Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships

237 Pages·2014·13.56 MB·English

by  Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift

Family Values

Family Values
The Ethics of Parent- Child Relationships
Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift
Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket image: Freedom from Want, illustration, Saturday Evening Post, March 1943.
Norman Rockwell Museum Collections. Printed by permission of the Norman
Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © 2014 the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.
“On Children” from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, copyright © 1923
by Kahlil Gibran and renewed 1951 by Administrators C.T.A. of Kahlil Gibran
Estate and Mary G. Gibran. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of
the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication,
is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly
to Random House LLC for permission.
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Brighouse, Harry.
Family values : the ethics of parent- child relationships / Harry Brighouse and
Adam Swift.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978– 0- 691– 12691– 3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Families. 2. Values. I. Swift,
Adam, 1961- II. Title.
HQ728.B7385 2014 306.85— dc23
2013044237
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Minion Pro and John Sans Pro
Printed on acid- free paper ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
On Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
— Kahlil Gibran

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Part One Liberty, Equality, Family 1
Introduction 2
Chapter 1 Liberalism and the Family 5
Chapter 2 Equality and the Family 23
Part Two Justifying the Family 47
Introduction 48
Chapter 3 Children 57
Chapter 4 Adults 86
Part Three Parents’ Rights 113
Introduction 114
Chapter 5 Conferring Advantage 123
Chapter 6 Shaping Values 149
Conclusion 175
Notes 183
Bibliography 201
Index 213

PrefaCe
This book offers an account of why families are valuable. Or rather, since some
families are, alas, dreadful, it offers an account of why “the family” is valuable—
why it is generally a good thing that children are raised by parents. Some may
regard this as a pointless exercise. Even to ask such a fundamental question
may seem to betray not merely an ignorance of evolutionary biology but a kind
of emotional blindness, an insensitivity to the stuff of human relationships, a
deafness to the strains of love.
There is something right about that response. Our account will indeed ap-
peal to some rather elementary observations about the value of intimate lov-
ing relationships within the family. Where some, most famously Plato, have
argued for the superiority of collective child-r earing institutions, we will come
down on the side of the conventional wisdom— and the wisdom of the ages—
rejecting this and related suggestions as failing to understand the very special
things that parents and children can do for one another.1 But, traditional and
reassuring though our views may be in that respect, we are confident that read-
ers will find much of what follows rather more disconcerting.
Identifying the proper content of “family values” is, for us, the first step
toward working out a normative theory of the family. Only by thinking care-
fully about why it is good for children to be raised by parents, and good for
parents to raise children, can we derive a satisfying and appropriately detailed
understanding of the morality of family life. We want to know what parents
should be required to do for their children, what they should be permitted but
not required to do for their children, what rights (if any) they have to exercise
control over their children’s upbringing, what rights (if any) those children
have to be treated (or not to be treated) in certain ways, and so on. These are
questions of moral and political philosophy— questions about the proper di-
vision of responsibility for child rearing as between parents and society. The
state decides what parents should be free to do to, with, and for their children;
indeed, it sometimes decides who should be permitted to become parents in
the first place. We set out a theory that aims to guide the state in its delibera-
tions. In a democracy, it is the citizenry who determine how the state acts,
so another way of putting this is to say that our theory aims to guide us in