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...
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| Tipo de documento: | Tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Published version |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/667396 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/667396 |
| Nivel de acceso: | Acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Niños Children Cost of children Coste de los niños 34 |
| Sumario: | 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. The thesis provides a comprehensive investigation into the grounds in virtue of which parents can raise claims to have the costs of children socialized. It argues that the prospects for successfully establishing such claims are very limited. This is either because (i) they would offend against the liberal egalitarian commitment to personal responsibility for procreative choice, or against (ii) the 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 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. On this account, typical parents do not have claims of fairness to parental subsidies. 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. |
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