Online research in philosophy

Diversity is a feature of family life which those who speak of the importance of family values should not ignore. The diversity is seen not only in the structure of families, but also in the moral values which children actually pick up in the context of the family and the way in which the transmission of values occurs. Diversity becomes a matter of public importance when the values which children develop at home are perceived to be in serious conflict with the values which underpin moral education in the common school. Any response to this diversity requires a delicate balance between the right of families to initiate their children into their own moral values, the right of schools to teach the shared values of the broader society, and the right of children to develop into autonomous moral agents.

The notion that the family is the unit of care for family doctors has been enigmatic and controversial. Yet systems theory and the biopsychosocial model that results when it is imported into medicine make the family system an indispensable and important component of family medicine. The challenge, therefore, is to provide a coherent, plausible account of the role of the family in family practice. Through an extended case presentation and commentary, we elaborate two views of the family in family medicine — treating the patient in the family and treating the family in the patient — and defend both as appropriate foci for care by family doctors. The practical problem that arises when the family is introduced into health care is deciding when to concentrate on the family system. The moral problems that arise concern how extensively doctors may become involved in the personal lives of their patients and families. The patient-centered clinical method provides a strategy for handling both problems. Thus, making the family a focus of care in family medicine can be justified on theoretical, practical, and moral grounds.

In this paper, I offer a view beyond that which would narrowly reduce the role of parents in medical decision making to acting as custodians of the best interests of children and toward an account of family authority and family autonomy. As a fundamental social unit, the good of the family is usually appreciated, at least in part, in terms of its ability successfully to instantiate its core moral and cultural understandings as well as to pass on such commitments to future generations. The putative rights of children to expression, information, freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and to freedom of association with others are, in this essay, assessed from the perspective of those conditions necessary for the family to function as a moral community. In so doing, I respond to the move to liberate children from parental authority and to effect the transformation of the family as implied by the United Nations’ "Convention on the Rights of the Child" and the pediatric bioethics it supports.

The new familialists argue that the decline of the intact two-parent family is responsible for our most pressing social problems and advocate public policies designed to promote family stability and discourage divorce and nonmarital births. This essay defends the freedom of intimate association and argue that family stability, while an important good, must be balanced with other goods such as equality and justice within the family, happiness, and individual self-development.

Recent controversies involving Islamic family law in the context of liberal jurisdictions (as exemplified in the Shari’a arbitration controversy of Ontario, Canada) have raised fundamental questions regarding the nature of family law in a liberal jurisdiction and the place of Islamic religious and legal commitments in such a jurisdiction. In this chapter, which is part of a book dedicated to discussing the question of family law pluralism in liberal states, the author argues that orthodox Muslims would prefer a policy of family law pluralism that is derived from a liberal family law rather than a system of family law pluralism that would give religious bodies greater authority. Working with a Rawlsian conception of the role of the family within political liberalism, the author argues that orthodox Muslims could support this version of family law because it creates a space for private ordering within the family that is sufficient for robust manifestations of Islamic family life that are also consistent with liberalism, and most importantly, does not require Muslims to endorse what would be, from their perspective, metaphysically controversial conceptions of marriage, such as the norm of lifelong marriage. The chapter describes how various Islamic ethical and legal doctrines give rise to and support a system of family law pluralism which, although different from the pluralism of liberalism, creates the possibility for overlap between authentically Islamic doctrines and liberal ones. The author then offers examples of the salient historical differences in Muslim understandings of family law by comparing two distinct Sunni Muslim systems of substantive law: the Hanafî and the Mâlikî. The author also describes the tension that exists between the values of Islamic law as a legal system and traditionalist Islamic religious discourse: the former protects and vindicates the individual rights of the parties to the marriage contract while the latter promotes an ethic of sacrifice, trust, love and female subordination to their husbands. The pluralist conception of marriage in Islam, whether at the legal or moral level, means as a practical matter that not all Islamic conceptions are consistent with a liberal order, and accordingly, any kind of Islamic arbitration system must be subject to the supervision of the liberal legal order to confirm that results of arbitration do not violate mandatory provisions of family law. Finally, the author offers the practical example of New York courts’ experience with enforcing (or not) family law arbitrations conducted pursuant to Jewish law to demonstrate the capacity of the courts in a liberal jurisdiction to give effect to the autonomy of nonliberal citizens while ensuring that the autonomy of the family is not used to deprive any of its members of their fundamental rights as citizens.

Feminist thinkers have long criticized liberal theory’s public/private distinction for perpetuating indifference to injustices within the family. Thinkers such as Susan Okin have extended this criticism in evaluating the theory of political liberalism, suggesting that this theory’s reliance on a public conception of citizenship renders it indifferent to the way in which the internal politics of the family can undermine equality.However, I argue in this article that the feminist concern to ensure equality within the domestic sphere can in fact be incorporated into a reconstructed account of political liberalism. Central to my strong public reconstruction is the principle of publicly justifiable privacy, according to which the public/private distinction itselfmust be formulated with reference to the values of free and equal citizenship. On my account, the public values of citizenship should figure prominently in evaluations of family life. This reformulation of the public/private distinction answers feminist critics who suggest that political liberalism fails to offer a politics of the personal.

Using Rawls's theory as illustration, I argue that any conception of justice which includes a commitment to equality of opportunity eventually must collide with a commitment to the family. I then contend that the link between justice and equality of opportunity cannot be severed by showing that one powerful attempt to do so founders. Borrowing from Martin Buber, I try to show that the perspective required by justice is different from and opposed to that required for intimate relations. Moreover, I argue that the institution of the family provides the soil without which human intimacy withers. Finally, I try to suggest that the need for human. I?You encounters is a response to aspects of the human condition quite different from those which give rise to institutions of justice and the state.

This article discusses three main orientations in recent works of legal and political theory about the family-contract-based, community-based, and rights-based-and argues that none of these takes adequate account of two paradoxical features of family life and of the family's relationship to the state. A coherent political and legal theory of the family in the contemporary United States requires recognition of the relational rights and responsibilities intrinsic to family life.

This article explores the justice of the family. From the perspective of justice, the family causes serious concerns, for it causes severe inequalities between individuals. Several justice theorists remark that by its mere existence the family impedes the access to equality of life chances. The paper examines whether this means that justice requires the abolition of the family. It asks whether everyone, and, in particular, the worst off, would prefer the family to a generalized well-run orphanage. This thought-experiment is used to inquire which value, if any, is such that (a) it would be menaced by the abolition of the family, and (b) in a just society, it would to prioritized over the principle of equality of life chances.

Why do families matter? Is it simply because of their role in social reproduction, or does this ignore the personal goods, the benefits and burdens, of intimate life? Does an emphasis on the formative role of families risk treating them merely as serving the state and divert attention from the rights of persons to form families and the rights - and needs - of children to nurturing relationships? What kind of social and economic transformation would be necessary to implement a normative vision of family that supports families, is egalitarian, and respects diversity? What is the best way to rectify women's continuing disproportionate responsibility for house work and care work - enlisting the state or pressuring men? Is an egalitarian vision of family life, in which promoting sex equality within marriage a proper governmental task, consonant with basic liberal principles, or is it a transformative project that ignores human nature and basic sex difference, corrupts family life, and infringes on women's - and men's - religious freedom? This essay responds to those questions, raised by several political scientists and political theorists in a symposium about my book, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard, 2006).