Family Ethics

The Dutch government has a double moral message for Dutch parents. On the one hand, they expect mothers to work more hours outside the home; on the other hand, they expect parents to perform better in their parental tasks. New research shows again that in spite of all stimulation measures, Dutch women with children prefer their part-time jobs, and parents prefer not to leave their children to the responsibility of day care all week. To what extent is the government allowed (...) to oblige mothers to work more hours a week if the consequence is that the responsibility for upbringing shifts from parents to day care centres? (shrink)

This book addresses the endangerment of children’s bodies in affluent societies. Bodily integrity is an important part of a child’s physical and mental well-being, but it can also be violated through various threats during childhood; not only affecting physical health but also causing mental damage and leading to distortions in the development of the self. The authors give an account of three areas, which present different serious dangers: (1) body and eating, (2) body and sexuality, and (3) body and violence. (...) Through an in-depth examination of the available theoretical and empirical knowledge, as well as a thorough ethical analysis, the central injustices in the mentioned areas are identified and the agents with responsibilities towards children displayed. The authors conclude by providing invaluable insight into the necessity of an ethical basis for policies to safeguard children and their bodies. (shrink)

This article explores the socio-ethical concerns raised by the familial searching of forensic databases in criminal investigations, from the perspective of family and kinship studies. It discusses the broader implications of this expanded understanding for wider debates about identity, privacy and genetic databases.

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. (shrink)

Abstract This paper summarizes certain aspects of an assessment of the level of the moral judgement of three groups of children: mildly educationally subnormal children, ESN(M), who are also maladjusted; stable ESN(M) children; and stable children of approximately average intelligence. A minimum age of 12.0 years was stipulated; all the children attended secondary school with the oldest in the total sample being 15 years 9 months. The assessment procedure which, although owing much if not all of its rationale to Piaget, (...) is original in its mode of presentation and largely in its content, is described. The results of each of the three groups are compared. Also, the results are correlated with IQ. This enables a judgement to be arrived at as to the relative importance of (a) intelligence and (b) social adjustment in the making of mature moral decisions and choices. (shrink)

This article asks whether being a child is, all things considered, good or bad for children. I defend a predicament view of childhood, which regards childhood as bad overall for children. I argue that four features of childhood make it regrettable: impaired capacity for practical reasoning, lack of an established practical identity, a need to be dominated, and profound and asymmetric vulnerability. I consider recent claims in the literature that childhood is good for children since it allows them to enjoy (...) special goods that aren't available in adulthood, or which are harder to access in adulthood. I raise some difficulties for these claims. Then I argue that whatever version of these views survives my criticism will not establish that childhood is overall good for children. This is because the goods of childhood aren't significant enough to outweigh the bad features associated with being a child. I conclude by suggesting that the badness of childhood for children means that we are likely to owe more to children than to adults. (shrink)

A comprehensive statistical profile of single-parent families reveals significant differences among different types of such families. Summarizes the home and school life for one-parent children and presents a variety of types of assistance.

A model of moral identity formation is presented. According to the model, family influences have a direct effect on moral identity development in adolescence, independent of the effects of personality, income and other factors. The model is tested using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (Child Sample), which is constituted of the children born to a representative sample of American women who were between the ages of 14 and 21 in 1979. In general, the results provide support (...) for the model. Cognitively and socially rich family environments, combined with high levels of parent-adolescent joint activity, were found to facilitate voluntary participation in community service, a marker of moral identity formation. The implications of these findings for parenting, moral education and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Can and should political liberals recognize and otherwise support legal marriage as a matter of basic justice? In this article, we offer a general account of how political liberals should evaluate the issue of whether the legal recognition of marriage is a matter of basic justice. And, we develop and examine some public reason arguments that, given the fundamental interests of citizens, could justify various forms of legal marriage in some contexts. In particular, in certain conditions, the recognition of some (...) form of legal marriage may be the best way to protect the fundamental interests of women as citizens in freely chosen associations. Or, it may be that, in certain conditions, to secure the social conditions necessary for gays, lesbians and bisexuals to be free and equal citizens, some form of legal marriage can or should be recognized. (shrink)

When the decision has been made to stop treatment of a newborn child with a bad prognosis, the child usually dies in a short time. Sometimes, however, gasping occurs, and although it is usually thought that this is not a sign of suffering, the parents can hardly fail to interpret it as such. Could that be a reason to administer muscle relaxants to the child? It would not harm the child and may greatly benefit the parents. So it seems the (...) humane thing to do. Legally, however, the action would count as killing, and the prohibition of killing normally implies a denial of the authority to decide on exceptions, which should be understood as a protection of public trust. I discuss three ways of arguing why the law, nevertheless, should allow for an exception in this case. The discussion identifies and describes this kind of conflict, and shows how to evaluate proposals for solving it, using a particularly clear exemplary case by way of illustration. (shrink)

Abstract The study explores cognitive, affective and situational factors in child?rearing and their relation to children's constructions of discipline and to the maturity of their social interactions. Subjects were 17 children aged between three years 10 months and four years 11 months and their mothers. Mothers? individual constructions of different classes of their own and their children's transgressions were measured using two Repertory Grids. Children's constructions and feelings about a recent conflict with parents were measured by a structured interview. Their (...) patterns of hostile behaviour were assessed with a standardized scoring system applied to diary records of directly observed social interactions at nursery school. Regarding mothers? constructions of transgressions, the findings only partially supported an attributional analysis of parenting. Mothers were primarily concerned with the intentionality of their children's behaviour and its harm potential; they gave no more consideration to developmental components such as lack of knowledge, the capacity for self?control or situational constraints in constructions of their children's transgressions than in constructions of their own transgressions. While overall there was little relation between mothers? constructions of children's transgressions and their method of handling them, constructions were closely linked to behaviour in some situations (viz. disobedience) and poorly linked in other situations (viz. verbal aggression to parents, and physical harm to self). Those patterns were related to mothers? constructions of the child's intention and their affective response considered jointly; it seemed that mothers? motivations affected the way they categorized the misdemeanour which in turn affected their disciplinary response. Children were classified on the basis of observed behaviour into one of three hostility groups: harassers, teasers, and specifics. The mothers of the three groups of children were not distinguished by misdemeanours cited nor by disciplinary response. They were differentiated by their constructions of misdemeanours, especially by their different constructions of harm inflicted by their children on others. The three groups of children were differentiated from each other by the degree of anger attributed to their mother when they were naughty and by their level of identification with the mother's disciplinary stance. (shrink)

The present set of studies identifies the phenomenon of ?parenting by lying?, in which parents lie to their children as a means of influencing their emotional states and behaviour. In Study 1, undergraduates (n = 127) reported that their parents had lied to them while maintaining a concurrent emphasis on the importance of honesty. In Study 2 (n = 127), parents reported lying to their children and considered doing so to be acceptable under some circumstances, even though they also reported (...) teaching their children that lying is unacceptable. As compared to European American parents, Asian American parents tended to hold a more favourable view of lying to children for the purpose of promoting behavioural compliance. (shrink)

Ecologically valid procedures for eliciting and measuring children's anger are needed to enhance researchers' theories of children's emotional competence and to guide intervention efforts aimed at reactive aggression. The purpose of this article is to describe a laboratory-based game-playing procedure that has been used successfully to elicit and measure children's anger across observational, physiological, and self-report channels. Steps taken to ensure that participants are treated ethically and fairly are discussed. The article highlights recently published data that emphasize the importance of (...) provoking and assessing children's anger across multiple channels using laboratory-based procedures. Finally, it presents preliminary data that suggest that the safeguards taken to protect children were successful in making both children and their parents feel well treated and comfortable. (shrink)

Aurora P. Jackson and Richard Scheines. Single Mother's Efficacy, Parenting in the Home Environment, and Children's Development in a Two-Wave Study.

Under federal law, the state must develop permanency plans for all children who are removed from their homes due to neglect or abuse. Central to permanency planning is the belief that all children belong with families Permanency planning secures for children permanent family placements as opposed to temporary foster care or institutional placements. For children with disabilities who are voluntarily placed in institutions by their parents because their parents can no longer take care of them at home, no such permanency (...) planning is generally required. In this Article, the author argues that two recent policy developments that serve to protect the best interests of children generally should be expanded to address the needs of families who require support to keep their children with disabilities at home rather than placing them in institutions. These two recent policy developments are permanency planning for children who have been neglected and abused and the expansion of the definition of legal parenthood, in the context of surrogacy, same sex families, step-families, and children born to unmarried adults. (shrink)

(1973). A Report on Some Studies of the Influence of Family Background upon Moral Development. Journal of Moral Education: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 263-268.

To investigate reasoning about family honour, 128 first generation (mean age = 27.2 years) and second generation Hindu Indian-American adults (mean age = 24.7 years) were presented hypothetical scenarios in which male or female protagonists defied common Hindu customs (e.g., arranged marriage, intra-religion marriage and premarital sexual abstinence). Questions assessed beliefs about customs, connections to family honour and socio-moral orientations towards honour violations. Both generations perceived intra-religion marriage and premarital sexual abstinence to function for group identity-related reasons, such as preserving (...) Hindu culture and maintaining Hindu identity. First generation participants judged defiance of marital and abstinence traditions in moral terms more often than second generation participants (mainly for female protagonists). Justifications for moral judgements referenced damage to group identity, including family image, Hindu identity and cultural preservation. Implications for theories of moral psychology are discussed. (shrink)

The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrative construct about who we are, what our borders and limits and capacities are, what is pathology, and what is normality, and so on. These ontological and epistemological narratives are usually linked to grand explanatory narratives like science and religion, and are intimately linked to cosmological pictures. The “intersubject” is an emergent form of subjectivity in our time which reconstructs its borders to include the other, (...) and which understands itself as always building and being built through a combination of internal and external dialogue. The shift from monological to dialogical discourse is both a product and a producer of the intersubject, and is in turn made possible by a shift—underway for the last one hundred years or so—in the human information environment. The major educational innovation which reconstructs theory and practice for the intersubject—community of philosophical inquiry (CPI)—assumes, following field and systems theory, that any group gathered together is an interactive system. It also assumes that the fundamental forms of growth and development both of the individual and of the collective take place through a process of communal deliberative inquiry into meaning, resulting in the reconstruction of beliefs, values, and discourses on both an individual and a collective level. CPI is a process in which subject and object are both active and passive, shaping and being shaped, determining and determined, in and through their transaction. It assumes that its interlocutors are in a relation of both mutual and self-interrogation. As the phenomenon of the intersubject gains credence in human culture, philosophy is gaining power as an educational idea in the elementary and high school classroom. Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals enter a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical analysis of adult–child sex and pedophilia. In particular, it explores whether those who engage in adult–child sex have a disease, act wrongly, or are vicious and how the law should respond to it.

To protect public health, states require that parents have their children immunized before they are permitted to attend public or private school. But for homeschooled children, the rules vary. With the spectacular growth in the number of homeschooled students, it is becoming more difficult to reach these youth to ensure that they are immunized at all. These children are frequently unvaccinated, leaving them open to infection with diseases that are all but stamped out in the United States with immunization requirements. (...) States should encourage parents to get their homeschooled students vaccinated through enacting the same laws as those used for public school students. This could be done by enforcing current laws through neglect petitions or by requiring that children be immunized before participating in school sponsored programs. As most states require some filing to allow parents to homeschool their children, it would be easy to enact laws requiring that homeschooled children be immunized or exempted before completing registration. (shrink)

Hugh Lafollette’s theoretical justification of parental licensing hinges upon consideration of the harms associated with raising children. If we understand Lafollette’s stance as one in which the moral status of children is equal to that of other human beings, we must consider what such a commitment might require of social institutions such as the family. Unlike other licensing programs, I argue that Lafollette’s parental licensing program serves as a tool by which fair equality of opportunity can be acquired for those (...) living within a given society. I attempt to demonstrate how the normative views as to the sovereignty of parents serve to discount the moral status of children, thus limiting the protections offered against child maltreatment. I will show how Lafollette’s theoretical justifications align with concerns addressed in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle and Rawlsian views as to the importance of access to fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home (...) within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice-oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value. (shrink)

Whether argumentation competencies are associated with the kind of influence opportunities children have in their lives is the focus of this study. The hypothesis is that when children have the opportunity to initiate and evaluate arguments, hear others make and examine arguments, and participate equally in resolving disputes, children are able to develop their argument skills. Four argumentation competencies associated with critical discussions of proposals are identified: creating consensus about problematic situations, advocating proposals, facilitating behavioral commitment, and integrating identities. Second, (...) fourth, and sixth grade children completed tasks that assessed their influence opportunities and argument competencies. Children who perceived themselves to have many collaborative influence opportunities, that is, opportunities in which they could engage in mutual influence, had more highly developed argument competencies than children who did not have such opportunities. As predicted, this relationship occurred with the argument competencies of problem conception, proposal advocacy and facilitating commitment. Measures of non-collaborative influence opportunities were not associated with argument competencies. Together, the results suggest that discussions in which children are given the opportunity to influence and be influenced with arguments may provide the best context for children to develop their argument skills. (shrink)

Parents of children who died following complex heart surgery have recently discovered that organs were removed and retained in post-m.

_The Dead Mother_ brings together original essays in honour of André Green. Written by distinguished psychoanalysts, the collection develops the theme of his most famous paper of the same title, and describes the value of the dead mother to other areas of clinical interest: psychic reality, borderline phenomena, passions and identification. The concept of the 'dead mother' describes a clinical phenomenon, sometimes difficult to identify, but always present in a substantial number of patients. It describes a process by which the (...) image of a living and loving mother is transformed into a distant figure; a toneless, practically inanimate, dead parent. In reality, the mother remains alive, but she has psychically 'died' for the child. This produces a depression in the child, who carries these feelings within him into adult life, as the experience of the loss of the mother's love is followed by the loss of meaning in life. Nothing makes sense any more for the child, but life seems to continue under the appearance of normality. _The Dead Mother_ is a valuable contribution to literature on psychoanalytic and psychotheraputic approaches to grief, loss and depression. (shrink)

What exactly is it that makes someone a parent? Many people hold that parenthood is grounded, in the first instance, in the natural derivation of one person's genetic constitution from the genetic constitutions of others. We refer to this view as "Geneticism". In Part I we distinguish three forms of geneticism on the basis of whether they hold that direct genetic derivation is sufficient, necessary, or both sufficient and necessary, for parenthood. Parts two through four examine three arguments for geneticism: (...) the property argument, the causal argument, and the parity argument. We conclude that none of these arguments succeeds. (shrink)

Abstract Twenty?four second? and third?grade children were given two cognitively?based role?taking tests developed by Flavell et al. (1968). The children's social behaviour was observed over a two?month period. It was coded according to a scheme introduced by the anthropologists Whiting and Whiting (1975) which produces composite scores of egoism and altruism. Teachers rated the children's social behaviour and role?taking ability. IQ scores were obtained from school records. Tests of the reliability and validity of the measures of role?taking and altruism were (...) positive. Role?taking ability was positively correlated with naturally?occurring altruistic behaviour and teacher's ratings of altruism. IQ was positively correlated with role?taking ability, and tended to be positively correlated with altruism. The correlation between role?taking and altruism was marginally significant with IQ partialled out. The results were consistent with the conclusion that role?taking ability increases the disposition to behave altruistically in third?grade children. (shrink)

This essay explains and puts into theoretical perspective the rising interest in justice as an emotional virtue. Martin Hoffman's empathy theory is germane to this debate since it gives an essentially emotion?oriented account of moral development in general, as well as an explanation of the gradual bonding of empathy/sympathy with justice. While Hoffman's theory provides valuable insights into the ways in which all moral concerns, including justice, rely on and relate to the child's original capacity for empathy, it seems to (...) underestimate the emotionality of justice itself. This unnecessarily weakens the thrust of Hoffman's educational suggestions about induction as the most productive method of pro?social stimulation. (shrink)

Psychologists who participate as forensic evaluators in custody and visitation cases involving allegations of child sexual abuse must possess advanced assessment skills and a thorough knowledge of child development, child sexual abuse, and child interviewing techniques. This case study illustrates the types of problems that are inevitable when psychologists violate the boundaries of their role as an independent evaluator and fail to uphold their ethical obligation to be knowledgeable and competent in the area in which they profess expertise.

Abstract: Cognitive developmental research has neglected the very early stages of moral development. Three recent attempts to fill this gap are briefly described. The first is Martin Hoffman's stage theory account of the origins of empathy. The second is Selman's theory of the development of social perspective?taking. The third is Damon's account of the development of ?positive justice? in early childhood. The implications of these approaches for early moral education are then discussed.