Social Justice and Family Values

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Social Justice and Family Values

• Harry Brighouse
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• and
• Adam Swift
• Centre for the Study of Social Justice
• University of Oxford

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The issues

• Social Justice The family is a key source of
  social injustice, but to abolish the family would
  be to violate peoples rights and to deny them
  very valuable goods
• What is the proper place for the family in a
  complete theory of social justice?
• Public Policy There is a widespread sense, from
  left and right, that the family is under siege
• What policies would best promote - and
  distribute fairly - what is valuable about
  families?

3
Plan

• Relationship-goods account of the value of the
  family
• Policies concerning parental partiality
• Policies supporting parents
• Family values and poverty relief

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Three stakeholders

• Parents and potential parents
• Children
• Third Parties (everyone not involved in the
  particular parent-child relationships)

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The Relationship-Goods Account of Family Values

• The family is good for
• meeting childrens developmental interests
  (moral, physical, cognitive, emotional)
• meeting childrens immediate interests including
  security providing a sense of continuity with the
  past (children) and future (parents)
• enabling parental enjoyment of a distinctively
  valuable relationship in which they are intimate
  with someone for whom they play a central
  fiduciary role (the non-fiduciary interest in
  acting as a fiduciary)
• NB our account focuses on parents and children,
  not third party interests

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Clarifications

• All children need parents
• Not all adults have a fundamental interest in
  being parents, but many do
• We do not assume that families consist, or
  should consist, of a heterosexual couple and
  their biological children

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Parental partiality v fair equality of
opportunity.

• Some advantage transmission mechanisms
• gift/bequest
• elite schooling/private tuition
• network access
• parenting styles
• values transmission/ambition formation
• reading bedtime stories

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Rawlss rhetorical question

• Should we abolish the family then?
• Us No, because family values (as we have,
  correctly, described them) are more important
  than fair equality of opportunity and the family
  is crucial for their achievement. But we can,
  nevertheless, regulate the family and change the
  social environment to limit the conflict between
  fairness and what parents may legitimately
  partially do for their children.

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The family values test

• When an activity
• i) conflicts with some other important value
  like fairness/equality of opportunity AND
• ii) is not itself essential to realizing the
  value of the family AND
• iii) is such that removing/prohibiting it would,
  with appropriate other institutional measures,
  leave ample space for family values to be
  realized
• THEN it is a candidate for prohibition

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Elite private schools v bedtime stories

• In feasible circumstances - though not always in
  current circumstances - elite private schooling
  is not justified by family values (ditto
  inheritance)
• Bedtime stories are justified by family values
  even though they generate more unfairness than
  does elite private schooling

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Reforming the social environment

• Protecting space for the realisation of family
  values is consistent with efforts to reduce the
  unjust impact of legitimate familial interaction
• E.g. reducing the inequality between outcome
  positions would make it less unjust that
  children from different families had unequal
  opportunities to achieve those positions

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and a qualification.

• Even when an activity need not be permitted
  on family values grounds it might be justified
  (or even required) to permit it on other grounds,
  such as long-run improvement in the
  all-things-considered well-being of the least
  advantaged
• E.g. there may be good reasons to permit elite
  private schooling, even if not reasons that
  invoke family values

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Three sources of debate concerning family policy

• The theory of family values
• The weight of family values relative to other
  values
• Empirical claims about existing institutions
  and conjectures about the effects of reform
  proposals

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Supporting Parents

• Two aims
• Enabling parents adequately to meet their
  childrens interests
• Facilitating parental enjoyment of the
  parent/child relationship

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The family values guided policymaker will.

• Identify the social mechanisms that inhibit
  achievement of the two goals
• Identify the feasible reforms that will most
  effectively promote the desired outcomes without
  undermining more important values

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Three Conjectures

• Social institutions provide disincentives for
  parents to
• have children and realise the relationship goods
  that come from having them (as well as
  third-party benefits)
• spend as much time with their very young children
  as would be optimal for the childrens emotional
  development
• spend as much time with their children throughout
  their childhood as would be optimal for the
  parents full enjoyment of the relationship goods
  

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Relevant mechanisms inhibiting the two goals

• Fertility penalty
• Many parents too poor to take time off work
• Employers (rational) preference for full-time
  over part-time work, and for insecure part-time
  over secure part-time work
• Working hours too long
• More subsidy for childcare than for parental
  leave
• Gender pay gap makes it rational for women rather
  than men to take parental leave

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Current policy is moving in the right direction

• Increase in parental leave to 9 months paid, 3
  months unpaid from April (with intention to
  increase further to 12 months)
• Right to request flexible work arrangements
• Right to up to 12 weeks unpaid parental leave
• Manipulating tax code to reduce child poverty
• Maintaining, and thinking of increasing, child
  benefit
• Surestart being given new emphasis on parenting
  skills and child development

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But could do better

• Expectations in labour market still out of step
  with needs of children and interests of parents
• Well-being or quality of life agenda not yet
  fully integrated or taken seriously and still
  subordinated to competitiveness/productivity
  considerations
• From parents interest perspective, men in
  particular are missing out on relationship-goods

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Gender Objection

• If gender inequality were essential for
  childrens needs to be met adequately, then we
  would need to weigh up value of childrens
  interests v value of gender equality. We doubt
  that it is
• Still, it could be that the most
  readily-accessible-from-here child-friendly
  policies are gender-inegalitarian
• If so, hard question Should we pursue gender
  equality over meeting childrens developmental
  interests?
• Our view does object to gender inequality in so
  far as the incentive structure, social and
  economic, makes it harder for men than women to
  enjoy relationship-goods

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Objection pro-family measures are unfair
transfers from non-parents.

• Responses
• Non-parents still benefit net from behaviour of
  parents
• Parents would still face real costs relative to
  non-parents (promotion prospects etc)
• Information about net distribution of benefits
  and burdens can only be gleaned from looking at
  the whole tax/transfer system, not just one part
  of it

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Misidentifying goods and maldistributing them

• One problem is that current policies undervalue
  relationship goods
• Another problem is that access to such goods is
  unfairly distributed
• Poverty makes it unduly difficult both for
  parents to meet their childrens interests and
  for them to enjoy the relationship goods
• This is yet another good reason to abolish
  poverty