Abstract
Parents typically favour their own children over others’. For example, most parents invest more time and money in their own children than in other children. This parental partiality is usually regarded as morally permissible, or even obligatory, but it can have undesirable distributive effects. For example, it may create unfair or otherwise undesirable advantages for the favoured child. A number of authors have found it necessary to justify parental partiality in the face of these distributive concerns, and they have typically done so by appealing to features of the parent–child relationship. Parental partiality is said to be justified, despite its undesirable distributive effects, in part because the parent enjoys a special kind of relationship with her child. In this paper, I raise a problem for such relational defences of parental partiality. I report empirical findings suggesting that parental partiality will frequently create advantages—sometimes undesirable—not only for one’s children, but also for one’s more distant descendants; I argue that the creation of these latter advantages stands as much in need of justification as does the creation of advantages for one’s own children; and I claim that existing relational defences do not clearly contain the resources necessary to deliver such a justification. I then examine three possible responses to this problem.
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Notes
I henceforth often omit the qualifier ‘moral’.
See, for discussion of this point, Kolodny (2002).
For discussion of these latter cases, see Brighouse and Swift (2009), pp. 74–76.
Pettit and Goodin (1986) defend a view with a similar structure.
See, for a prominent example, Brighouse and Swift (2009).
For example, Hertz et al. (2008) compared the USA and several European countries and found parent–child correlations for years of schooling in the range 0.30–0.54. Correlation coefficients for the USA and UK were 0.46 and 0.31 respectively. The correlation coefficient provides a measure of the degree of linear interdependence between two variables, for example, the earnings of parents and the earnings of their offspring. It always takes a value between −1 and +1 inclusive. The closer it is to −1 or +1, the stronger the correlation. A positive value indicates a positive correlation and a negative value indicates a negative one.
The studies cited here have found correlation coefficients in the range 0.40–0.8 for the USA.
This figure reduces to 4–5 % if the increase in parental education is taken as a single variable, without discriminating between maternal and paternal education.
It might be thought that this burden of justification could be avoided by maintaining that transmitted advantages are unintended by parents who engage in parental partiality whereas first-generational advantages are not. [For an argument suggesting that this difference in intentions might be morally significant, see Segall (2011).] This response seems unpromising, however. We are addressing ourselves to those who concede that at least some first-generational advantages created through parental partiality require justification. But many of the first-generational advantages that most obviously call for justification are themselves typically unintended by the parents. Consider the undesirable social and educational advantages that may be created by sending one’s child to an elite private school. A parent might send her child to a private school intending that this will give her child a good education, and perhaps even intending that it will give her a better education than others, but without also intending that it will enable her to make more influential friends and outperform others in social situations requiring confidence, yet the latter advantages plausibly stand in need of justification.
Brighouse and Swift treat the tendency to produce unfair inequality of opportunity as the primary problematic distributive effect of parental partiality, but I present their view in more general terms here.
For example, they suggest that reading bedtime stories to one’s children and attending religious ceremonies or other community activities with them could often be justified by their account, whereas sending one’s child to an elite private school and investing in a trust fund for one’s child typically could not (2009, pp. 47–8, 56–8).
At least, it seems plausible on the assumption that parent–child intimacy is an all-or-nothing affair. If parent–child intimacy is in fact a matter of degree, then we would need to reframe the question as one about how much parent–child intimacy is optimal.
Brighouse and Swift (2009, p. 53) suggest a similar line of argument when they indicate that one relationship good that may help to justify parental partiality is that “[c]hildren enjoy a sense of continuity with (or belonging or attachment to) the past mediated by acquaintance with their own family members”.
Similarly, Brighouse and Swift (2011, pp. 116–22) argue that maintaining positive national traditions is significantly less important than realising the sorts of relationship goods that characterise parent–child relationships.
Though he does not use the term, Keller (2013) could be read as invoking agent-relative value (see also Sect. 2 above). He argues that your reasons to be partial towards your child derive from the value of your child, but that the value of your child generates reasons for you that it would not generate for others. Defences that appeal to the value of parental projects (for example, Williams 1982) plausibly also appeal to a value that is agent-relative: the value of our own projects plausibly generates stronger reasons for us than it does for others.
Perhaps the clearest example of a fundamentally intimacy-based argument for parental partiality can be found in Jeske (1998). However Jeske’s argument would not, without amendment, fall within the scope of my critique in this paper, for it is not clearly intended as a response to concerns about undesirable advantages.
This is something that many writers on partiality would take to be desirable regardless of whether they accept the argument in this paper. See, for example, Brighouse and Swift (2008, p. 145).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies, Harry Granqvist, Jacob Nebel, Saul Smilansky, and audiences in Bled (Slovenia) and Sheffield, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper; Adam Swift, for helpful discussions of his and Harry Brighouse's work on parental partiality; Simon Keller, for sharing an unpublished manuscript; and the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, for their financial support.
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Douglas, T. Parental partiality and the intergenerational transmission of advantage. Philos Stud 172, 2735–2756 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0442-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0442-0