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 relationship can exist between just one parent and a child. It could also exist between three parents and a child. So we’re definitely not assuming a two-parent family. And we’re not assuming a heterosexual family. The idea is to look at what is valuable in parent-child relationships and infer from that what families would need to be like to achieve what is valuable—and the answer is that you don’t need to have two parents, they don’t need to be heterosexual and they don’t need to be biologically connected. It’s a kind of revisionist view of the family.
JD: You do take it for granted that the lives of children go better rather than worse if they are raised in something approximating the “conventional” family. But what you understand by the “conventional family” doesn’t entail a defence of “family values” as those you call “traditionalists” would understand them does it?
We don’t take it for granted exactly. Our strategy is to look at the interests of children in how they are raised and see whether it matters that they have parents. Do you in fact need there to be parents for those good things that children need to happen? Our answer is that you do need there to be parents, and that means you need families, as opposed to state institutions. But the family doesn’t have to be traditional for these good things to be realised. That means that parents don’t need the rights over their children that traditionally we have granted them.
You mentioned rights. One possible objection to the way you set things up is that talking about the family in terms of rights and duties is inappropriate, because the family is a realm of intimacy and affection. How would you respond to that?
There’s a good thought in there, which is that healthy family life will involve parents and children not thinking about their relationship in rights-based or duty-based terms. But the fact is that there are things that you really mustn’t do to your children if you are to behave morally. So to talk about rights and duties is really just to talk about those things that are morally required of parents. And sometimes it’s important to keep in mind that in doing certain things I’d be failing in my duty to my child, since my child has a claim against me that I don’t behave in that particular way towards her.
There are two other objections to your project that I’d like you to consider: the first is that loving familial relationships resist certain liberal categories, autonomy principal among them; and the second worry would be that liberals regard the family as part of the private sphere and that therefore it’s not a legitimate object of reflection for liberal political philosophers. How do you respond to those two objections?
I’ll do the second one first. Some people try to argue that if we take as given the privateness of the family, then the question can’t even arise about the extent to which we may properly regulate it politically. Our view is that the category of the private results from an analysis of what should be left to individuals and what should be regulated—rather than being taken as a premise.
On the first objection: traditionally, there is a critique of liberalism which holds that it’s only really concerned with people in their capacity as citizens. Historically, from Locke onwards, there was this idea that we should see children as nascent citizens, so what mattered was the development of those capacities relevant to their citizenship—certain kinds of political capacities, the capacity to think for themselves in a political way. Some people think that liberalism can’t get interested in touchy-feely emotional stuff, because that isn’t really what citizenship is about. But some people have argued that that is relevant to citizenship, because it’s not only our cognitive capacities that are relevant to political action. Also, it doesn’t seem right to us that liberalism is only concerned with people qua citizens. We think liberalism should be concerned with other capacities that people develop. Liberalism is a doctrine about what the state may or may not do, but it’s not the case that what the state may or may not do is only to prepare people for citizenship. It can also care about how their personal lives are going.
Now you’re making a liberal egalitarian case for family values. So let’s turn to the potential for conflict between family values, appropriately construed, and the value of equality. You take the notion of fair equality opportunity as a starting point and then go on to argue that “parents are currently allowed to do too much for their children and in too many ways”. Does it follow from this that the challenge here is to figure out exactly how much parents can do for their children without offending against the principle of fair equality if opportunity?
Not quite. We’re not trying to find out what you can do subject to the concern that you don’t violate fair equality of opportunity. It’s more that we accept that respecting family life is more important than fair equality of opportunity. So if we had to choose between a world where you had fair equality of opportunity, but at the cost of loving familial relationships, that would be worse than a world in which we have loving familial relationships but in which we can’t provide people with fair equality of opportunity. So we come down on the side of the family in that particular conflict. Fair equality of opportunity comes into the equation when we ask, what it is about the family that really must be respected even though it creates some kinds of unfairness between children. What kind of parent-child interaction do we need to respect even though they will produce unfairness? And what kind of parent-child interaction do we, on reflection, not need to respect because, although we currently allow parents and children to engage in them, they’re not actually required for healthy familial relationships?
You have what you call “bad news for progressives” here don’t you? Because there’s a familiar progressive argument which says, if we fix the disparities in parents’ economic resources, then the unevenness of children’s developmental opportunities will be fixed too. But you think it’s not as simple as that?
Yes. It seems that the mechanisms that create the unfairnesses between children are mechanisms that go pretty much to the heart of family life. So you might hope that if we leave families alone to do their thing and have a very progressive education system, that will mitigate [the unfairness]. We might not get perfect equality of opportunity that way, but you’d get pretty close to equality of opportunity while still allowing families to do their own thing. But the more that sociologists investigate the detailed processes the more it looks as though the reason more advantaged parents tend to have kids who lead more advantaged lives is because of the stuff that goes on informally within the family—the transmission of cultural capital, taking your kids on holiday, having books in the house, reading bedtime stories and so on. And so the sense in which this is bad news for progressives is that we can’t respect family life without taking a hit for fair equality of opportunity.
On the other hand—and this is an important theme in the book—we can perfectly well respect family life while massively reducing the inequalities in the resources that parents bring to parenting. In that sense, ours is not an anti-social democratic thesis. We are saying that if we’re going to allow parents to enjoy very unequal resources, as we currently do, then you’re going to have accept a big hit to fair equality of opportunity, because it’s the stuff that goes on within families that creates the inequalities.
You argue that there is a difference, morally speaking, between reading your children bedtime stories and bequeathing them property or capital. But you also say that the line between those two things is not as bright as one might think. So could you something about why they differ and the extent to which they differ?
Our general strategy is to think about why we would want there to be families in the first place, why they matter, and to generate from that a criterion for deciding what things it’s really important that we allow parents to do for their kids and what’s not so important. The idea is that if you think about why familial relationships are important and why they must be protected, you end up protecting things like bedtime stories but not things like inheritance or property. Why is that? It’s because, on our account of what the parent-child relationship is about or for, it’s the emotional and cognitive development of children. When we think about how we should raise children, that’s what we should have in mind. Things like bedtime stories are important for that. And they’re important because they’re the kind of thing that will go on in a healthy familial relationship. They have an emotional aspect—there’s something special in a young child’s life about bedtime; the idea that the parent is sharing him or herself with the child. That’s why bedtime stories are getting in there. It’s not because they are ways of conferring advantage. It’s because things of that kind are an inevitable part of a healthy relationship both to children and to adults.
Now, bequeathing your property to your children does manifest a form of love. So we don’t want to say that it has nothing to do with love or with healthy emotional relationships. We concede that there is something distinctively familial and distinctively loving about giving your children your property, as opposed, say, leaving it to the state. But our claim is that if somebody is denied the right to bequeath their property to their children, they can’t say, “You’re completely misunderstanding the fundamental nature of the parent-child relationship and its role in human wellbeing.” Whereas if we banned bedtime stories on egalitarian grounds, I think a parent could say that we’re completely misunderstanding the fundamental nature of the parent-child relationship and the kinds of things human beings need to do in those relationships in order to flourish.
But it’s not the case, is it, that there’s no connection between parents reading their children bedtime stories and their children enjoying advantages over children who are not read to?
That’s right. In the society we live in, things like bedtime stories generate more inequalities overall than the simple bequest of property. There used to be something known as the “family piano” model of advantage in which parents had this stuff and it got handed down to the kids. But in fact it’s informal interactions like the reading of bedtime stories that are the ones that generate the real inequalities. At the moment, quite a lot of inequality is generated through the kinds of intra-familial interactions that we say we need to protect. On the other hand, quite a lot of the things we allow parents to do shouldn’t be protected in our view—we currently allow parents to do more for their kids than our theory says can be justified by an appeal to the family. And, in addition to that, we could, quite compatibly with respecting the family, radically change the extent of inequality between families, rather than seeing the family as a reason to resist attempts to change inequalities.
There’s another aspect of parents’ rights that you discuss in the book—it’s the ability of parents to inculcate certain values in their children or, to put it another way, to raise their children in a manner consistent with their deepest commitments. You approach this question in the same way you approach the question of conferring advantage—that is, how parents shaping their children’s values sits with the core interest in familial relationships. But then you go on to argue that the cases are not analogous. Why are they not analogous?
Obviously, there are ways of parents shaping their children’s values that could have negative externalities, as economists would put it, negative effects on others—if they raised them to be racist or intolerant and so on. But the case doesn’t have quite the same structure, because the concern is more for the child within the family and why she should be subject to her parents’ views about what’s important in life just because she happened to be born to those particular parents.
The relevant value at stake in this case is presumably autonomy?
Yes. We say that part of the role of the parent is to discharge a duty of care to the child in various ways. And we think part of that duty which parents owe their children is to enable them to live an autonomous life when they reach adulthood. And that rules out certain kinds of upbringing. It doesn’t rule out a liberal religious education in which children are not kept away from alternative possibilities. But we still, in my view, allow parents way too much discretion in shaping their children’s emerging values. We don’t properly regulate either home schooling or faith schooling.
"Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships" by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift is published by Princeton University Press (£24.95)
