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  • If you’re an egalitarian, how come you help your kids with their homework?

Jonathan Derbyshire

The world of ideas

If you’re an egalitarian, how come you help your kids with their homework?

by Jonathan Derbyshire / November 24, 2014 / Leave a comment
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Family Values

Families, argue Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift in their new book “Family Values”, are a “problem” for proponents of the egalitarian ideal. “One does not have to favour anything as far-fetched and widely discredited as equality of outcome,” they write, “to be concerned about the unequalising influence of family background.”

It’s clear that children born into different families have unequal life chances. But, Brighouse and Swift observe, there is disagreement among political philosophers and social theorists about “how much, or what aspects, of that inequality count as unjust.” After all, it is surely reasonable for parents to assume that they have the right to do things that benefit their children and not others. But are there ways of conferring advantage on their children that parents don’t have a right to engage in? For example, is there a difference, morally speaking, between sending your children to an elite private school and reading them bedtime stories or helping them with their homework? This is among the questions that Brighouse and Swift consider in a book that is analytically rich and—to liberal egalitarians, at least—philosophically and politically provocative. 

I spoke to Swift, who teaches political theory at the University of Warwick (Brighouse is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the  United States), and began by asking him what he and his co-author mean by “the family” for analytical purposes. For instance, does their analysis require that a family contain two parents, one of each gender?

AS: What we’re interested in when we talk about the family is the parent-child relationship. And that rela…

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Comments

  1. Franklin Mason
    November 25, 2014 at 00:40
    Curious. The assumption seems to be that we should grant the state sufficient power that potentially it can interfere in intimate, in-home family life. Why think that? Isn't a state as powerful as that a dangerous thing?
  2. TIMOTHY_ROBERTS
    December 1, 2014 at 19:30
    H'm. Do we properly regulate philosophers?
  3. Conor
    March 23, 2015 at 21:28
    How can we justify increasing equality of outcome by primarily making some outcomes worse?

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Jonathan Derbyshire
Jonathan Derbyshire is Executive Comment Editor at the Financial Times, and former managing editor of Prospect
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