Parental Partiality and Future Children

Prospective parents are sometimes partial towards their future children, engaging in what I call ‘pre-parental partiality’. Common sense morality is as permissive of pre-parental partiality as it is of ordinary parental partiality—partiality towards one’s existing children. But I argue that pre-parental partiality is harder to justify: love-based justifications for ordinary parental partiality typically provide weaker reasons in support of pre-parental partiality than in support of parental partiality, and other candidate justifications fail to make up for this normative deficit.

Reading bedtime stories to compatriots: Reconciling global equality of opportunity and self-determination

In this article, we propose a reconciliation between global equality of opportunity and self-determination, two central and seemingly conflicting principles in the contemporary theory of global justice. Our conception of reconciliation draws on the family-people analogy, following the account of familial relationship goods, developed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, on permissible parental partiality and domestic equality of opportunity. We argue, first, that a plausible conception of global equality of opportunity must be able to distinguish morally arbitrary aspects of nationality that require mitigation from morally permissible ones. Second, we argue that a plausible criterion for the distinction integrates a person’s normative interests over a lifetime: (i) the interests of a child born into societal circumstances that impact her life prospects; and (ii) the interests of an adult citizen in collective self-determination. Third, we outline an account of ‘people relationship goods’, as a principled way to circumscribe the permissible scope of self-determination. Fair global equality of opportunity requires mitigating nationality-tracking inequalities, except those that fall within the permissible scope of collective self-determination.

Parental partiality and justice

The problem of parental partiality and justice concerns the conflict between parents’ natural desire to put their own children’s interests first and the principles of egalitarian justice which express equal concern with the well-being of all. The underlying dilemma between partial concern and impartial treatment is a much discussed one in moral and political philosophy. Parental partiality raises that dilemma in an acute form given the very close attachment that parents have to their children and the substantial and ongoing social and economic inequalities present in contemporary societies. Investigating the meaning of egalitarian justice reveals that under any interpretation it imposes substantial obligations which many parents concerned with their own children’s interests will reject. Parental partiality, in turn, can be theorized as a social convention or personal project, but is most plausibly seen as realizing a special kind of value or form of flourishing, such as intimacy for example. Short of abolishing the family or abandoning the commitment to egalitarian justice, any reconciliation of this conflict will have to speak to both sets of values. One option is to circumscribe the domain of parental partiality by arguing that parents only have rights to realize a particular kind of valuable relationship with their children; another is to build in to our conception of parental partiality moral constraints of which egalitarian justice might be one. As long as we live in an unequal world where parents have strong attachments to their children, this debate looks set to continue.

The Family

This chapter examines various recent challenges that the family poses for the articulation of a comprehensive account of distribution that is broadly egalitarian in character, a topic largely ignored by many prominent theorists. It considers how opportunities to form families should be distributed, who should bear the costs of rearing children, and how the justice-based entitlements of children should be understood in relation to their parents and other adults. Attention is given to the tension between equality and parental partiality and to the way in which justice should be concerned with the provision and distribution of intrinsic goods of childhood.

Poverty, partiality, and the purchase of expensive education

Prioritarianism doesn’t value equality as such – any reason to equalize is due to the benefits for the worse off. But some argue that prioritarianism and egalitarianism coincide in their implications for the distribution of education: Equalizing educational opportunities improves the socioeconomic opportunities of the worse off. More specifically, a system that prohibits parents from making differential private educational expenditures would result in greater gains to the worse off than a system that permits these expenditures, all else equal. This article argues that prioritarianism opposes a cap on educational expenditures. The argument, in brief, is that an equalized provision of schooling does a worse job of channeling the partiality of rich families in ways that produce positive spillover for poorer children. My challenge to the prioritarian case for educational equality is an internal one: the very concerns about parental partiality that underlie prioritarian objections to uncapped educational expenditures apply with even greater force to a system that caps educational expenditures.