Abstract
In this article, I highlight some core ideas that are important for understanding the parent-child relationship within the framework of political liberalism. I stress that, although some ideal or conception of the family is part of most, if not all, comprehensive doctrines, for political liberals, the state’s interest in the family is as a social-political institution in which certain needs of persons as free and equal citizens are met. I discuss the main needs and interests of children and parents in the parent-child relationship. I consider that many children are cared for by multiple people, and I discuss how the state should address the recognition of multiple legal parents. I discuss some contexts in which conflicts arise between the interests of children and caregivers and address how such conflicts should be resolved in the politically liberal state. Although Rawls failed to offer an acceptable account of the family as part of the basic structure and did not adequately address the role of caring relationships in a just society, I hope that this article helps to show how political liberals can offer a plausible account.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships (Princeton University Press, 2014), 174.
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8–9.
John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers, edited by Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) (hereinafter IPRR), 573–615, 595.
IPRR, 596.
On liberalism, the family and material caregiving, see, for example, Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women Equality and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999) and Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Brake, Minimizing Marriage, 173–185.
See, for example, Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor and Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 138.
Ibid., 171.
See Nancy Fraser’s anti-marginalization principle in her “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment,” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41–66, 48.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4.
Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137–160.
Rawls says that a well-ordered society is one in which “(1) everyone accepts and knows that others accept the same principles of justice” and “(2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.
Blain Neufeld and Lori Watson, “The Tyranny—or the Democracy—of the Ideal?” Cosmos + Taxis 5 (2018): 47–61.
IPRR, 578.
Ibid., 575. Quong argues that public reasons should not be limited to matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials. He claims that public reasons should be offered whenever they are available. Quong, Liberalism Without Perfectionism, 273–287. With Lori Watson, I defend Rawls’s restricted account of the scope of public reason; see our Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
IPRR, 575, 577.
Ibid., 581–582. With Lori Watson, I argue that the criterion actually demands more than this. See our Equal Citizenship and Public Reason.
IPRR, 595.
Ibid., 597.
For another important feminist critique of the family as part of the basic structure, see Clare Chambers, “‘The Family as a Basic Institution’: A Feminist Analysis of the Basic Structure as Subject,” in Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls, edited by Ruth Abbey (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 75–95.
Martha Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 488–520, 504.
Maxine Eichner, The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23–26, quoting 25.
Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” 505–506.
Ibid., 505.
In my approach, I have been deeply impressed by Elizabeth Brake’s work on marriage, see her Minimizing Marriage.
See Fraser’s anti-marginalization principle in her “After the Family Wage,” 48.
Brake takes this view with respect to adult caring relationships in her Minimizing Marriage.
Just as Brake thinks that the state must recognize and support adult caring relations in this way, I am claiming that, given the needs of children and the needs of their primary caregivers and the state’s interest in this relationship, the state must recognize and support the parent–child relationship and support it through law and policy. Compare with Brake’s Minimizing Marriage, 156–188.
Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that there is a conditional and limited right to parent grounded in a person’s interest in a parental relationship. I do not address whether political liberals can recognize such a right here. See their Family Values, 86–111.
See Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 70–75.
Watson and Hartley, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, especially Chapter 8.
Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 64.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 98.
Ibid., 19.
This is the commitment of political liberals as described by Clare Chambers in her Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State Press, 2008), 162. This kind of autonomy, Chambers stresses, does not mean that individuals will be autonomous in the sense of “governed by rules one sets for oneself or endorses for oneself.” Ibid., 162.
And, see Gina Schouten’s stability argument for the claim that, in some circumstances persons would insist that the state engage in political interventions to secure “the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle” in her “Citizenship, Reciprocity, and the Gendered Division of Labor: A Stability Argument for Gender Egalitarian Political Interventions,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 16 (2017): 174–209.
Here I follow Brake who observes that attitudinal care and material care tend to go together and that material caring “is generally done better in caring relationships.” Minimizing Marriage, 174.
Although I can’t address this here, I think that Rawls’s notion of personhood is problematic. See my “Justice for the Disabled: A Contractualist Approach,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009): 17–36.
Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 65.
Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, especially Chapter 8.
Brighouse and Swift have an important discussion of this in their Family Values, 149–174.
Ibid., 87–93.
Ibid., 150–174.
Matthew M. Kavanagh, “Rewriting the Legal Family: Beyond Exclusivity to a Care-Based Standard,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 16 (2004): 83–143, 94.
For a report on the California law, see http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-brown-bills-parents-20131005-story.html. For philosophical discussion of the recognition of three or more parents, see Samantha Brennan and Bill Cameron, “How Many Parents Can a Child Have? Philosophical Reflections on the ‘Three Parent Case,’” Dialogue 54 (2015), 45–61.
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
Wisconsin, 406 U.S. at 209.
Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 174.
See Mark Navin’s Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Ethics, Epistemology and Health Care (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Ibid., Chapters 1–3.
Ibid., 144.
Ibid., 142.
For a case in which a deaf parent vigorously asserted her parental right to decide whether her child should be required to have cochlear implants see: http://www.cochlearwar.com/newsflash/003a.html. The relevant quotation is: “I should decide. They are my flesh and blood. I am deaf. God made them deaf. I do not want them to have implants. It is not safe.”
I do not think the outcome in such cases is obvious. Thus, I don’t propose a general principle here. Such cases will have to be decided on the basis of the particular circumstances. The case of cochlear implants is especially challenging for attempting to generate any general principle. Individual factors impact their likely “success,” and in some cases such implants may reduce the overall quality of life of a particular individual. For example, the implants may not produce hearing levels that are adequate to effective hearing so as to participate in conversations where background noise is present, and such individuals may be effectively cut off from learning sign language as a result of an assumption that they can “hear.” In such cases, these individuals are harmed, overall, by the implants insofar as their capacity for communication is undermined or seriously diminished.
Acknowledgements
I thank fellow panelists Blain Neufeld and Gina Schouten as well as audience participants for helpful feedback and discussion. I also thank Lori Watson for helpful feedback.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hartley, C.J. Political liberalism and children. Philos Stud 175, 1095–1112 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1068-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1068-9