Resumen de A defence of parental licensing: how we should do justice to children and adultd
This thesis is a comprehensive study and defence of parental licensing, i.e. the proposal of making the right to parent one’s biological conditional to the successful completion of a series of checks and tests that aim to establish whether an adult, or a group of adults, can adequately raise a child. Although this proposal has been object of deep controversy in the public debate and between philosophers working on parent-child relationships, it has not received a careful and detailed philosophical analysis: this thesis aims to fill this gap. More specifically I aim to show that we can build a defence of this rather controversial proposal starting from uncontroversial premises on justice between children and parent, which I spell out in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, I provide an overview of the existing debate on parental licensing and I show that the main argument in its favour is based on symmetry between adoptive parents, who are currently licensed, and biological ones who are not; opponents of parental licensing, in turn, subscribe to what I call the Asymmetry View on parental licensing. Although advocates of parental licensing can convincingly reply to these objections, the existing debate fails to address some important fundamental issues. Chapter 3 argues that parental licensing is one among different possible systems according to which the state decides how to assign a specific child to the parental custody of a specific adult; moreover each child-assigning system determines a different distribution of harms and risks to children and adults. In Chapter 4, I argue that while defenders of the status quo may defend it only by invoking aggregativist views on the justification of harm and risk imposition, which are deeply implausible, a family of more plausible views on social risk supports parental licensing. Chapter 5 considers a series of questions related to the actual implementation of parental licensing and in particular addresses concerns about the presence of mistakes in the screening procedure and the justifiability of the policy under unjust social circumstances; this chapter also concludes my main defence of parental licensing. The last two chapters consider moral requirements that parents have beyond the ones that my licensing scheme aim to implement. Chapter 6 analyses and challenges the so called “Dual Interest View” on justice between parents and children and defends a controversial principle according to which the overall best interest of the child always takes priority over adults’ interest in parenting.
Chapter 7 argues that children have a right to be loved unconditionally and that adults who are unable to love their children unconditionally lack a moral right to parent any child
