Pictures of Parenthood Very Different From Our Own
The natural right to liberty surely includes the right to bring children into this world, and to raise them as your own. If you do so, it’s your business, and (barring abuse or neglect) interference by others, or the state, is illegitimate; nor do you need a justification for your act. So it seems. But in The Family: A Liberal Defence David Archard asserts the contrary. Such permission as one has to found a family derives, not from more basic freedoms, or from one’s interest as a prospective parent, but from the interests of the prospective child and of the larger society: that is Archard’s view. This permission, therefore, is “granted only indirectly.” What difference does the source of the permission make? He provides a striking analogy:
Consider the case of the manager or coach of a sports team. In the performance of this role he has discretionary rights—chiefly who to select to play for the team and for the adoption of the tactics employed by the team...But these coaching rights are delegated to him by those who have ultimate responsibility for the team—the owners or board of management. The coach cannot claim that these discretionary rights are based directly on his interests in controlling the team. After all, the coach is not alone in having an interest in how things fall out for the team...Moreover the coach’s continued exercise of these rights is circumscribed by his continued success in advancing the interests of the team (and thereby also of those who own or ultimately manage the team). Why should it not in principle at least by the same with parents?
Coaches can be replaced, if losses accumulate. And if replaced against their will, they have no special ground for complaint. This is not to say that the owners or managers of the Boston Red Sox cannot be criticized for their choice of coach; only that former coaches who lodge such criticisms do so only as interested fans. Similarly, on this picture, with parents. Archard might issue the usual caveats about the impracticality and inadvisability of frequent performance evaluations, by the state, of each parent, which put their “position” under threat, should their “win/loss record” become too unfavorable. Still in principle this should all be okay:
The parent could not complain against [their] removal that it is “my child to parent as I see fit.” Anymore than the sports coach can claim that “it is my team to direct as I see fit.”
I can’t tell if Archard really believes that parents’ charge of their children is as contingent as, and is justified in the same way as, a coach’s charge of his team. Whether he believes it or not, it is surely an absurd position. It is interesting also to note how Archard’s thought experiment reverses the usual direction of analogy. He assimilates the justification of parent to that of coach; meanwhile, in every other inspirational sports movie, a great coach succeeds in drawing greatness out of his team by fostering, among his players, something like brotherhood or sisterhood.
While Archard imagines a society where parenthood is more contingent than it is, Elizabeth Anscombe notes that it is already more contingent than it used to be. Her paper “Why Have Children?” does not answer its title-question. Her goal, rather, is to make us feel the strangeness of asking it in the first place. Before the modern age, it would have been as sensible to wonder and deliberate about having children, as to wonder and deliberate about digesting one’s food: