Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships
Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift
Abstract
The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. This book provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. The book argues that parent–child relationships produce the “familial relationship goods” that people need to flourish. Children's ... More
The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. This book provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. The book argues that parent–child relationships produce the “familial relationship goods” that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, the book explains why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. The book reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.
Keywords:
family,
heterosexual family,
two-parent family,
parents,
children,
autonomy,
social institution,
social inequality,
parent–child relationship
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691126913 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691126913.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Harry Brighouse, author
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Adam Swift, author
University of Warwick
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