Justifying the Family, 1

Art by Elliot Skow

In Family Values, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift ask whether children need parents. That inquiry seems a wild project, but then philosophers are supposed to question everything and follow the argument where it leads. Why not raise children another way, say

* In “state-regulated quasi-orphanages,” where “children are raised by trained...employees”;

or

* In kibbutzim, where “child raising is shared between ‘parents’ and designated child-raising specialists...children would have contact with their ‘parents’ for about three hours a day”;

or

* In communes, where “a large group of adults collectively...raises a group of children, with no adult thinking of herself as having any special responsibility for any particular child, and no child thinking of herself as the responsibility of any particular adult.”

Stay calm; Brighouse and Swift defend the status quo. Before evaluating their case, it’s worth observing that things go off the rails before the arguments begin. BnS assert, of these alternatives, that in none of them “would children have parents.” That’s quite wrong. Children raised in state-run orphanages, or in communes, would certainly have parents—they just would not know their parents. The horror of these arrangements, therefore, is not that no child would have parents; it’s the greater horror, that children would be lost to their parents, and their parents made alien to them.

BnS argue that families are better because they better serve children’s interests. Describing those interests, BnS say that (this is an abbreviated list):

• Children need food, shelter, clothing, etc.

• Children need education.

• Children have emotional needs, and need to learn to regulate their emotional lives.

• Children need the freedom and support to enjoy their childhood.

The full argument for families is long, but here is part of their case that communes serve these interests less well:

Adults have their own lives to lead, and the more of them there are, the harder it will be for them to coordinate their lives such that they can all remain closely within the child’s orbit...and the more likely is conflict over the details of how the child should be treated...As the number of [caregivers] increases, the complexity of negotiation and coordination expands geometrically.

BnS also assert, that a child needs to be loved, and cared for by someone who loves them, and that this role “cannot be widely distributed.” It also cannot be “played in turn by a series of different adults,” which is their core argument against quasi-orphanages with trained employees:

the restrictions on freedom of contract required [of orphanage employees] would be extreme, and the regulatory oversight very complicated. Employees...would have to sign up for many years, and not only could they not withdraw from the contract; they could not be fired, except for the most egregious breaches of contract.

So BnS argue that families are best, because of their effects on children’s interests. But is the justification of the family really hostage to future evidence about the effectiveness of the alternatives? If it were to turn out that children would be better clothed and fed and educated, maybe even better loved, in an orphanage, BnS would have to switch conclusions, and say that the family has turned out to be unjust. That strikes me as wrong.

Is this scenario worth worrying about? Maybe it would be very hard to build orphanages that better served children’s interests than families do. But note that BnS’s criticism of orphanages is weaker than it looks. The “restrictions” on “freedom” that good orphanages would require may be “extreme,” but “extreme” is not the same as “unjustifiably burdensome”: many if not most people do sign up for very long term, hard-to-cancel contracts—when they get married, and indeed when they have children. Why is it, then, a “cost” of orphanages that it would require such contracts of its employees?

I’m tempted to argue that BnS overlook the strongest defense of families, because they work with an incomplete list of children’s interests. What are we talking about, when we talk about a those interests? We’re talking about what is good for the child, but that’s still unclear. BnS say they are “objectivists” about what is good for a child. They say, for example, that play is good for children (and adults); their “objectivism” means that play is good, even for people who dislike it, prefer not to engage in it, find themselves miserable when they do it, and receive no future benefits from it. It’s good in itself, regardless of what the player thinks. This is puzzling and should give one pause. If something doesn’t contribute to your happiness, even in the long term, how can it be good for you? The answer must be that, as BnS use “interest,” what’s in your interest is not the same as what makes you happy, or what you want, or whatever. But then what do they mean by “interest”? Looking at their list, and trying to discover what unifies it, I suggest that what’s in someone’s interest, for BnS, are things that are part of a complete human life (or are prerequisites to such things). Such a life includes play; and so while there could be, and maybe have been, humans who dislike play and are happier without it, their lives would still be missing something.

If that’s what we’re talking about, when we talk about someone’s interest, then there is something else that certainly belongs on the list of children’s interests, a glaring omission from BnS’s discussion: it’s in a child’s interest to be raised by their parents. Since this is itself on the list, there is no need to justify the family by discovering how that “arrangement” serves (other) interests on the list—interests it might or might not serve, depending on additional contingent factors. The family automatically serves an interest children have, because it itself is a—core—interest children have. Right?

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See also: Social Experiments, with Joan Didion. Thanks to Tyler Doggett for ongoing conversations on this topic and the Brighouse and Swift book.