Debates on the nature and justifiability of paternalism typically focus only on adults, sometimes presuming without argument that paternalism towards children is a non-issue or obviously justified. Debates on the moral and political status of children, in turn, rarely connect with the rich literature on paternalism. This chapter attempts to bridge this gap by exploring how issues that arise in the general debate on paternalism are relevant also for the benevolent interference with children. I survey and discuss various views and (...) argue for my own: that paternalism towards children is in most respects like paternalism towards adults and stands in the same need of justification, though such justification is more often forthcoming both because children are typically less prudent than adults and so benefit more from interference, and because, in some respects, interference is less harmful to them. (shrink)

There is wide agreement that children have human rights, and that their human rights differ from those of adults. What explains this difference which is, at least at first glance, puzzling, given that human rights are meant to be universal? The puzzle can be dispelled by identifying what unites children’s and adults’ rights as human rights. Here I seek to answer the question of children’s human rights – that is, rights they have merely in virtue of being human and of (...) being children – by exploring how children’s interests are different from adults’, and how respect for children’s and adults’ moral status yields different practical requirements. If human rights protect interests, then children have many, but not all, of the human rights of adults, and, in addition, have some human rights that adults lack. I discuss the way in which children’s human rights, as I conceive of them here are, or fail to be, reflected in the law; as an illustration, I use the most important legal document listing children’s rights, namely the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

In this paper, I introduce what I call relational virtue and defend it as an important subcategory of virtue. In particular, I argue that it offers a valuable resource for answering questions concerning the value of intimate relationships such as parent-child relationship or friendship. After briefly sketching what I mean by relational virtue, I show why it is a virtue and in what sense we can meaningfully distinguish it from other sorts of virtue. I then describe some distinctive features of (...) relational virtue in more detail and discuss their implications. Next, I present filial piety as the paradigmatic example of relational virtue. I argue that a child s being filial should be understood as an appropriate response to her parent s being virtuous as a parent. I conclude by showing how my relational virtue theory of filial piety can avoid the difficulties faced by previous theories of filial piety such as gratitude theory and friendship theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that what I call ‘gratitude for being’ can capture the distinctive sort of gratitude that we typically owe to our intimates, such as parents and close friends. Instead of specific actions or beneficial objects, the benefactor herself and her relationship to the beneficiary are considered as the grounds of gratitude. I argue that people who have consistent and particularized care for us deserve our gratitude for being, rather than gratitude for doing.

In this article I investigate the nature and extent of filial obligations. The question what (adult) children owe their parents is not only philosophically interesting, but also of increasing relevance in ageing societies. Its answer matters to elderly people and their adult children, and is relevant to social policy issues in various ways. I present the strongest arguments for and against three models of filial obligations: the ‘past parental sacrifices’ model, the ‘special relationship’ model, and the conventionalist model. There is (...) something to be said—and after consideration of objections something remains to be said—for all three models. In other words: filial obligations have more than one source, and an adequate model of filial obligations should reflect this. On its own, each of the above models is one-sided. They also fail to show the connections between the question of filial obligations and various other issues, such as issues of gender justice, the extent of institutionalization of eldercare, and social conventions regarding filial responsibility. Therefore, I integrate what I think we should keep from the aforementioned models into a contextual, pluralist model, which places filial obligations in a broader social and cultural context and relates them to issues of social justice. The model also highlights the difference between general and specific filial obligations, and the factors that determine their nature and extent, thus enabling a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of filial obligations. (shrink)

Many ethicists writing about automated systems attribute agency to these systems. Not only that; they seemingly attribute an autonomous or independent form of agency to these machines. This leads some ethicists to worry about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps in cases where automated systems harm or kill human beings. In this paper, I consider what sorts of agency it makes sense to attribute to most current forms of automated systems, in particular automated cars and military robots. I argue that whereas it indeed (...) makes sense to attribute different forms of fairly sophisticated agency to these machines, we ought not to regard them as acting on their own, independently of any human beings. Rather, the right way to understand the agency exercised by these machines is in terms of human–robot collaborations, where the humans involved initiate, supervise, and manage the agency of their robotic collaborators. This means, I argue, that there is much less room for justified worries about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps than many ethicists think. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Freundschaft ist ein wichtiges Thema der aristotelischen Moraltheorie. Aristoteles versteht unter Freundschaft die optimale Form der Beziehung, in der sich die Beteiligten gegenseitig schätzen und Wohltaten leisten. Im Rahmen seiner Freundschaftstheorie hat Aristoteles auch eine Auffassung der Freundschaft zwischen Eltern und Kindern entworfen. Im Vergleich zu seiner allge-meinen Freundschaftstheorie haben seine Ansätze zur Freundschaft zwischen Eltern und Kindern sowohl in der historischen als auch in der systematischen Forschung wenig Aufmerksamkeit gefunden. Das Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, die Auffassung dieser (...) speziellen Beziehung im Kontext seiner Moral- und Freundschaftstheorie darzustellen, zu interpretieren, aber auch weiterzuentwickeln bzw. zu vervollständi-gen. Zudem wird eine kritische Beurteilung sowie Korrektur einiger Aspekte dieser Theorie, insbesondere der Gläubiger-Schuldner-Auffassung der Eltern-Kinder-Beziehung, vorgenommen. Diese Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles’ Theorie führt zu einer klareren, systematischeren, aber auch attraktiveren und angemesseneren aristotelischen Theorie der Eltern-Kinder-Freundschaft, als sie in den Schriften des Aristoteles vorliegt. -/- Summary: Friendship (philia), the optimal form of a relationship, in which the friends love and do good things for each other, is an important theme of Aristotle’s ethics. In the framework of his friendship theory, Aristotle also outlined an account of the specific friendship emerging within the relationship between parents and their children. In comparison to his general theory of friendship, which has been widely discussed both by historians of philosophy and by ethicists, has this account received little at-tention. The objective of this article is to present and interpret, but also to develop and qualify, this account of parent-child friendship in the context of Aristotle’s general friendship theory. I shall also suggest that some aspects of this theory, in particular the debtor-creditor account of filial duties, need to be reassessed. This interpretation and discussion should yield a clearer, more systematic but also more attractive and adequate Aristotelian account of the optimal parent-children relationship than the one we find in the texts of Aristotle. (shrink)

The traditional liberal view on conflicts between care for wellbeing and respect for choice and desire is that we should look to degrees of competence and voluntariness to determine which moral imperative should take priority. This view has likely influenced the common view that children’s choices should be considered only to the extent that this promotes their future autonomy and helps us determine their best interests. I reject both the general traditional liberal view and its application to children. Competence and (...) voluntariness, as well as maturity, are at best proxies for what really matters, which is wellbeing, choice and desire. We typically have reason to respect children’s choices, irrespective of any further positive consequences. If we should more often make children do what they do not want to do, this is mainly because, though we should care about respecting their choices, we should care even more about their wellbeing and future autonomy. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 113-126, Spring 2022.

For Aristotle, in making the deliberate choice to incorporate the extensive requirements of the young into the aims of one’s life, people realise their own good. In this paper I will argue that this is a promising way to think about the ethics of care and parenting. Modern theories, which focus on duty and obligation, direct our attention to conflicts of interests in our caring activities. Aristotle’s explanation, in contrast, explains how nurturing others not only develops a core part of (...) the self but also lead to an appreciation of the value of interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

This article is concerned with choices that parents or guardians make about the food they give to their children. Those with primary responsibility for the care of young children determine the set of foods that their children eat and have a significant impact on children’s subsequent dietary choices, both in later childhood and in adulthood. I argue that parents have a morally significant reason not to feed meat to their children, which stems from their fiduciary responsibility for the child’s moral (...) development. This should, at a minimum, be factored into parental decisions about their children’s diet. In the absence of compelling countervailing reasons, it will mean that parents should not, in an all-things-considered sense, feed meat to their children. This claim does not rely upon the obviously contentious claim that it is morally wrong to eat meat. Instead, the fact that children, when adults, may reasonably themselves come to believe that consuming meat is wrong gives parents morally compelling reasons to avoid acting in ways which may have the predictable consequence of corrupting the moral character of those for whom they are responsible. (shrink)

Bis vor wenigen Jahren hätte ein Beitrag zur Familienethik mit einem Hinweis darauf begonnen, dass es sich dabei um ein philosophisches Forschungsdesiderat handelt. In der Zwischenzeit hat sich die Situation merklich verändert: Zahlreiche Sammelbände, Monographien und Aufsätze zeugen davon, dass sich die Familienethik zunehmender Beachtung erfreut und die Beziehung zwischen Eltern und Kindern ebenso wie die Rechte und Pflichten von Eltern und Kindern untereinander eine eingehendere Analyse verdienen. In dieser Einleitung werden einige gesellschaftliche und innerphilosophische Entwicklungen skizziert, die zur zunehmenden (...) Beachtung der Familienethik geführt haben. Darüber hinaus wird ein Überblick über die Beiträge des Schwerpunktes gegeben. (shrink)

I distinguish between three different ideas that have been recently discussed under the heading of 'the intrinsic goods of childhood': that childhood is itself intrinsically valuable, that certain goods are valuable only for children, and that children are being owed other goods than adults. I then briefly defend the claim the childhood is intrinsically good. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis, and rejection, of the claim that certain goods are valuable only for children. This has implications about (...) how a good society should trade off economic productivity on the one hand and goods such as play and unstructured time on the other hand. (shrink)