Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships

"I’ve chosen The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. This is an academic book, a philosophical book, which I found incredibly useful in developing my thoughts on these issues. Essentially, they are attempting to justify the family as an institution, the way that we raise children in societies like ours. To some extent, in my own work, I don’t need to have that justification. I can start from ‘Well, this is where we are, so what do we owe our children in that situation?’ but it’s very interesting that they do that. What’s particularly interesting about it is they talk about the importance of the parent/child relationship. They say, ‘Well, look, this is something that we need, not only for children’s interests, but also for parents’ interests’. Parents have an interest, they argue, in the unique relationship that you have with children, and they think this isn’t like other relationships. They argue that parents do have rights to exercise some discretion over what their children do and so do have some authority over them, but those rights are essentially conditional on them being used to do right by their children: to parent adequately. I find that an interesting and useful argument. They also talk about the moral limits of parental influence and partiality. They argue that we need the family, but that parents don’t automatically gain the freedom or discretion to give their children unlimited advantages over others or freedom to shape their values precisely as the parents want. Yes. Very clearly it doesn’t have to be the biological parent. Children need one or two adults who are playing a parental role in their life. Yes. It’s important to say that, firstly—and again, it has echoes of the capabilities approach here—they’re talking about the opportunity to do this as being a non-substitutable good, rather than making the claim, which would clearly be ridiculous, that nobody can have a full or flourishing life without actually doing it. So I think that’s important. But as you suggest, even that claim is controversial. They discuss the unique combination of an intimate, loving relationship and the degree of fiduciary authority that you have over the child, the fact that you’re caring for them, and you’re also shaping them. It’s a unique combination of things in the relationship. It’s difficult, because, as a parent, that seems intuitively convincing. But it’s also arguable that there are other relationships, which, if not exactly the same, could play a similar role or an equally valuable role in people’s lives. That’s definitely one thing Brighouse and Swift talk about, the way in which the family as an institution could seem in tension both with a fully liberal society and a fully egalitarian society. They defend the family as institution, but they don’t defend unlimited discretion for parents to do whatever they want, to bring up their children however they see fit. They center these core familial relationship goods: the idea that there are certain things that need to happen between parents and children for the relationship to have its value and to play its role in children’s cognitive development, and so on. To provide these goods, you don’t have to pile endless advantages on your children or give them exactly the kind of narrowly determined view of life that you might think that they should have. This is about things like reading bedtime stories, sharing those sorts of close experiences. It’s about doing things that you value together. In saying that the family deserves to be protected as an institution, they’re not saying that parents have unlimited rights to make every single decision about what happens to their children. Essentially, it’s a right that deserves protection only insofar as it’s used to protect the children’s interests, because that’s what ultimately grounds it. One thing I like about Brighouse and Swift’s approach is that they’re sensitive to that tension. They’re saying, ‘Well, yes, doing things that you value together with your children, and sharing some of the things that are valuable to you is a key part of having that relationship. But at the same time, as parents, we have a moral duty to cultivate our children’s capacity for autonomy.’ And so at the point where you’re in conflict with that, then there’s a line to be drawn in terms of what parents can permissibly be doing. It’s the Mrs. Jellyby problem, isn’t it? She’s a minor character in Dickens’s Bleak House who spends her whole time trying to help children and people in different parts of the world while completely neglecting her own children. It’s Dickens, so it’s very gendered: there’s no question about what Mr. Jellyby should be doing! But the core idea is that there’s a balance to be struck. It’s tempting to think that ‘good parenting’ is just doing all you can to advantage your own children, especially socially and economically, but I really try to challenge that in my own work. That’s partly for reasons that philosophers like Brighouse and Swift have pointed out, which is that we still have our responsibilities of justice and morality to other people, even if we are parents, and there’s a limit to how much we can legitimately prioritize our own children’s interests. But I also think it’s a mistake as far as our own children are concerned. It’s partly because we’ve been focusing only on our own children in rich societies (and focusing on them in a very consumer-orientated, individualistic way), rather than on global emergencies like climate change, that they now face a very threatened future. So, we do need to think more about what we owe other people collectively. But returning specifically to Brighouse and Swift, they talk about the difference between doing things for your children that will actually cultivate core relationship goods, and trying to give them a competitive over their peers. The idea is that the former is a core part of loving parenting; the latter is less legitimate."