Legitimate Parental Partiality1
1
Legitimate Parental Partiality1
Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Adam Swift (Oxford University)
I
Egalitarians believe that goods should be distributed much more equally than they
are at present, but they also recognize that there are principled limits to the pursuit of
distributive equality. Fully to realize a fair distribution would involve the sacrifice of
other values that properly constrain egalitarian ambitions. Some barriers to the realization
of equality reflect the value of respecting prerogatives people have to favor themselves.
Even G.A. Cohen, whose egalitarianism is unusually pervasive and demanding, says that:
…only an extreme moral rigorist could deny 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). I do not wish to
reject the italicized principle, which affirms what Samuel Scheffler has
called an ‘agent-centred prerogative’.....2
It is also widely thought that people have morally weighty prerogatives to act partially
toward particular others. Indeed, the permissibility of partial relationships between
individuals is a touchstone of liberal – including egalitarian liberal - thinking. David
Estlund presses the point against Cohen, developing a series of cases of incentive-
demanding motives that result in inequality but draw only on altruistic concerns -- where
the other whose interest is being pursued is near and dear to the incentive-demanding
agent.3
These relationships appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial
relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and
have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the
duty, to further one another’s interests in ways that may interrupt equality. Scheffler calls
this observation (when made in an appropriately hostile manner) the ‘distributive
objection’ to special responsibilities: ‘the problem with such responsibilities is …that
they may confer unfair benefit. …special responsibilities give the participants in
rewarding groups and relationships increased claims to one another’s assistance, while
weakening the claims that other people have on them’.4 Indeed, participants in these
protected relationships benefit twice over. They enjoy the relationship itself, and they
enjoy the claims that it enables them legitimately to make on one another, to the
exclusion of those outside the relationship.
Our focus in this paper is the relationship widely thought to be the most powerfully
protected of all: that between parents and their children. Parents may, and should, treat
their children differently from other people’s children, and in ways that have the potential
2
to confer significant benefits and to generate significant inequalities between them and
those others. Rawls famously says:
It seems that even when fair opportunity (as it has been defined) is satisfied, the
family will lead to unequal chances between individuals (Section 46).5 Is the family
to be abolished then? Taken by itself and given a certain primacy, the idea of equal
opportunity inclines in this direction.6
Only the invocation of his other principles, which he takes to soften the conflict between
the family and ‘justice as a whole’, prevents this counterintuitive result.7
Other theorists talk about the ‘autonomy’ or the ‘integrity’ of the family, or the
‘right to raise one’s children’, or ‘parental nurturance’, as barriers to equality.8 These
formulations command widespread assent partly because there is no consensus on what
counts as respecting the autonomy or integrity of the family, on the content of the right to
raise one’s children, or on the proper scope of parental nurturance. Parents who take it as
their project to invest all possible resources in ensuring that their child will have maximal
competitive advantage against others may be promoting her best interests as they
conceive them, but an egalitarianism that respects that kind of ‘parental nurturance’ will
be tepid indeed. We do not believe that parents must be permitted to pursue their
children’s best interests regardless of the inequalities that pursuit may induce between
them and others. The behavior described is excessive, not legitimate, parental partiality.
Our aim in this paper is to provide a normative account of the familial relationship that
explains why.
Some theorists address issues of partiality to particular others in the abstract, the
content of the special responsibilities associated with special relationships being either
ignored altogether or treated in a rather schematic way.9 Scheffler, for example, is
concerned with special responsibilities in general, and he is more interested in the issue
of our obligations to compatriots than in familial relationships. Indeed, some theorists
(though not Scheffler) take familial partiality as morally unproblematic and justify
partiality towards compatriots by analogy with it.10 We want an account, by contrast, that
ties the content of the special responsibilities – what it is that you have reason to do for
your child, or compatriot, but not for others – to the nature of your relationship with them
and, more specifically, to the goods realized by that particular relationship. What kinds of
partiality must you be permitted to show in order to be able to enjoy that kind of
relationship? For us, particular features of the parent-child relationship justify the
expression of particular kinds of partiality. To demonstrate the legitimacy of partiality
among compatriots it would be necessary to argue from particular features of that
relationship to the legitimacy of particular kinds of partiality within it.
In section II we clarify the nature of the conflict between the family and
egalitarian principles. Section III presents our ‘relationship goods’ account of why the
family is valuable, and section IV uses this account to outline the basis for a boundary
between legitimate and excessive parental partiality. Section V brings out the austerity of
our view, while Section VI somewhat mitigates that austerity by emphasising the
3
importance of privacy and spontaneity in family life. In section VII we point to the ways
in which parental partiality can be respected while ameliorating its inegalitarian impact,
and in section VIII we clarify the view by defending it from some objections. Section IX
concludes.
II
Before getting into the substance of our argument, it is important carefully to
specify its purpose and limits by distinguishing two issues. On the one hand, there is the
question of what kinds of parental partiality are necessary for people to enjoy the goods
made possible by familial relationships, goods that make such a distinctive and
substantial contribution to well-being. On the other hand, there is the question of the
extent to which particular people in particular circumstances are justified in acting to
realise those goods for themselves and their loved ones. The issue of what types of
partiality are necessary for agents to enjoy familial relationship goods is, we believe,
somewhat separate from that of the extent of the agent’s prerogative or duty to pursue her
own interests and those of her loved ones, rather than pursuing benefits for others. Our
main aim is to offer a theory about what parents must be free to do to, with, or for their
children if those parents and children are to enjoy the goods distinctively made available
by familial relationships. It is not to defend a fully specified view about the extent to
which parents are in fact justified in pursuing those goods for themselves and their
children in any particular circumstances.
Framing things in terms of ‘legitimate parental partiality’ encourages us to run
these two issues together, as does presenting the conflict between equality and the family
in terms of the conventional problematic whereby the family leads to unfair inequalities,
between similarly motivated and talented children, in terms of their educational or labour
market prospects.11 To ask whether it is legitimate for a parent to engage in a particular
interaction with her child is to ask whether, all things considered in the circumstances,
that interaction is one in which she may justifiably or legitimately engage. But it seems
likely that the answer to that question will depend on a good deal of detailed information
about the circumstances. Familial relationships may be valuable enough to make us judge
society A, in which people enjoy Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity but lack familial
relationships, worse than society B, where there is a good deal of inequality of
opportunity but plentiful family life. We believe that they are. For us, this means that
parents are justified in engaging in forms of partiality necessary for the realisation of
familial relationship goods even where doing so disrupts that version of equality of
opportunity. But to make that judgement is to say nothing about the relative importance
of family values and other distributive goals, such as, say, the provision of food to the
starving.
Perhaps, in a world where some lack what they need for mere survival, much of
the time and energy spent by affluent parents on the provision of relationship goods for
themselves and their loved ones is self-indulgence, exceeding any reasonable prerogative.
Some pursuit of relationship goods for oneself may fall within the scope of a reasonable
prerogative, and the provision of some of them for one’s children may be a matter of
4
duty, still many of us may misjudge the balance between the interests of others on the one
hand, and those of ourselves and our loved ones on the other. Our purpose is primarily to
offer an account of the reasons for action that, though partial and inequality-inducing, are
susceptible to justification by appeal to the value of the family. We believe that parents
are indeed justified in acting on those reasons when the conflict is with fair equality of
opportunity – the distributive goal with which the family is conventionally taken to
conflict. But which actions are in fact justified or legitimate in anything like our current
circumstances – where the distribution of resources between parents is itself unjust,
where children do not enjoy fair equality of opportunity, where millions are starving - is
another matter.
Conceiving the value of the family in terms of the goods that parent-child
relationships make available to people involves a reframing of the tension between
equality and the family that yields further fruit. It is because familial relationship goods
are so valuable that we favour the family over conventional equality of opportunity. But
rather than regarding the value of the family as giving reason to desist from the full
pursuit of egalitarian distributive goals, we can include relationship goods (or the
opportunity for such goods) among the goods that one cares about the equal distribution
of. If relationship goods that can be realised only by the family, and that depend on forms
of parental partiality along the lines to be outlined, are indeed valuable, then they are
(give or take some wrinkles to be discussed later) valuable for all. True, relationship
goods may not be as amenable to principled distribution as more visible and transferable
goods like money, but there are surely things that can be done to facilitate their fairer or
more equal distribution. So rather than having the family trump equality, we can think of
the family, or, more precisely, the goods it makes possible, as being itself an object of
egalitarian concern. To frame things this way is not to deny that there may be permissions
and duties arising out of familial relationships that justify giving one’s own interest in
familial relationship goods, or that require giving one’s children’s interests in them,
greater weight than that of other people and their children. Nor is it to rule out the
possibility that familial relationships themselves justify or require parents’ promoting
their childrens’ interests in ways that go beyond the provision of familial relationship
goods. But it does bring out how, whatever one’s views about the kinds of partiality
needed for parent-child relationships to make the contribution they do to human
flourishing, there are further questions about how that kind of flourishing should be
distributed, what duties fall on states and individuals to promote what kinds of
distribution of it in particular circumstances, and so on.12
III
How do we establish what kinds of parental partiality are susceptible to
justification by appeal to the value of the family? Our approach is to identify the specific
interests that are facilitated and protected by the family and consider what kinds of
partiality are necessary for their promotion. These interests are the reasons why it is
better that children be raised in families than in state-run child-rearing institutions. Such
institutions might be fairer or more consistent with conventional egalitarian principles
such as fair equality of opportunity, but requiring that all children be raised in them
5
would deny both them and adults those aspects of well-being that derive from
participation in familial, parent-child, relationships. We call these aspects of well-being
‘familial relationship goods’.
We can distinguish three sets of interests pertaining to the family: children’s
interests; parents’ interests; and third party interests (externalities). Children have both
developmental and immediate interests: how they are raised affects not only how they
develop and how well-prepared they are for adult life but also how happy, well-
nourished, and well-balanced they are during childhood. For adults, whether they can
have children, how many they have, what kind of relationships they have with those
children and how able they are to fulfill other ambitions while parenting have a profound
impact on how well their lives go. . Finally, both because children are potential economic
and civic contributors to social life, and because parents interact with others, rearing
arrangements affect those who are not, at a particular time, rearing or being reared.
Corresponding to these interests are accounts of the value of the family. Some
theorists focus on the positive externalities. Our account, by contrast, justifies the family
primarily by appeal to the values it realizes for its members. We do not deny that the
family may be essential for producing third-party benefits – such as the capacity to trust
and be trusted.13 Such benefits may indeed be among the reasons why families are
preferable to state-run institutions. But we see these as byproducts of a relationship that is
fundamentally valuable for other reasons. If it turned out that arrangements like the
kibbutz were as good at producing fair-minded citizens, or productive contributors to the
economy, and indeed even if they were better, we would still prefer the family as the only
way for human beings to realize very important goods in their lives. Family life,
appropriately arranged, makes available to its participants distinctive goods, goods for
which nothing else can be an adequate substitute.
Other theorists offer an exclusively child-centered account. For them, the family
is justified entirely because of its benefits for its involuntary members, the children; the
family, appropriately structured, is the best feasible arrangement for ensuring that
children enjoy the conditions necessary for their emotional and cognitive development
and, in some versions, for their flourishing within childhood. If some other institution
were systematically superior for this purpose, that would be enough to justify it.14 It is
widely accepted that all people need to participate in family life as children in order to
become fully flourishing adults: they need secure attachments to particular adults who
will give them the kind of loving attention necessary for them to become capable of
loving themselves and others. We do not seek to minimize the importance of that claim.
But we also endorse the more controversial view that for many adults having a parental
relationship with a child makes a distinctive contribution to their flourishing that is
necessary for them to be said to be fully flourishing. For us, this fact plays a role in
justifying the institution of the family.15 Move this footnote somewhere else.
Here are some examples of relationship goods realized or produced by the family:
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* Children enjoy the loving attention of, and bond with, a particular adult, a relationship
that is widely regarded as essential for their emotional development.
* Children are provided with a sense of continuity with (or belonging or attachment to)
the past, mediated by acquaintance with her own family members.
* Children enjoy the security provided by the presence of someone with a special duty of
care for them.
* Parents enjoy a distinctively valuable relationship with their children; one that can be
intimate and mutually loving, but in which the parent acts as a fiduciary for her child’s
interests in physical, cognitive, emotional, and moral development.
The first three goods accrue to children. We do not claim that the nuclear family is the
only arrangement that could fulfill these interests adequately, but we believe that any
alternative institution would have to provide a parent-like bond between some adult and
each child. For current purposes we take our account of these goods and their connection
to family life or something like it to be relatively uncontroversial.
The fourth good accrues to the parent. The institution of the family allows them to
have a relationship of a kind that cannot be substituted for by relationships with other
adults, for example. They are intimate with the child in a way that is not symmetrical; the
child is unable fully to understand or know the parent in the early years, and is entirely
dependent on the parent in the earliest years. The parent is the decision-maker for the
child, and even as the child comes to be a decision-maker herself the parent determines
the context in which decisions are made. The parent has a special duty to promote the
child’s interests including the interest most children have in becoming someone who has
no need of a parent’s special duty of care. Since Locke it has been a familiar idea that
parents have fiduciary duties toward their children (though the precise content of those
duties is widely disputed). Our additional claim, here, is that parents have a non-fiduciary
interest in being able to play a fiduciary role; it is valuable for their children that they
play it well, but it is also a distinctive source of their own flourishing that they play it.
It is a distinctive source of flourishing in the sense that it is unavailable through other
relationships. In order to provide this good for adults, the institution for child-rearing
needs to be the family, or something that mimics the family very closely.16
Of course we are not claiming that all adults need to be parents in order to flourish
fully. People vary in their competence at, and enjoyment of, the tasks and experiences
involved in raising children. Some people have characters that are ill-suited to
childrearing; they will not flourish in the role and their lives would go better without
children. Others may well flourish in the role, but their lives would go just as well if
devoted to the activities and roles that they would have had had they not been parents.
Our claim is not that parenting is essential for everyone to flourish; but that it is a
distinctive and important source of flourishing for many adults. Nor is it to say that all
people who could flourish as parents will do so in the role; as with any valuable activity,
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parenting may go badly, sometimes because the parent has done it badly, and sometimes
because unfortunate circumstances have intervened.
There is widespread agreement that familial relationships are central to
flourishing for many adults as well as for children. Our relationship goods approach is
supposed to go beyond the near consensus that familial relationships are important, and
explain why they are important by identifying interests that only the family can help
people to realize. 17 Any such account runs the risk of appearing parochial. It is clear that
parents in some cultures at some points in history have not valued their children, or their
relationships with them, in the ways suggested.18 In some societies there is a powerful
economic imperative to have children, and incentives provided by the social and
economic structures affect the way that parents treat children. In early mediaeval Europe,
for example, children were effectively slaves in law; parents sought to have sufficient
children to serve their economic interests, and if they had more than they could provide
for, infanticide was a legal solution (if, it appears, one rarely practiced) and abandonment
a common one.19 So if the relationship goods account is morally correct, it seems to fly in
the face of the experience of many people in many eras.
Our response to data such as these, and the wealth of similar cases that spring
readily to mind – some much closer to home than medieval Europe - is to say that in
those cases described both parents and children are simply failing to enjoy the distinctive
goods made available by a parent-child relationship. We are not arguing here that the
relationship goods account of the value of the family is the one to which parents have
always adhered or on which they have usually acted. We are claiming that it gives an
account of the distinctive and very important goods for which the family is indispensable.
That account in turn grounds a view about the kinds of partiality toward one’s children
that can be justified.20
IV
The relationship goods account helps us work out what room is necessary for the
free and flourishing internal life appropriate to the family.21 There must be permission,
and social support, for those activities and interactions between parents and children that
are essential for realizing the value of the family; for the activities and interactions that
produce the goods the account depends on. We cannot give an exhaustive list of these
here, but we shall start to unfold the argument by drawing a contrast between what we
think of as paradigm cases of activities that must be permitted in order for the family to
flourish with cases of activities which, we think, could in normal circumstances be
prohibited without seriously jeopardizing the valuable aspects of familial relationships.
Here are two permissible activities, that in current circumstances at least, are
likely to conflict with fair equality of opportunity. First, parents should be free to read
bedtime stories to their children and should have considerable discretion over which
books to read. Why? This freedom facilitates both parties’ interest in enjoying a close and
emotionally fulfilling relationship, as well as promotion of the child’s educational
interests. It also facilitates the parental interest in sharing her own interests with her child
8
and in getting to know her child’s emerging personality. Second, parents should be free to
have their children accompany them to religious ceremonies and other valued activities
and to enroll them in associations in which they will participate in the communities of
value of which the parents approve (Hebrew School, the Ukrainian Youth League, cricket
clubs, and so on). These permissions , which are limited by the duty to facilitate the
development of autonomy, and decrease in strength and scope as the child grows up and
develops interests of her own, derive from the interest that family members have in
shared interests and identification.22 The idea is that it is through engaging in these
activities and others relevantly like them that people realize relationship goods. That is
why, even when they do conflict with fair equality of opportunity, they still qualify as
legitimately partial.
The contrast is with activities - things we do to with and for our children – that are
not essential for the realization of the relationship goods that we have identified. Again,
there is a wide range. Recall, from section 1, the parents who invest all possible resources
in securing competitive advantage for their child: perhaps, say, sending her to an
expensive private school designed to optimize her chances in the competition for well-
rewarded and interesting jobs, investing in a trust fund, and interacting with her on the
basis of judgments about how best to develop her human capital. These activities too will
violate fair equality of opportunity in a regime of unequal outcomes, but they are not
protected by the considerations we have invoked concerning the value of the family. In
normal circumstances at least, none of these things is essential for the parent to carry out
her special duty of care for the child -- none is essential for the child’s interests to be
adequately met, so none is essential for the parent to meet her fiduciary responsibilities;.
and none of them is essential for either the children or the parent to enjoy the distinctive
goods made available by the familial relationship.
It would be convenient for egalitarians if the first kind of activity compromised
equality less severely than the second. Some strands in the egalitarian tradition have
tended to assume this, and that something close enough to fair equality of opportunity can
be achieved through a combination of public education policies intended to marginalize
the impact of expensive private schooling, and tax-transfer policies designed to mitigate
the effects of unequal parental wealth on life prospects. However, recent research in
economics and sociology casts doubt on this assumption, suggesting that in fact parenting
styles, and other factors integral to valuable familial relationships, may have as much if
not more impact on prospects for income and wealth than transfers from parents to
children.23 Bourdieu-influenced sociologists conjecture that as long as outcomes are
substantially unequal, and the family remains in place, parents who win the competition
for outcomes will, intentionally or otherwise, turn their winnings into opportunities for
their children.24 Through the family children are enculturated into the expectations of
life, and especially of worklife, of their parents and their parents’ friends and
acquaintances; think of an apparently innocent phenomenon like “Take Our Daughters
and Sons To Work Day”, which encourages parents to expose their children to the world
of work but does so by exposing them to their own position within the occupational
structure.25 The family, it may turn out, is more threatening to the prospects for equality
9
of opportunity, even of the conventional kind, than social democrats have wanted to
believe.
V
We have claimed that reading bedtime stories and having one’s children
accompany one to church (or to cricket matches) trump conventional equality of
opportunity, while the pursuit of competitive advantage through investment in elite
private education or the bequeathing of trust funds do not.. Outlining our distinction in
such terms may seem unhelpfully crude, glossing over the subtle complexities that make
the question of legitimate parental partiality such a vexed one for parents with egalitarian
sympathies. Many parents send their children to private schools or bequeath them
property for reasons that have nothing to do with the pursuit of competitive advantage.
Some read their children bedtime stories precisely because they believe that doing so is a
crucial means of equipping them for success in the various competitions, most obviously
in the labor market, that will importantly influence how well their lives go as adults.
Some want their children to accompany them to religious ceremonies not because they
value shared interests and identification but because they believe that a life with that
religion is better than one without it. Addressing cases like this will help to clarify our
view. It will also reveal its austerity.
Our account of family values justifies parents’ engaging in activities such as
reading bedtime stories and being accompanied to church, despite their tendency to
disrupt fair equality of opportunity, because, and in so far as, they contribute to the
relationship goods that the family is distinctively able to provide to its members. The
examples just discussed show that parents can be, and we think they commonly are,
motivated by the desire that their children have access to, enjoy, and participate in certain
excellences, which will make their lives go better than they otherwise would. A life with
literature, or of considered practice within a particular faith, is, they think, just
intrinsically a better life than one without those goods. This is not only why they read to
their children, but also one of the reasons why they send them to elite private schools,
where they will learn Latin or acquire a love of science or literature or be coached by
retired international cricketers. We care that all people’s lives go well, but we care more,
and in different ways, about the lives of those we love going well than about the lives of
others going well. Because caring specially that someone’s life go better than it otherwise
might is part of what it is to love someone, it seems natural to conclude that an account of
partiality that appeals to familial relationship goods can justify parents giving their
children access to intrinsically valuable activities or excellences, even where that disrupts
equality.. Does our emphasis on the goods of intimacy and shared identification miss a
simple truth - that love and favouritism are so closely connected that parents can justify
giving extra weight to the interests of their children in general, not only in so far as that is
required by the duty of care and not only with regard to the developmental and other
‘relationship good’ interests that the family distinctively makes available?
We believe not. Wanting one’s child’s life to go better than it otherwise would is
also the reason that underlies the kinds of deliberate transmission of competitive
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advantage from parents to children in the examples that we used to motivate egalitarian
resistance to such transmission. It is, typically, because parents want their children to
have better lives than they otherwise would, not because they want their children to have
better lives than others, that they are so concerned to endow their children with
competitive advantage.26 Commonsense egalitarian intuitions baulk more at competitive
investment in children, even where that is for the sake of intrinsic goods that they will
enjoy as a result of their positional advantage, than at the direct bestowing of intrinsic
goods (such as religious faith or love of literature) in ways that do not seem to upset the
fairness of competitions for the intrinsic goods. This is because of the intuitive appeal of
fair competitions and our noticing that bestowing competitive advantage on one’s
children makes other children worse off, in at least one important respect, than they
would otherwise have been.27 But this greater baulking at the pursuit of positional
advantage is somewhat misconceived; for the true egalitarian it results from an overly
conservative, status quo biased, baseline of comparison. Rather than directly bestowing
access to excellences on one’s own children, and justifying that by the thought that one is
not thereby making other people’s children worse off than they were before, why not
think of the baseline as being one in which those goods are bestowed equally on all
children? Compared to that baseline, giving them to one’s own children (and not to other
people’s) does make other people’s children worse off. There can be ‘familial
relationship goods’ justifications of parents’ giving their children goods that only parents
can give; there can be duties of care that may require parents to give their children goods
that in principle could be given by others. But there is no ‘familial relationship goods’
justification for favouring - for promoting the interests of one’s own children rather than
those of others - in general.
We do not deny that loving someone means wanting their life to go well – and
caring more about that than that other people’s lives go well. We acknowledge that
parents who seek the good for their children are motivated by an entirely appropriate
feeling of parental love – whether they seek it by bequeathing them resources they may
devote to their life projects, by buying them an education that will introduce them to a
world of excellences, by devoting their own time and energy to that introduction, or even
by trying to improve their competitive advantage relative to others. That advantage, is, in
the end, only advantage in the competition for better rather than worse lives. What we
deny is that it is necessary to permit such interactions, transfers or investments in order
for the goods distinctively made available by familial relationships to be realized. A
world in which parents did not act to further the good of their own children - except in
ways implied by the parental duty of care and except for those aspects of their good (such
as emotional development) that can only be provided by parents – would be a world that
left plenty of room for the realization of familial relationship goods.28
On our account, then, parents cannot properly appeal to the value of the parent-
child relationship to justify a claim to be permitted specially to benefit their children in
any general sense, not even in terms of giving them access to excellences or intrinsically
valuable goods or activities.29 But this does not mean that they should not be permitted to
do precisely that. Just as we might have reason to grant individuals’ unjustified demands
for inequality-inducing incentives, so too there might be reasons to give parents
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permission to bestow good things particularly on their children. Some of the
transmissions to which parents may wrongly claim protection by appeal to their rights or
duties as parents may admit of a quite different kind of defense. In particular, activities
that develop the human capital of children, but are not relevant to the production of
relationship goods, may, in the right kind of tax-transfer system, contribute to the well-
being, all things considered, of the least advantaged. Children might be more productive
if their parents have devoted much time and energy to their development, or if they have
been sent to expensive elite schools, and thus better contributors to tax-transfer schemes,
as well as spurs to overall growth in production. Similarly, if parents are allowed to
bequeath their wealth, or some substantial part of it, on their children, they might work
harder themselves, thus contributing (in an economy structured the right way) more to the
benefit of the less advantaged. Further, as far as intrinsic goods are concerned, we might
be optimistic that some of them have a structure reverse to that of competitive goods.
Whereas improving the labor market competitiveness of your child, whatever its other
effects, directly harms the competitiveness of another person, awakening her love of
Shakespeare or instilling in her a passion for science does not directly harm, and may
well enhance, the ability of other people to have those.
We should make two points about this kind of reason to permit forms of parental
partiality that, on our account, cannot be justified by appeal to familial relationship
goods. First, it involves subjugating egalitarian to prioritarian principles. We are asked to
accept unfairly favorable opportunities for some children (and unfairly unfavorable
opportunities for others) on the grounds that, taking parental motivations as they are,
permitting the unfairness is necessary to produce states of affairs that are better, in
prioritarian terms, than would otherwise be available. We are not hostile to that
subjugation; that permission may indeed be justified, all things considered in the
circumstances. But it is not comprehensively justified.30 The parental motivations in
question can themselves be subject to moral criticism; on our account, they are
condemnable precisely in that they create unfairness while not falling within the bounds
of legitimate parental partiality. Second, parents, implicitly appealing to this kind of
argument, often justify investing in their own children by claiming either that they
particularly the intrinsically valuable goods in question (perhaps education in general,
perhaps something more specific like Shakespeare, science or cricket) or that their
investment will yield benefits to others, perhaps especially to the worse off, in the long
run (or both). Neither claim justifies the actions it is invoked to justify. If what they value
are the intrinsically valuable goods, then they can impartially devote their resources to
providing those goods to children in general, without favoring their own. If what they
care about is the well-being of the worse off, then they can devote them to those children
investment in whom is most likely to produce those benefits. What they really care about,
in our experience, is that the intrinsically valuable goods by enjoyed by their own
children. If our account is right, it is only in rather special circumstances that such
investment can justified by appeal to the value of the parent-child relationship.
VI
12
For us, then, the relationship goods approach means that parents have no justified
claim to promote their children’s interests in general. But different families will realise
relationship goods through different kinds of interaction and shared activity, and healthy
intimate relationships need to be spontaneous. So our approach does give parents a
justified claim to a sphere of discretion within which they may relate spontaneously to
their children. These considerations importantly mitigate the austerity of our view. We do
not accept the idea that the family constitutes, or is part of, a ‘private sphere’, a realm
somehow beyond considerations of distributive justice and in principle immune to state
action. What we do accept – the grain of truth in that picture – is that parental discretion
is important, and that the monitoring and regulation of intimate relationships threatens to
destroy the spontaneity on which so much of their value depends. That is true whether the
monitoring and regulation is carried out by the state or by the individuals themselves.
Parents may not properly invoke the value of the parent-child relationship to justify
acting with the intention of advantaging their children rather than other people’s, but they
may properly invoke it to claim a sphere of discretion, and a freedom to engage
spontaneously with their children, within which such advantage may, unintentionally, be
bestowed and received
What is it about bedtime story-reading that makes it so natural a paradigm case of
a protected activity? The parent reading the bedtime story is doing several things
simultaneously. He is intimately sharing physical space with his child; sharing the
content of a story selected either by her or by him with her; providing the background for
future discussions; preparing her for her bedtime and, if she is young enough, calming
her; re-enforcing the mutual sense of identification one with another. He is giving her
exclusive attention in a space designated for that exclusive attention at particularly
important time of her day. There must be ample space for parents to engage in activities
with their children that involve these kinds of things. Our other case, having one’s
children accompany one to church (or cricket), is similarly a paradigm case because it
involves similarly intimate interaction and produces similar mutual identification.
Although, narrowly specified, each such activity might be prohibited without significant
loss, the prohibition or inhibition of many such activities would produce a serious loss.
Without substantial opportunity to share himself intimately with his child, in ways that
reflect his own judgments about what is valuable (at least until the child develops her
capacity to make her own judgements of value), the parent is deprived of the ability to
forge and maintain an intimate relationship, and the child is deprived of that relationship.
The loss, then, is a loss to both the parent and the child, and it is a loss of the core of what
is valuable about the relationship.
But even though bedtime stories and accompaniment to church are paradigm
cases of protected activities, we doubt that prohibiting all others and permitting just these
two (or just any other small number) would suffice to protect the ability of parents and
children to enjoy the relationship goods. That is because it is important that parents have
a great deal of room to choose how to instantiate the valuable relationship. What is a
viable way of instantiating a valuable relationship for one parent-child pair will not be for
another, because the personalities and preferences of the people involved affect the
viability of any given activity being one in which they can enjoy the relationship. Richard
13
Rothstein is sceptical that reading to children would produce cognitive benefit if the
parent doing the reading had no independent enthusiasm for reading.31 We are less
doubtful. Perhaps parents could promote their children’s cognitive development, where
that was required by their duty of care, even where they would rather be doing something
else. But it is plausible that there would still, in that case, be a loss in terms of other
aspects of the relationship. Reading to one’s child (or taking her to church or a cricket
match, or cooking with her) will be less expressive of, and hence less likely to foster, an
intimate loving relationship if one is not independently invested in the activity. External
monitoring and excessive restrictions on one’s options interfere with the relationship in a
way that tends to be detrimental. That is why, even where there might be some child-
centered and third-party reasons to coerce parents into reading to their children – perhaps
social science tells us that children who have not been read to become less productive or
less cooperative members of society – such coercion is, on our view, likely to be
counterproductive in many cases.32
But just as excessive external monitoring undermines the value of an intimate
relationship, so does excessive self-monitoring. Parents must, of course, monitor both
themselves and the relationship; this is one aspect of the asymmetry between the parent
and the child. And, as we argued in section II, judgements about the legitimacy, all things
considered, of particular parent-child interactions depend on the circumstances. So we by
no means advocate unreflective parenting. But successful intimate relationships require a
good deal of spontaneity, spontaneity that is easily put at risk by the need to keep
constantly in mind whether one is unfairly conferring advantage. Consider helping one’s
child with her homework. One might have many and mixed motivations for doing so: to
share with her a passion for a subject in which one is oneself interested, to contribute to
her cognitive development and interest in the world of learning, to enrich her
understanding of something worth understanding well, to take the opportunity to share
time with her, to make sure she gets a better mark than her classmates. On our account,
some of these motivations are justifiable by appeal to the value of the familial
relationship while others are not. But our account also shows why parents would be
wrong to monitor the likely effects of their actions. To do that would be to destroy
precisely the easy and relaxed intimate interaction that gives the family much of its value.
The importance of a sphere of unmonitored discretion means that parents will inevitably,
and may justifiably, interact with their children in ways that confer unfair advantages that
they would not be justified in intending to confer.
To clarify our view about the role of spontaneity and discretion, it may be helpful
to contrast it with the similar but crucially different position advocated by Colin Macleod.
Like us, Macleod holds that certain kinds of partiality are needed within the family for it
to make its particular contribution to human flourishing, but his account of the kinds that
are needed, and that can be justified by appeal to the importance of spontaneity, is more
expansive than ours. For him ‘partiality of the sort needed to generate partiality
constituted goods in the family is best understood as a deep-seated motivational
disposition to be systematically and spontaneously attendant and responsive to the needs
and interests of particular others…Thus, as a parent who loves my son, I am, in a sense,
spontaneously motivated to make him happy and advance his interests. I am moved to
14
read him stories and secure for him the best educational opportunities available without
any direct concern for how pursuing such opportunities might affect the educational
opportunities of other children. As a result, I am likely to be less sensitive to distinctions
between expressions of partiality that are essential to sustaining our intimate relationship
and those that are not.’33 Like us, Macleod holds that the state may indeed be justified in
preventing parents from advancing their children’s interests by sending them to elite
private schools, for example, since that kind of partiality is not essential to the sustenance
of the valuable intimate relationship. But, unlike us, he thinks that parents are so strongly
disposed ‘systematically and spontaneously’ to favour their children’s interests, without
regard to those of others, that expecting them to monitor their own motivations in that
regard will threaten the value of the family. As he puts it, ‘the process of self-regulation
of partiality can encumber the kind of spontaneity that…is an important feature of strong
partiality.’34 Indeed, Macleod goes so far as to suggest that ‘we may have reason to
excuse some parents who, in current circumstances, make an unjustifiable choice to go
private. In the absence of justified public constraints, strong and, in many respects
laudable parental partiality can be difficult to reign [sic] in appropriately’35.
We do not agree that the degree of self-monitoring needed to restrain oneself from
sending one’s child to a private school that one would vote to abolish is such as to
threaten even the kind of spontaneity that Macleod thinks is needed for valuable familial
relationships. But our disagreement with his position goes deeper. The spontaneity and
discretion that matters, on our account, is more limited than that which his view affords
parents. For us, parents may not justifiably intend generally to favour their children, but
they may find themselves doing so as the unintended consequence of actions that they are
justified in undertaking on other grounds, such as the realisation of the relationship goods
of intimacy and shared identification. To expect them to monitor those actions for their
unfair effects would be to hamper the kind of spontaneity that is indeed crucial for
valuable parent-child relationships. The protected space that can be justified by appeal to
the value of the family is, then, the space to realize and enjoy an intimate loving
relationship, and such unfairness as may result from the interactions that occur within that
space is permissible only as an unintended byproduct of the interactions required for that
relationship. Macleod, by contrast, holds that parents can justifiably intend to favour their
children because intentionally favouring one’s children is itself a motivation that parents
need to be free to act on if valuable spontaneity is not to be destroyed. On our view, the
value of familial relationship goods can justify parents’ helping with their children’s
homework where their having to think about the unfair effects of their doing so would
spoil the spontaneity of the relationship in a way that impaired the realisation of familial
intimacy. On his, they can help with homework even where their conscious motivation is
to further their children’s interests in general, because the disposition to futher one’s
children’s interests in general is itself the kind of partiality constitutive of valuable
familial relationships.
The relationship goods account gives parents a claim both to a good deal of
discretion over the specific mechanisms by which they realize the goods made available
by family life and to the unmonitored, spontaneous enjoyment of parent-child
interactions, even where such interactions may lead to the furthering of their child’s
15
interests in ways that would not be justified if parents were aiming at them. Though not
as generous to parents and their children as Macleod’s, more commonsensical view, these
points between them yield parents considerable room justifiably to engage in actions that
have the effect of favouring their children’s interests – even at the expense of other
children’s. True, there is still the separate issue, distinguished in section II, of the extent
to which parents in particular circumstances are justified in pursuing relationship goods,
for themselves and their loved ones. It is consistent with the argument of this section that
many parent-child interactions susceptible to justification by appeal to the value of the
family may not legitimately be undertaken, all things considered. We claim only that this
and the previous section offer the right account of the ways in which parents’ acting
generally to favour their children’s interests can be justified by that appeal.
VII
We have said that equality-undermining interactions between parents and children
are susceptible to justification by appeal to the value of the family where they are
necessary for the production of familial relationship goods. Many interactions
conventionally regarded as morally permissible do not qualify as such on our account -
indeed many that some regard as morally required fail our test also. Still, our account
leaves a good deal of room for interactions that may have the effect of producing unfair
inequalities between children, especially when one factors in the importance of discretion
and spontaneity if parent-child relationships are to go well.
But how much unfair inequality results from valuable aspects of family life
depends on the environment. The state may do wrong to pursue egalitarian goals, such as
fair equality of opportunity, by interfering in family life in ways that undermine its
capacity to realise relationship goods for its members. But of course other measures that
would mitigate the interruption of that kind of equality without undermining the ability of
the parents and children to realize these goods might be justified. Suppose that reading
bedtime stories to one’s child for 15 minutes every evening has a demonstrable positive
effect both on their expected lifetime income and on their competitiveness for interesting
and rewarding jobs, and suppose also that children of more educated parents tend to be
the ones who are read to. While, on our account, this would not justify forbidding (or
other attempts at preventing) the reading of bedtime stories, it might justify taking steps
to encourage parents who are less educated and/or have lower household incomes to read
more to their children.36 It might also justify transfer payments designed to lessen the
effect of reading stories on lifetime expected income; for example by mitigating the wage
inequalities in the external economy.
The general point here is that whether, and to what extent, the pursuit of familial
relationship goods yields inequality (other than of the enjoyment of those goods) depends
in large part (perhaps entirely) on the design of social institutions. In a society without
wage inequalities, one’s income would be entirely a function of the number of hours one
worked, and would not be at all influenced by the value of one’s natural talents or the
extent to which interactions with one’s parents had developed those talents (though it
would still be influenced by how those interactions had influenced one’s preferences for
16
income relative to leisure). Or consider the following imaginative comment from
sociologist Annette Lareau, whose ethnography Unequal Childhoods identifies the ways
in which middle class parenting styles confer competitive advantage on their children:
This kind of training developed in Alexander and other middle-class children a
sense of entitlement. They felt they had a right to weigh in with an opinion, to make
special requests, to pass judgment on others, and to offer advice to adults. They
expected to receive attention and to be taken very seriously. It is important to
recognize that these advantages and entitlements are historically specific…. They
are highly effective strategies in the United States today precisely because our
society places a premium on assertive, individualized actions executed by persons
who command skills in reasoning and negotiation.37
Even in those circumstances in which the government is not entitled, in the name of
equality of opportunity, to interfere with the family, because doing so would undermine
its ability to confer on its members the relationship goods for which it is vital, it may yet
be justified in shaping or reforming the social environment so as to diminish the extent to
which the prerogatives and obligations essential to the production, within the family, of
relationship goods generate further, extrinsic, inequalities. It may, in other words, try and
break the link between the kinds of parent-child interaction that make the family valuable
and the non-relationship-related goods that they currently yield.38
One more point about the relation between relationship goods and the
circumstances in which people realise them is important. On our account, parents need
not, indeed should not, be in the business of continually judging whether or not to interact
with their children in a particular way by thinking about the extent to which that
particular interaction, or mode of interaction, tends to produce unfair inequalities between
those children and others. To do that would be to impair the spontaneity on which
successful relationships depend. But, as we explained in section II, whether any particular
interaction, or mode of interaction, may legitimately be engaged in, all things considered,
does depend on the circumstances or context in which the parents find themselves. These
two points may seem contradictory, but in our view it is perfectly possible for parents to
assess the circumstances in which they find themselves, to make a judgement about
whether, and to what extent, those circumstances render legitimate the pursuit of
relationship goods for themselves and their loved ones, and then to pursue those goods, to
whatever extent they have judged justified, without also engaging in the kind of
continuous monitoring that would undermine spontaneity. The crucial point, in the
current context, is that since the extent to which individuals may legitimately pursue
relationship goods depends on the circumstances in which they find themselves, political
action to change those circumstances can render the pursuit of relationship goods less or
more legitimate. Parents who may feel self-indulgent – or worried that they are giving
disproportionate weight to the interests of their children - in a world where others are
starving, or where they know that their enjoyment of family life results in huge
unfairnesses between themselves or their children and others, would have less reason,
perhaps no reason, to restrain their pursuit of familial relationship goods in a world that
distributed goods more justly. One way for states to promote family values is to move us
17
in the direction of a world in which parents can legitimately devote themselves to their
families.
VIII
We have argued that activities relevantly like bedtime story telling merit
protection because of their connection to the production of relationship goods. We do not
invoke any presumption of liberty in our defense of this view; rather, we argue from the
specific interests at stake to the content of ‘family freedom’. By contrast, we conjecture
that sending one’s child to an elite private school does not normally involve or produce
relationship goods and is not worthy of protection by appeal to ‘family values’. The child
is interacting with other children and adults in school, not with her parent. In selecting an
elite private school the parent is selecting which set of other people the child will interact
with, but is not directly furthering or helping to maintain the goods of the parent-child
relationship. Nor, normally, is she carrying out her fiduciary duty to meet her child’s
interests. Similarly, gifting or bequeathing large amounts of money to one’s children are,
typically, external, non-intimate, transactions. Even if they are motivated by parental
love, the relationship can survive well without them; these, too, fall into the unprotected
category.
We can see two obvious objections to our claim that this latter kind of activity fall
beyond the bounds of legitimate parental partiality. One is that protecting them might be
justified because they play a vital role in allowing parents to fulfill the special duty of
care they owe their children. The other is that, although not necessary for discharging the
duty of care, they do indeed involve or produce the relevant relationship goods.
Responding to these challenges will help us to clarify the kind of arguments we have
been making, and to draw readers’ attention to the complex issues raised by their
application to the unjust societies in which we currently live.
Clearly the first issue turns on the content of the duty of care as well as the
particular circumstances in which the parent and child find themselves. A popular
formulation holds that parents have a duty to do the best for their children. If that were
right, it might indeed justify, might indeed require, parents sending their children to elite
private schools. But it cannot be right. Parents cannot single-mindedly pursue their
children’s good; they must balance their children’s interests against those of others
(including the parents’ own). For us, the duty of care has both a comparative and an
absolute dimension.
On the comparative side, the duty extends to doing what one can (subject, of
course, to other moral constraints) to ensure that one’s children have the prospects that
they would under a fair distribution. For some parents this itself might justify a
compensatory decision to buy private tuition. Suppose that the kind of distributive justice
with which we are concerned is adequately captured by a principle demanding fair
equality of opportunity. 39 The parents of a child whose prospects would otherwise be less
than equal to those of children with similar levels of talent and willingness to exert effort
do nothing to inhibit the realization of that conception of justice by paying for her to
18
attend better schools or bequeathing her money which they have refrained spending on
consumption goods (as long as in doing so they do not overcompensate for the child’s
prospect deficit). So, in a world in which there are other mechanisms tending to
undermine fair equality of opportunity, it might be quite acceptable parents to act in these
ways. Indeed, it might be required of them, as part of their duty of care.
We have mainly been talking about advantaged parents who act towards their
children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity but that are protected by
their contribution to the realisation of familial relationship good. Buying their children
private tuition or elite private education is not protected. But, for most working class and
poor parents, or members of ethnic minorities whose children are known to suffer from
various biases in education systems and labour markets, buying private tuition and, if
they can somehow afford it, elite private education, may not conflict with fair equality of
opportunity at all. Unlike the middle class parents, they may be simply providing for their
children some of the opportunities that their children would have under a regime of fair
equality of opportunity. This is an attempt to compensate for unfairness, an implication of
the duty of care, not excessive parental partiality.40 But some parents live in societies
where the available public education is entirely inadequate in absolute terms. In large
parts of South Africa, for example, girls have a high probability of being raped on school
premises by someone with AIDS and the prospects of learning in many public schools are
slim.41 Where relatively expensive private schools are the only adequate schools, parents
with the means may have an obligation to do what they can to send their children to
them.42
The second objection suggests that gifting or bequeathing money, or buying her a
particularly good education, while not entailed by the parental duty of care, is indeed
justified on the grounds that it is necessary to realize familial relationship goods. The
success of the parent-child relationship may itself depend on transfers and investments of
the kind we are discussing. One’s child might feel entitled to one’s largesse, especially if
she observes a cultural pattern of large scale parent-child giving/bequeathing within her
milieu. She might similarly feel undervalued if she is consigned to the ordinarily-
resourced local school when she knows that one can readily pay for her to attend the
outstandingly resourced private school some short distance away. One might feel that that
to do otherwise would be an expression of undervaluing her, and it might for that reason
pollute the relationship.
Our response is somewhat conjectural. First, we doubt that such feelings would be
prompted in a regime in which, for example, elite private schooling or large-scale gifting
were effectively prohibited. If she is prohibited from disposing of her money in that way
the parent is not doing anything that demonstrates her misevaluation of the child, and the
child cannot reasonably believe that she is. As Samuel Scheffler points out,
People’s judgments about the circumstances in which, and the extent to which, they
have reason to give special weight to the interests of their intimates and associates
are highly sensitive to the norms they have internalized and to the character of the
prevailing social practices and institutions. Behaviour that is seen in one social
19
setting as an admirable expression of parental concern, for example, may be seen in
another setting as an intolerable form of favouritism or nepotism.43
The state that prohibits activities like sending one’s child to an elite private school while
leaving ample opportunity for activities like reading bedtime stories, thereby leaves
ample space for realizing the value of the family. But even if such activities are not
prohibited, we conjecture that children who enjoy emotionally healthy relationships with
their parents will not experience their parents’ restraint as an instance of undervaluing.
This is both because the parent has some influence over the emerging values of the child
and because she can engage in a wide range of other valuing behaviors in the context of
which the child can be immunized from a sense of entitlement to the benefits deriving
from the parent’s wealth.
Still, it may be that some identifiable types or instances of gifting and
bequeathing, or of educational investment, are particularly valuable instantiations of the
parent-child relationship. Consider the bequest of a house in which a family has lived for
centuries. Perhaps, even though an egalitarian ethos and set of parental values could
prevent children from feeling damaged by its unavailability, such a legacy, symbolizing
the sense of continuity over time and between generations that is among our ‘family
values’, is an important good that would be lost in a regime of prohibition. If so there
would be a relationship-goods case for legalizing such bequests but combining that
permission with a rule preventing the child from realizing the house’s commercial value
and taxing the benefit. Similarly, some parents wish their children to receive particular
kinds of education not because they want them to enjoy competitive advantage over
others, nor even because they want their children to be able to partake of excellences that
will make their lives go better in some general sense, but because the parent-child
relationship itself – or perhaps the child’s sense of herself as a member of a particular
familial tradition - depends on the child’s knowing or understanding particular things
(cricket, classical languages, music) not otherwise available. Though we are sceptical of
many claims along these lines, there is doubtless conceptual space for this possibility and
surely some families inhabit that space. But here too there could be no ‘family values’
objection to attempts by the state to separate the educational goods in question from other
kinds of benefit, and in particular from the competitive advantage that often accompanies
them.44
IX
If the family did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. Without it, children
would not develop the capacities they need to flourish as adults, and adults would not
enjoy the very distinctive goods made possible by intimate parent-child relationships.
Those relationships depend on - are constituted as the relationships they are - by
partiality, partiality that by its very nature disrupts equality. Indeed, the discourse of
‘family values’ is typically invoked to counter attempts to pursue those goals, by those
who claim that respecting the autonomy or integrity of the family means accepting the
illegitimacy of a seriously egalitarian agenda. Our aim has been to outline a theory that
strikes the right balance. One that recognizes the value of familial relationships, their role
20
in human flourishing, while insisting that such relationships not become ‘moral
loopholes’ or excuses for abandoning egalitarian goals.
We have attempted to identify the distinctive goods realized by the family and to use that
account of family values to provide the basis for a distinction between legitimate and
excessive parental partiality, deriving, in a way that we have not seen attempted before,
the content of particular partial reasons for action that arise from the goods realized by a
particular kind of relationship. For us, the lesson is that the family and equality do not
conflict nearly as much as is commonly thought. This is so in two quite different ways.
On the one hand, we can respect the partiality constitutive of parent-child relationships
while altering the social environment so as massively to reduce its impact on the
distribution of other goods. Even in current contexts, careful inspection of the goods in
question reveals that much inequality that we are urged to tolerate as a necessary
consequence of respecting the family fails to qualify as such. On the other, familial
relationship goods can themselves be regarded as among the distribuenda of a complete
theory of distributive justice. To claim that certain kinds of partiality are necessary for the
realization of those goods is not to claim anything about the extent to which individuals
are justified in pursuing those goods for themselves and their loved ones. Rather than
conceiving them as obstacles to egalitarian goals, those who care about ‘family values’
should think about the proper content of those values and start worrying about those least
able to enjoy them.
Endnotes
1 We are grateful to audiences at an ECPR workshop in Granada, Oxford’s Centre for the
Study of Social Justice, the Universities of Birmingham and Reading, the Nuffield
Political Theory workshop, Princeton’s Center for Human Values (especially to Stephen
Macedo for facilitating that occasion), and the Oxford Political Thought Conference. We
have surely forgotten many valuable corrections and suggestions received during the
years it took us to reach this stage, but we do remember at least some of those from Dario
Castiglione, Simon Caney, Clare Chambers, Matthew Clayton, G.A. Cohen, Cecile
Fabre, Pablo Gilabert, Herbert Gintis, Richard Holton, Adam Hosein, Sandy Jencks,
Kenneth Macdonald, Dan McDermott, Colin Macleod, David Miller, Francis Schrag,
Zofia Stemplowska, John Tasioulas, Simon Thompson and Andrew Williams. Adam
Swift’s first thoughts in this direction came to him during a Research Readership
supported by the British Academy and facilitated by Nuffield College.
2 “Incentives, Inequality and Community” in Grethe B. Peterson (ed.) The Tanner
Lectures on Human Values Vol. 13 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992),
pp.263-329, at 302-3.
3 See David Estlund, “Liberalism, Equality and Fraternity in Cohen’s Critique of Rawls,”
The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 1998, pp. 99-112. See also Michael Otsuka’s
critique of Estlund, “Prerogatives to Depart from Equality”, in Anthony O’Hear (ed.)
Political Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 58 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.95-111.
21
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 MA: 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 acknowledgement 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: Yale University Press, 1986); James Rachels “Morality, Parents and Children”, in
his Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997);Morris
Lipson and Peter Vallentyne, “Equal Opportunity and the Family”, Public Affairs
Quarterly 3 (1989), pp. 29-47; Ferdinand Schoeman, "Rights of Children, Rights of
Parents, and the Moral Basis of the Family," Ethics 91 (1980), pp.6-19; Richard W.
Miller, “Too Much Inequality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 19 (2002), pp. 275-313, at
284.
9 For an example of the latter, see David Miller’s four-fold schema in his ‘Reasonable
Partiality towards Compatriots’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005), pp.63-81.
For an approach to another ‘family values’ issue that shares our methodological
commitment to the specificity of the parent-child relationship, see Simon Keller: ‘Four
Theories of Filial Duty’. Philosophical Quarterly 2006.
10 E.g. Andrew Oldenquist, ‘Loyalties’, Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp 173-193.
John Cottingham, ‘Partiality, Favouritism and Morality’, The Philosophical Quarterly 36
(1986), pp.357-73 observes that relationships with compatriots are not, for most people,
as important to human flourishing as are familial relationships, and suggests that any
justification of patriotic partiality will thus be more complex than what he calls
‘philophilic partiality’. But he is still concerned with partiality or favouritism in general,
rather than investigating the content of special responsibilies along the lines that we
suggest.
11 It is worth noting that there are various conventions regarding equality of opportunity. We follow here
the familiar Rawlsian convention that does not regard the impact of the family on the capacity for or
exercise of effort as contravening equality of opportunity, although, as Rawls himself suggests (see
footnote X (7 at the moment), other widely held conceptions do. We believe that the argument in this paper
is robust across the different conceptualizations.
12 For a similar approach, which came to our attention only in the final stages of revising
this paper, see Arash Abizadeh and Pablo Gilabert, ‘Is there a genuine tension between
cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities?’, Philosophical Studies
22
(forthcoming): ‘….within the cosmopolitan egalitarian framework, the non-instrumental
value of special relationships must be recognized for each person. The upshot is that 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’ , p.??
13 For a sophisticated third-party justification along these lines, see See Jennifer Roback
Morse ‘No Families, No Freedom: Human Flourishing in a Free Society’, Social
Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999), pp. 290-314.
14 For examples of child-centered views see James Dwyer, Religious Schools v.
Children's Rights (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), Peter Vallentyne, “The Rights
and Duties of Childrearing”, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 11 (2003), pp. 991-
1010; Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, "The Moral Status of Children: Children's
Rights, Parents' Rights, and Family Justice," Social Theory and Practice 23 (1997), pp.1-
26.
15 For a fuller account of our view, see our “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family”,
Ethics 117 (2006), pp.80-108. Another recent account that, though different from ours in
many ways, similarly treats parents’ interests as having an important justificatory role is
Matthew Clayton, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
16 For a fuller account of the interests sketched here, and a more thorough and careful
attempt to derive ‘the family’ from them, see see our “Parents’ Rights and the Value of
the Family”, Ethics 117 (2006), pp.80-108.
17 We should clarify that 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 recognising 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’ 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), p140 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 Parfit’s version of
the “one thought too many” objection in his ‘Justice and the Family’, Inquiry 19 (1976),
pp.193-208.
18 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
23
prominently, Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, Yale University Press,
2001).
19 See John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in
Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
20 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 ‘Family Values and Social Justice’,
forthcoming in G. Craig, D. Gordon and T. Burchardt (eds.) Social Justice and Public
Policy (Policy Press 2008) and Family Values (Princeton UP, manuscript in progress)
21 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: Harvard
University Press, 2001), p.165.
22 We present a more nuanced account of this right in ‘Parents’ Rights and the Value of
the Family’. Where the current paper explores the distributive implications of our
normative account of the family, that one pays more attention to the question of the
extent to which parents may legitimately seek to influence their children’s values.
23 See Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf (eds.) Meritocracy and
Economic Inequality. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 2000); Samuel Bowles,
Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne-Groves (eds.). Unequal Chances: Family
Background and Economic Success (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and
for a qualitative account, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods (University of California
Press, 2003). For a careful account of how this plays out specifically with respect to the
uptake of education in American schools see Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools
(Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2003).
24 For a study that emphasizes the intentional aspects, see Stephen Ball, Class Strategies
and the Education Market: the middle class and social advantage (London:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). .
25 Thanks to a referee for PAPA for supplying us with this nice example.
26 We do not deny the possibility that some parents might be motivated precisely by the
desire that their children do better than others, but we doubt that this is the general case.
For discussion, see Adam Swift, How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the
Morally Perplexed Parent (Routledge, 2003).
27 See our “Equality, Priority and Positional Goods”.
28 The relationship between love and bequest is complex. In some cases, the very
possibility of inheritance can spoil or pollute parent-child relationships. Parents can use
24
their discretion to exert control over their children in a way inimical to the realisation of
valuable relationship goods, the relationship descending into an unpleasant series of self-
interested exchanges. Still, there is evidence that in some families it is only the possibility
of inheritance that gives adult children any motivation at all to stay in touch with their
ageing parents. See Martin Kohli, ‘Intergenerational Transfers and Inheritance: A
Comparative View’ in Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics 24 2004, pp.266-
289.
29 This applies even if those parents possess only those resources – time, money, cultural
capital - that they would have under a just distribution.Where parents have more than
their just share, then, as discussed in section II, their claim to be permitted to use those
extra resources intentionally to benefit their children (who are in any case likely to be
better off than other people’s children) can be challenged on other grounds.
30 For a fuller discussion of this distinction and related issues, see our “Equality, Priority
and Positional Goods”, Ethics 116 (2006), pp. 471-97, at pp.491-95
31 Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools, chapter 2.
32 It is true that social pressure and even legal measures can produce commitment in due
course. It may be, for example, that strong social approval or state endorsement of the
reading of bedtime stories, or repudiation of corporal punishment, could lead to
committed compliance, and hence spontaneous bedtime story reading or disciplinary
restraint, from parents whose compliance was initially grudging or reluctant – even if a
police force committed to enforcing bedtime stories and prohibiting corporal punishment
would not. (We are grateful to one of the referees for Philosophy and Public Affairs for
pointing this out.) Still, the risk of excessive external demands and monitoring of parents
undermining the valuable informality of family life, and the value of parents having
considerable discretion about how to conduct that life, remain important.
33 Colin Macleod, “The Puzzle of Parental Partiality”, Theory and and Research in
Education 2004, pp.309-321. Despite our disagreements, our thinking about the family
owes a good deal to Macleod, especially to his “Liberal Equality and the Affective
Family”, in David Archard and Colin MacLeod (eds) The Moral and Political Status of
Children. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
34 Ibid, p..317
35 Ibid., p.317
36 Note that Western governments that take such measures offer something like this
justification, in addition to the distinct claim that policies of this kind will help to foster
the development of human capital.
37 Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, p 133.
38 See Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, “Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods”,
Ethics (2006): ---- at --.
39 We do not ourselves find this principle adequate. Parents of the cognitively impaired
would be right to judge that even societies that complied with fair equality of opportunity
25
would subject their children to gross injustice. Parents concerned to help such children
towards justice might well be justified in pursuing their children’s interests in a very
determined way.
40 Where the local state school is so bad that even the children of the relatively
advantaged will fail to enjoy fair equality of opportunity if they attend it, then their
parents too may be justified in option for a private alternative. Note crucially that what is
justified here is only the purchase of an education that will give the children a fair
chance, not a better than fair one. For more along these lines, see Adam Swift, How Not
To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (London:
Routledge, 2003). For a similar point justifying the relatively advantaged saving and
bequeathing resources to their children, see G. A. Cohen If You’re an Egalitarian, How
Come You’re so Rich? (Harvard University Press, 2000), p.176.
41 See Elaine Unterhalter “The Capabilities Approach and Gendered Education: An
Examination of South African Complexities”, Theory and Research in Education (2003);
1: 7-22.
42 Clearly there is plenty of room for debate about when a school is ‘adequate’ for a
particular child, and we are not ruling out scenarios where parents need to go private to
achieve adequacy in less drastic contexts than the South African one. For extensive
discussion of this issue see Swift, How Not To Be A Hypocrite.
43 Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances p 123. Thus, for example, we have
observed a dramatic change in attitude towards private schooling in the UK 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 UK, going private remains taboo, but is entirely acceptable in equivalent
circles in the US. 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 see ourselves as attempting precisely to explore ‘where the
limits lie’ (though we do not claim to identify them precisely).
44 For fuller discussion of this and other possibilities along these lines, see our “Equality,
Priority and Positional Goods”.
