Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships

by Harry Brighouse, Adam Swift

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--and should not--have over their children.Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" 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' 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.

Genres: Philosophy

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Reviews

[Swami Narasimhananda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spare the rod and spoil the child was the old adage, but now you could end up in jail for using a rod! Increasing media intrusion and excessive unnecessary human-right championing has made us lose the domains of our families to different societal agencies including law. How does a parent bring up a child in such a society? The authors, from backgrounds of education and political science, stress on the value of family and also the freedom of a parent in raising children. Intimate family relations can never be substituted by the protection of social agencies. This book is at once a work of political science and family relationships. Where and how does politics intrude the family? Investigating the changing nature of various traditional constructs of family, parent, and children, the authors have remarkably brought out a timely work questioning the resignation to collective institutional child-rearing. The authors definitely become the voice of countless parents when they say: ‘Healthy family life requires parents to enjoy a good deal of discretion over their children’s lives and to be experienced by their children as exercising authoritative judgments in many areas. … But parents cannot exercise that discretion and enjoy that unmonitored interaction without being allowed the space to make mistakes … parents have no right to abuse children—but they do have a right to the space within which abuse may occur’ (120). This book forces us to focus on the family, so neglected today, and emphasises its role in shaping values of future generations.