Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships - Paperback

by Harry Brighouse (Author), Adam Swift (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

"Family Values is an important book on a neglected topic by two excellent scholars. It advances an original argument, and does so clearly and accessibly. Highly recommended."--Stephen Macedo, Princeton University

"This book goes a long way to illuminating what is at stake in debates about family values and brings much-needed reasoned analysis to important questions in contemporary democratic politics. A major contribution to political philosophy, Family Values will significantly raise the level of informed public discourse on the subject."--Colin M. Macleod, coeditor of The Moral and Political Status of Children

Author Biography

Harry Brighouse is professor of philosophy and affiliate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include On Education and School Choice and Social Justice. Adam Swift is professor of political theory at the University of Warwick. His books include Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians and How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent.