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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: “What justifies parents’ influence on their children?” written by Yutang Jin

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This essay was a finalist in the Graduate Category of the 2nd Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by University of Oxford Student, Yutang Jin

In a family, parents can exert enormous influence on their children. Parents tend to implant in their children’s mind, for good or ill, values and ideas which go on to guide their whole lives. This essay focuses on this relationship and discusses what justification we can have for parental influence over their children.

The dominant discourse in addressing the parent-child relationship is that of moral rights. I argue, however, that the liberal discourse of rights, sound as it may be, has lots of drawbacks that disqualify it from being a cogent account of family relationships. I then go on to craft a Confucian framework whereby to discuss how parents and children should behave to each other. My main argument is that parents’ influence is justifiable insofar as parents comply with moral rules that regulate their relationship with children, and these rules are subject to public justification and rectification.Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: “What justifies parents’ influence on their children?” written by Yutang Jin

What’s wrong with adopting out an adopted child?

‘Re-homing’ is a term coined to describe the adopting out of adopted children. Reuters today published a long story on the practice, describing several cases in which children adopted from overseas by American parents were then put up for adoption again within the States, in one case only a few days after the initial adoption.

The adoptions described in the Reuters piece are problematic for obvious reasons. It appears that lax oversight arrangements in the US, particularly for intra-state adoptions, have allowed couples to adopt out their children with little or no vetting of the new parents, in some cases into abusive families, and often without much consideration of the child’s interests. But might there also be less obvious considerations in play here?Read More »What’s wrong with adopting out an adopted child?

In the genetic supermarket, should parents be allowed to buy?

Imagine a world in which genetic interventions (for hair/eye colour, health, strength, happiness, morality…) were tested, safe, effective and accepted. In this genetic supermarket, who should be allowed to buy – to decide how children should be modified? Parents seem the obvious choice – but on reflection, there seem few reasons to allow this.

Why is it good for people to make their own choices? Firstly, out of liberty: everyone should have the right to do what they want with themselves. Secondly, because people know their own preferences much better than anyone else (one of the reasons that the communist command economies failed). And thirdly because people can experience the consequences of their choices, and become more skilled consumers, driving poor products out of business.

None of these applies to parents choosing their children’s genes. Here they are making the choice for other people, whose preferences they don’t know (because they don’t even exist yet!). And unless parents plan to have ten or twenty children, they have no relevant personal experience to draw on for comparing genetic interventions. And the main effects of these interventions are very long term, making the parents even less suited to making the choice in an informed way.Read More »In the genetic supermarket, should parents be allowed to buy?

State versus parental authority: morality or efficiency?

In a previous post, I touched briefly upon the role of the state in child-rearing. The state takes on a very specific set of roles, while parents fulfil others. The rhetoric surrounding parental rights or government power seem to imply that we’ve reached this division after careful consideration of the rights of all parties, based on fundamental moral principles.

However, it seems suspicious to me that this principled division corresponds nearly perfectly to practical considerations. In other words, the government has all the rights in the areas they’re good at, while parents have all the rights in the remaining areas.

Consider, for instance, that the government is quite good a detecting blatant physical abuse. You just have to send someone to have a look, and in most places, the government can and does just that. Teachers are on the lookout for this, and social workers generally have the right to investigate and intervene.Read More »State versus parental authority: morality or efficiency?

What grounds paternal obligations?

Last week, Laurie Shrage caused a bit of a stir on the blogosphere with her controversial article on the Stone, a New York Times philosophy blog, entitled “Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?”  In the article, Shrage challenges the prevailing notion that unwilling fathers should be forced by the state to pay child support.  This is unfair, Shrage argues, because unwilling fathers never consented to conceive or raise the child, and (unlike the mother) lacks the freedom to have the child aborted or given up for adoption.  Shrage’s article raises a number of interesting issues, including whether US restrictions on reproductive rights mean pregnant women are analogously forced to give birth and the issue of whether a policy could adequately distinguish between ‘willing’ and ‘unwilling’ fathers.  Here, though, I would like to focus on the central question of whether unwilling fathers have a moral obligation to financially support their children. Read More »What grounds paternal obligations?

Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting?

We’ve come a long way, as a species. And we’re better at many things than we ever were before – not just slightly better, but unimaginably, ridiculously better. We’re better at transporting people and objects, we’re better a killing, we’re better at preventing infectious diseases, we’re better at industrial production, agricultural and economic output, we’re better at communications and sharing of information.

But in some areas, we haven’t made such dramatic improvements. And one of those areas is parenting. We’re certainly better parents than our own great-great-grandparents, if we measure by outcomes, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Why is that?Read More »Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting?