Conclusion

The central arguments of this book have been that children are owed a good environment in which to grow up and that adults are owed the stable and supported right to care for children if they so desire. In Part I, I explored how to conceptualize children’s justice and how to measure whether children’s interests are being met by their society. I showed why children’s interests cannot be understood in terms of holding a set of resources, even if resources are understood in a very broad sense. When the subject of justice is understood to be adults, then it makes sense that the role of principles of justice simply be giving each person their fair share. This was the perspective taken by the two most influential liberal thinkers of the last century, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. I suggested their approach cannot cope with the needs of children, since children might have a fair share of economic resources yet grow up socialized into beliefs, values and practices that are harmful to their current and future flourishing. A theory of justice must, therefore, take holistic account of the various ways in which upbringing might affect a person’s life, thus looking at its effects on children’s well-being. To meet this challenge, I offered an objective list account of children’s well-being which suggested that this is principally driven by the quality of their relationships with others. This theoretical shift implies a reconceptualization of what justice is about. Instead of justice being understood primarily as economic fairness, it must be seen as fundamentally about creating a society with norms and practice which foster flourishing interpersonal relationships, with a particular concern for the least advantaged children whose interests must be given priority....

Children’s Distributive Outcomes: Equality of Opportunity?

In this chapter, I consider the extent to which my account supports equality of opportunity, understood roughly in the Rawlsian sense known as FEO (Fair Equality of Opportunity). FEO seems inconsistent with the priority view defended in Section 2. However, I argue there are powerful reasons of justice to think that justice requires limiting the ability of parents to pass on economic advantages to their children. I show an argument for equalising opportunity flows from my account of children’s wellbeing. I argue that children’s social relations with one another are dependent upon FEO, and in particular that children interact with the world as agents. This means that their lives take the shape they do because of their own actions and abilities.

Beyond Parents: Collective Duties to Children

In this chapter, I consider duties non-parents might have to children. I consider empirical evidence which suggests that parents matter less for children than is commonly assumed, and that other members of society matter more. I suggest that this influence on children generates duties to the children that are similar- albeit weaker- to those of parents. All members of society are responsible for the content of children’s character and this impact brings duties to ensure society is not harmful to the child. Further, the intertwined nature of children’s lives means that special duties to one child transfer to others. The implication is that the perfectionist duties explored in chapter 11 apply not just to parents but to all citizens, who have a moral duty to change their conduct in ways that will further the wellbeing of children.

The Implications of Perfectionism

Here, I build on the conception of children’s interests outlined in chapter 3, I show how Nussbaum’s list of valuable goods can be productively extended once the requirement to be neutral about ethics is dropped. I offer a view of flourishing grounded in the importance of interpersonal relationships, of agency and an appreciation of the natural world. I then discuss a few more concrete examples of the kinds of beliefs that will be required by progressive upbringing. These are i) a personal commitment to gender equality) knowledge of controversial scientific and historical truths, iii) an openness to sexual choice and iv) a rejection of consumerism. Taken together, these discussions show why justice for children requires them to be raised in an environment conducive to socially liberal beliefs and values, a view that stands in deep tension with theories of liberalism that apply only to politics, and to the preferences of many parents. I turn to these concerns in the next section.

Welfare across the Lifespan

This chapter considers how welfare or advantage ought to be distributed within a single lifespan, rather than between lives. A possibility is that people can make up for a bad childhood via compensating factors in adulthood, and thus there is no need to prioritise the interests of children. Through a consideration of what are termed ‘the intrinsic goods of childhood’ I make the argument that there is a basic case for seeing the start of a person’s life as the most important life stage, because gains in childhood are by their nature longer lasting and likely to lead to further advantages later in life. This provides a powerful, though potentially outweighed, reason for thinking that justice requires devoting more attention and resources to children than is recognised by most accounts.

Paying for Childcare

Here, I make the case that each member of society can be expected to do better if more resources are dedicated to child rearing. This is for two reasons; first, it benefits everyone during their life stage as children. Moving resources towards children, and changing norms to be more child friendly, can be expected to benefit everyone, because childhood is a particularly significant part of a person’s life. It matters instrumentally – having good childhood is predictive of a good adulthood – and intrinsically, because people have a strong attachment to their childhood years. Second, it makes the project of raising children more attractive and this option benefits both parents and those who do not become parents.

The Project View of Parenting

Here, I consider what morally connects adults to children so that they have a presumptive right to parent the child. I argue against the still widely held genetic view and suggest that blood connections, in themselves, do not matter very much morally. I also suggest that while relationships between parents and children are highly significant, they do not define parenting or exhaust the set of considerations relevant to the distribution of parental rights. Instead, I defend the ‘project view’ of parenting, according to which parenting should be respected as part of an important project that most people have a right to pursue.

The Currency of Children’s Justice

This chapter explores different theories of advantage in the context of childhood. It argues that both subjective theories of advantage, which measure mental states like happiness, and resource theories must both be rejected. Resource based theories are attractive in the case of adulthood when a person can rightly be held responsible for their choices but cannot capture important threats to children’s interests. In their place I propose a wellbeing theory drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities view.

What is a Child?

This chapter outlines an account of what it means to be a child, and why childhood matters as a moral category. I argue that despite concerns, a theory should take childhood simply to mean people below the age of 18. I argue that childhood matters because children’s malleability and vulnerability mean they are poorly served by existing accounts of liberal justice.

Perfectionism and Parenting

Here, I defend perfectionist parenting, according to which parents have a direct moral duty to promote the best views of ethics to their children. I argue that this duty is in part justified by parents’ duties to other children, since the actions of one child will matter a great deal for other children. In the final part of the chapter I consider the extent to which perfectionist parenting limits parental freedom. A proper recognition of value pluralism shows why there is still very wide latitude for parents to shape their children’s values such that they share cultural reference points and have interests in common.