Legitimate parental partiality

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 43-80

  Brighouse, Harry ^a   Swift, Adam ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58149390469     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.01145.x     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. For seminal discussion, see Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
2. G. A. Cohen does not wish to reject the principle that "every person has a right to pursue self-interest to some reasonable extent (even when that makes things worse than they need to be for badly off people)"[italics removed], "Incentives, Inequality and Community,"in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 13, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp. 263-329, at pp. 302-3.
3. David Estlund, "Liberalism, Equality and Fraternity in Cohen's Critique of Rawls," The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 99-112,
4. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 99; see also pp. 54-59.
5. In section 46 Rawls says that "the internal life and culture of the family influence, perhaps as much as anything else, a child's motivation and his capacity to gain from education," A Theory of Justice rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 265.
6. A Theory of Justice rev. ed., p. 448; original edition (1971), p. 511.
7. The passage continues: "But within the context of the theory of justice as a whole there is much less urgency to take this course. The acknowledgment of the difference principle redefines the grounds for social inequalities as conceived in the system of liberal equality; and when the principles of fraternity and redress are allowed their appropriate weight, the natural distribution of assets and the contingencies of social circumstances can more easily be accepted."
8. See, for example, James Fishkin, Justice, Equal Opportunity and the Family (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); James Rachels, "Morality, Parents and Children,"in his Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997);
9. Ferdinand Schoeman, "Rights of Children, Rights of Parents, and the Moral Basis of the Family," Ethics 91 (1980): 6-19;
10. Richard W. Miller, "Too Much Inequality," Social Philosophy and Policy 19 (2002): 275-313,
11. For an example of the latter, see David Miller's fourfold schema in his
12. "Reasonable Partiality towards Compatriots," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005): 63-81.
13. Simon Keller, "Four Theories of Filial Duty," Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2006): 254-74,
14. E.g., David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
15. Andrew Oldenquist, "Loyalties," Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 173-93.
16. John Cottingham, "Partiality, Favouritism and Morality," The Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986): 357-73,
17. For a similar approach, noting that within a cosmopolitan egalitarian framework" the basic good of special relationships gives rise not only to special responsibilities, but also to general duties to help provide (or refrain from undermining) the goods necessary for anyone to be able to form such relationships,"see
18. Arash Abizadeh and Pablo Gilabert, "Is There a Genuine Tension between Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism and Special Responsibilities?" Philosophical Studies 138 (2008): 348-65,
19. We largely prescind from the complexities raised by the distinction between legal and moral permissions preserved in this formulation. For us, there may be reasons-publicity, lack of relevant information, the inevitability of policy being a blunt instrument-for a state to protect kinds of parent-child interaction that particular parents may not legitimately engage in. That can of worms is matter for another article.
20. We follow here the Rawlsian view that does not regard the impact of the family on the capacity for effort as contravening equality of opportunity, although, as Rawls himself suggests (see n. 8), other widely held conceptions do.
21. There is a tendency, especially in the liberal tradition, for children to be treated as proto-adults; it is their developmental interests that matter fundamentally. We agree with Colin Macleod that this picture is mistaken: There are, in fact, goods intrinsic to childhood that matter fundamentally, and that may sometimes be in tension with developmental interests. See his "Primary Goods, Capabilities, and Children," in Measuring Justice: Capabilities and Primary Goods, ed. Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
22. For a sophisticated third-party justification along these lines, see
23. Jennifer Roback Morse, "No Families, No Freedom: Human Flourishing in a Free Society," Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999): 290-314.
24. For examples of child-centered views, see James Dwyer, Religious Schools v. Children's Rights (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998);
25. Peter Vallentyne, "The Rights and Duties of Childrearing," William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 11 (2003): 991-1010;
26. Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, "The Moral Status of Children: Children's Rights, Parents' Rights, and Family Justice," Social Theory and Practice 23 (1997): 1-26.
27. For a fuller account of the interests sketched here, and a more thorough and careful attempt to derive "the family" from them, see
28. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, "Parents' Rights and the Value of the Family," Ethics 117 (2006): 80-108.
29. The relationships in question do not contribute to the flourishing of the persons involved because they value the relationships; the contribution comes because the relationships structure and express the way that the persons value one another. Of course there is no problem in valuing the relationship as well as the other person-in recognizing that a friendship or marriage is good for one-but something is wrong if that is the salient thought. That is why there is something odd about Bernard Williams's famous objection to the "one thought too many" in the case of the man deciding whether to save his wife or a stranger. As Derek Parfit observes (reported in Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory ([New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], p. 140 n. 36): "It's odd that Williams gives, as the thought that the person's wife might hope that he was having, that he is saving her because she is his wife. She might have hoped that he saved her because she was Mary or Jane or whatever. That she is his wife seems one thought too many."Francis Schrag anticipates the "one thought too many"objection, in Parfit's version, in his
30. "Justice and the Family," Inquiry 19 (1976): 193-208.
31. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Random House, 1962); Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Penguin, 1979). More recent historians have revised the "Aries thesis"to claim that childhood was regarded in the past more as we regard it today, but most of their work focuses on the West. See, most prominently, Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
32. The account offered has implications for a wide range of issues in family policy broadly construed-population policy, reproductive bioethics, state support for family life-some of which we pursue elsewhere. See Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, "Social Justice and Family Policy,"in Social Justice and Public Policy, ed. Gary Craig, David Gordon, and Tania Burchardt (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2008), pp. 139-56, and
33. "The End of the Tory War on Single Parents?" Public Policy Research 14 (2007): 186-92.
34. For Rawls, we need to distinguish between "the point of view of people as citizens and their point of view as members of families and of other associations. As citizens we have reasons to impose the constraints specified by the political principles of justice on association; while as members of associations we have reasons for limiting those constraints so that they leave room for a free and flourishing internal life appropriate to the association in question,"Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 165.
35. See
36. Harry Brighouse, "Civic Education and Liberal Legitimacy," Ethics 108 (1998): 719-45,
37. See Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, ed. Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles, and Steven Durlauf (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, ed. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne-Groves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and for a qualitative account, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a careful account of how this plays out specifically with respect to the uptake of education in U.S. schools, see Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004).
38. For studies that emphasize the intentional aspects, see, on the United Kingdom, Stephen Ball, Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Class and Social Advantage (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003) and, on the United States, Ellen Brantlinger, Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
39. Thanks to an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs for supplying us with this nice example.
40. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, p. 123. Thus, for example, we have observed a dramatic change in attitude towards private schooling in the United Kingdom during the last thirty years. "Going private" was once seen as more or less taboo in liberal and public sector circles, but is now much more widely acceptable. Similarly, in socialist circles in the United Kingdom going private remains taboo, but is entirely acceptable in equivalent circles in the United States. Scheffler continues: "social institutions can vary considerably in their character while still leaving ample room for people to behave in ways that give expression to the value they attach to their interpersonal relationships. Within a fairly broad range, people can modify the behaviour that serves this function to fit the institutional and normative context in which they find themselves. In particular, they can adapt their behaviour to more or less egalitarian institutions and policies. People who live in societies with relatively more extensive social welfare programmes, or more extensive policies of redistributive taxation, are not thereby prohibited from giving meaningful expression to the value they place on their most treasured relationships. To be sure, this kind of flexibility is not unlimited, and it is an interesting question where the limits lie. However, it is not necessary to fix those limits with any precision to see that a general practice or honouring special responsibilities need not preclude the implementation of significantly egalitarian policies, or deprive a professed commitment to equality of all practical implications."We are offering an answer to the interesting question of where the limits lie.
41. Discretion and spontaneity have important implications for state attempts to promote good parenting. Richard Rothstein expresses rare skepticism that reading to children will produce cognitive benefit if the parent is unenthusiastic (see Class and Schools, chap. 2); but even if parents could promote their children's cognitive development when they would rather be doing something else, there would still be a loss in terms of other aspects of the relationship. Reading to one's child will be less expressive of, and hence less likely to foster, an intimate loving relationship if one is not independently invested in it. With regard to that goal, it may well be counterproductive.
42. With respect to private schooling, we here disagree with Colin Macleod,
43. "The Puzzle of Parental Partiality," Theory and Research in Education 2 (2004): 309-21.
44. Two complications: (i) equalizing reward schedules in such ways would reduce the influence on distributive outcomes not only of bedtime stories but also of endowments and motivations, whatever their origins; (ii) bedtime stories themselves influence children's endowments and motivations. Attempts to reduce the influence of bedtime stories on children's prospects might thus seem to run counter to the spirit of fair equality of opportunity, which is often read as licensing inequalities in outcomes where they result from differences in endowments and motivations. Since we read fair equality of opportunity as a very thin principle, demanding only that people with similar levels of talent and motivation face similar prospects and saying nothing about the extent (if any) of inequalities between the positions that they should have equal opportunity to achieve, we do not see this as a problematic implication of the proposal. Rather it indicates the limited significance of the principle. For relevant discussion, see
45. Norman Daniels, "Merit and Meritocracy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 7 (1978): 206-23;
46. Morris Lipson and Peter Vallentyne, "Equal Opportunity and the Family," Public Affairs Quarterly 3 (1989): 29-47,
47. For a sustained argument for a radical reform of the occupational structure, see Paul Gomberg, How to Make Opportunity Equal (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
48. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, "Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods," Ethics 116 (2006): 471-97.
49. For this objection, to a less nuanced version of the current argument, see
50. Matthew Clayton and David Stevens, "School Choice and the Burdens of Injustice," Theory and Research in Education 2 (2004): 111-26.
51. Cases of this kind are sometimes framed in terms of the "parental duty of care,"which raises issues too complex for adequate treatment in this article. Here we can only observe (a) that the duties that parents owe to their children cannot simply be assumed to trump the duties they may owe to others in particular circumstances; (b) that what they owe to their children is likely to depend on what other people are doing for theirs (which may itself be a function of what those others believe to be the content of their parental duty of care); and (c) that there may be a particular value to participants in relationships knowing that others have duties, and not merely permissions, to do particular things for them in particular circumstances.
52. G. A. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Adam Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
53. See
54. Stephen Macedo, "School Reform and Equal Opportunity in America's Geography of Inequality," Perspectives on Politics 1 (2003): 743-55.
55. Family values discourse is used for other rhetorical purposes too. But in the United States, for example, where there is only a very weak strand of egalitarianism in political life, family values are often invoked against measures that mitigate inequality such as estate tax, welfare payments, and integration of schools. See Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Nathan Glazer, "Separate and Unequal,"New York Times Book Review, Sept. 25, 2005, pp. 12-13.