Resumen de What do we owe parents? distributing the costs of children
The topic of this thesis is the just distribution of the costs of children. In particular, it asks whether an ideal liberal egalitarian society owes it to the parents to ensure that the costs of children are shared between parents and non-parents. This issue has received relatively little attention from political philosophers, yet it seems pertinent to a concern that is central to any distributive justice theory: identifying the agents who are responsible for giving the new members of society what they are owed.
This dissertation is a work of ideal political theory. It provides a comprehensive investigation into the grounds in virtue of which parents can lay claims of justice to have the costs of children socialized by a just liberal egalitarian society. It argues that the prospects for successfully establishing such claims are very limited. The most promising avenue for parents can be summarized by the following claim. Unless the costs of caring for infants and young children is socialized, those who care for them full-time would suffer deficits of personal autonomy that are incompatible with the liberal egalitarian commitment to personal freedom. This conclusion would be in line with widespread feminist views on the matter, and would support policies such as paid parental leave, publicly funded childcare facilities, workplace accommodation for parents of young children and the like.
I show, further, that other arguments that seem, prima facie, to provide parents with distinctive claims to having the costs of children shared are not successful. This is either because (i) they offend against the liberal egalitarian commitment to personal responsibility for procreative choice, or against (ii) the liberal egalitarian commitment to state neutrality between different conceptions of the good. Finally, I show that a relatively widely endorsed family of arguments that support parents’ claims (iii) rest on specific versions of what is already a controversial normative principle, namely the fairness principle, that upon examination turn out to be implausible.
The thesis then develops a new account of fairness, which I call the Shared Preference View. According to this account, typical procreative parents do not have fairness claims to be subsidized. The account of fairness I develop has important implications beyond the debate regarding the fair distribution of the costs of children, including for environmental justice and for establishing a moral obligation to obey the law.
The thesis it is organized in six chapters and a conclusion, as follows.
Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: The Argument from Insurance Chapter 3: The Argument from Autonomy Chapter 4: The Argument from Fairness Chapter 5: Are Non-Parents Unfair Free Riders? Chapter 6: Are Kids Unfair Free Riders? Conclusion
