Philosophy

Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships

Paperback

Price:
$32.00/拢28.00
ISBN:
Published:
Aug 2, 2016
2014
Pages:
240
Size:
6 x 9.25 in.
Main_subject:
Philosophy
Buy This

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children’s upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should鈥攁nd should not鈥攈ave over their children.

Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the 鈥渇amilial relationship goods鈥 that people need to flourish. Children’s healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child’s interest in autonomy severely limits parents鈥 right to shape their children’s values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children.

Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.