Abstract
In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls ‘Kids Pay’, depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents (a) electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of (b) satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children’s needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs.
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Notes
Note that these figures are merely illustrative of the significant amount of resources that are typically devoted to childrearing—they do not by themselves tell us how much ought to be spent on childrearing.
Unless otherwise noted, I use the term ‘parent’ in this paper to refer to procreative parents, or persons who are responsible for creating and raising other human beings.
In this paper, I will assume for the sake of argument that the decision to create and raise a child is always fully voluntary.
This is not to suggest that non-parents do not benefit in other ways from parents’ childrearing labour in societies without redistributive welfare systems (e.g. from the mere existence of a workforce). I mention welfare states specifically because they are a common focus of discussion in the parental justice literature. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this clarification.
It should be noted that within the existing literature on parental justice, the terms ‘forward-looking’ and ‘backward-looking’ have sometimes been used differently than they are being used here. For example, Olsaretti (2013, pp. 237-238) uses the term ‘forward-looking’ in relation to pro-sharing views that justify cost-sharing on the grounds that it will incentivize citizens to have more children and thereby avoid demographic imbalance in the future, and the term ‘backward-looking’ in relation to pro-sharing views that justify cost-sharing on grounds of fairness. This is perhaps the more common usage, though for the purposes of this paper I will follow Tomlin (2015, p. 666) in using the term ‘forward-looking’ in relation to pro-sharing arguments that justify cost-sharing in virtue of benefits that non-parents will enjoy in the future, and ‘backward-looking’ in relation to pro-sharing arguments that justify cost-sharing in virtue of benefits that non-parents did enjoy during their childhood.
Not all theorists agree that voluntarily accepting a benefit is necessary for the generation of fair play obligations. Klosko (1987, p. 247) and Arneson (1982, pp. 620-623) both argue that simply receiving a benefit can give rise to fair play obligations so long as the benefit in question is of a certain type, e.g. a public good that is necessary for a minimally decent life and which all individuals can be presumed to want. Others, however, argue that there is a morally relevant distinction between passively receiving and actively accepting a benefit, and that fair play obligations can only arise from benefits that have been actively accepted (Simmons 1979, pp. 319–333; Hart 1955, p. 185; Rawls 1971, pp. 111–112).
This is my own version of Tomlin’s (2015, p. 668) Matrix case. I have chosen to replace the original case because (a) I lack the requisite sci-fi knowledge to appropriately modify Matrix in the sections to follow, and (b) I think that the plausibility of Tomlin’s conditions is better illustrated through an example that more closely resembles real life.
Tomlin (2015, 677) fully acknowledges the problems facing the implementation of his scheme and flags potential responses to them in n. 27. I mention them here only as examples of the types of questions that must be addressed before Kids Pay can be accepted as a practicable view.
Tomlin would likely point out that this argument assumes—contentiously—that existence itself is not beneficial. I will explain in the following section why his argument fails even if we assume for the sake of argument that we benefit children by bringing them into existence.
I am grateful to Isabella Trifan and an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify the relevance of the self-interest criterion for my argument in this section.
I assume that some degree of moral (as opposed to strictly causal) responsibility can be attributed to Alan in this case in virtue of the inherent risks associated with setting off explosive devices, though as Olsaretti (2009, p. 167) points out, whether we think this translates into a responsibility to bear the full cost of rescuing the hikers will turn on a substantive ‘principle of stakes’, or “an account of what consequences can justifiably be attached to features that are appropriate grounds of responsibility.” It is possible to defend an alternative principle of stakes that would not recommend that Alan be held liable for the full cost of rescuing the hikers.
I do not mean to endorse the view that unintentional parents should always be held liable for the full cost of raising their children, only that their lack of self-interested motivation in creating the child makes an important difference to our evaluative attitudes toward them and their moral standing to complain. If we endorse any of the existing arguments for socializing the costs of childrearing—including the arguments from fairness, autonomy, or insurance—then we may not think that they should be liable for the full cost, even if we agree that children themselves cannot be liable qua beneficiaries.
This could in principle be for one of two reasons: either (1) because the quality of their existence is not so bad as to make non-existence preferable; or (2) because no intelligible comparison can be made between non-existence and existence that would support the judgment that they have been made comparatively worse off. However, if Tomlin wants to suggest that children can benefit overall by being brought into existence, it seems like his argument must assume the former view. For a defense of the former view, see Feinberg (1992); for a defense of the latter view, see Heyd (1992).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion on previous drafts, I am grateful to Serena Olsaretti and Isabella Trifan. Research for this project was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) project on Justice and the Family: An Analysis of the Normative Significance of Procreation and Parenting in a Just Society (Grant number: 648610; grant acryonym: Family Justice).
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Magnusson, E. Parental Justice and the Kids Pay View. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 963–977 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9937-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9937-z