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.
The Right to Parent One’s Biological Babies
This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing the question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable.
Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority
A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.
Taking Stock of Leisure
I chose ‘leisure’ as the theme for this occasion partly because it’s a topic which everyone – anyway, everyone present this afternoon – knows quite a lot about informally from their own experience. I chose it also because philosophy is supposed to be concerned with, among other things, human life and human nature in general, and reflecting about leisure is largely a matter of reflecting about its place in human life as a whole. It is not easy to say what is essential to human beings, because the attributes that seem deeply characteristic of us form such a long list, whereas stating the essence of something is traditionally supposed to be a matter of giving a single pithy fundamental formula. If, however, one is allowed to point to the essential by simply listing typifying characteristics, then the capacity to appreciate leisure and distinguish it from non-leisure must surely count as essential to human beings.This is not to claim, of course, that the concept of leisure is universal to all cultures, nor that if a certain culture lacked this notion it might not all the same get along as well on the whole as we do, who have it. For conceivably that culture might recognise and realise some equally important human capacity whose object figures not at all in our own reflections and deliberate arrangements. We can be quite liberal in forming our list of essentially human capacities as long as we allow that there may be whole peoples, and long stretches of history, in which one or another essentially human capacity goes systematically unrecognised and largely or completely unrealised.
Citizenship as Identity, Citizenship as Shared Fate, and the Functions of Multicultural Education
This is the second of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. Melissa Williams examines citizenship as identity in relation to the project of nation-building, the shifting boundaries of citizenship in relation to globalization, citizenship as shared fate, and the role of multicultural education within the view of citizenship-as-shared-fate. She argues the other side of the same coin to that presented by Shelley Burtt in the previous chapter: according to Williams, the liberal state often demands too much in the way of loyalty from traditional groups, and when it does, it runs a strong risk of becoming oppressive and illiberal. Moreover, she holds that there is no need for a single shared identity among citizens of the liberal state. Her conception of people tied together by a shared fate is to this extent compatible with Burtt’s attempt to make liberalism’s commitment to autonomy more hospitable to groups of individuals encumbered by unchosen attachments, but her notion of citizenship as shared fate also goes further than that, and possibly stands in some tension with, Burtt’s view, since it allows and even encourages people to develop primary affiliation to all kind of groups – traditional as well as global.
Good for Women
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has much to offer, particularly to women. A UBI could help fill the gaps in U.S. social programs that leave women economically vulnerable. And the tax increase needed to fund the program poses no serious threat to the economy. The libertarian right will surely howl that “high taxes” dramatically reduce work and savings. But economic research challenges that prediction. Raising the right taxes, to fund the right programs, can render freedom and equality compatible with economic growth. Refreshingly, Van Parijs argues the case for the UBI in terms of freedom – a value too seldom invoked in American social welfare policy. For similar reasons, Bruce Ackerman and I have proposed stakeholding – a one-time, unconditional grant to young citizens. Although stakeholding and the UBI differ in important ways, I want to focus on their shared strengths: both proposals could enhance women’s freedom and economic security by breaking the link between social welfare benefits and paid work.
Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit
This essay argues that Simone Weil appropriates Marx’s notion of labor as life activity in order to reposition work as the site of spirituality. Rather than locating spirituality in a religious tradition, doctrine, profession of faith, or in personal piety, Weil places it in the capacity to work. Spirit arises in the activity of living, and more specifically in laboring—in one’s engagement with materiality. Utilizing Marx’s distinction between living and dead labor, I show how Weil develops a critique of capital as a “force” that disrupts the individual’s relation to her own work by reducing it to the mere activity of calculable “production.” Capital reduces labor to an abstraction and thereby uproots human subjectivity, on a systemic scale, from its connection to living praxis, or what Weil calls spirituality. Life itself is exchanged for a simulacrum of life. In positioning living labor as spiritual, Weil’s work offers a corrective to these deadening practices.
Is Meaningful Work Available to All People?
In light of the impact of work on human flourishing, an intractable problem for political theorists concerns the distribution of meaningful work in a community of moral equals. This article reviews a number of partial solutions that a well-ordered society could draw upon to provide equality of opportunity for eudemonistically meaningful work and to minimize the impact of bad work upon those who perform it. Even in view of these solutions, however, it is not likely that opportunities for meaningful work can be guaranteed for all people, which carries an implication that, even in well-ordered societies, it is likely that not all people will flourish. The author argues that the limitedness of meaningful work is not a reason to reject the normative claim that meaningful work is integral in flourishing, nor is it a reason against working to transform social and political institutions to increase opportunities for meaningful work.
Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on Labor
Comparing the typologies of human activities developed by Beauvoir and Arendt, I argue that these philosophers share the same concept of labor as well as a similar insight that labor cannot provide a justification or evaluative measure for human life. But Beauvoir and Arendt think differently about work (as contrasted with labor), and Arendt alone illuminates the inability of constructive work to provide non-utilitarian value for human existence. Beauvoir, on the other hand, exceeds Arendt in examining the ethical implications of our existential need for a plurality of free peers in a public realm.
The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage
This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir’s account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir’s dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.