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Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights explores important issues at the nexus of two burgeoning areas within moral and social philosophy: procreative ethics and parental rights. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little scholarly engagement across these subdisciplinary boundaries, despite the fact that parental rights are paradigmatically ascribed to individuals responsible for procreating particular children. This collection thus aims to bring expert practitioners from these literatures into fruitful and innovative dialogue around questions at the intersection of procreation and parenthood. Among these questions are: Must individuals be found competent in order to have the right to procreate or to parent? What, if anything, can justify parents' special authority over, or special obligations toward, their children, particularly children they biologically procreate? How is the relationship between the right to procreate and the right to parent best understood? How ought liberal societies understand the parent-child relationship and the rights and claims it gives rise to? A distinguishing feature of the collection is that several of its chapters address these issues by drawing on philosophical work in the realm of education, one of the most controversial areas in the ethics of parenthood. This book represents a distinctive synthesis of topics and literatures likely to appeal to scholars and advanced students working across a wide range of disciplines.
List of contents
Introduction
Jaime Ahlberg and Michael Chobli
1. How Procreation Generates Parental Rights and Obligations
Michael Chobli
2. Teach Your Children Well: Origins, Rights, and the Education of "My" Child
Russell DiSilvestro
3. Children of Choice and Educational Responsibility
Jaime Ahlberg
4. The Problem of Choosing (For) Our Children
K. Lindsay Chambers
5. A Chip Off the Old Block: The Ethics of Shaping Children to Be Like Their Parents
Robert Noggle
6. Liberalism and the Status of Family Making
Mianna Lotz
7. Parents’ Rights and the Control of Children’s Education
Roger Marples
8. Liberalism, Parental Rights, and Moral Education: Yet Another Reflection on Mozert v. Hawkins
Marc Ramsay
9. An Interest, not a Project: Hegel on Ethical Love and Procreation
Ashli Anda
10. Parenthood and Personally Transformative Experiences
Michael W. Austin
11. Fundamentally Incompetant: Homophobia, Religion and the Right to Parent
Samatha Brennan and Colin Macleod
12. Parental Licensing and Pregnancy as a Form of Education
Christine Overall
About the author
Jaime Ahlberg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida. Her main areas of interest are ethics and political philosophy, with emphases in bioethics, education, and feminism. Recent publications include "Educational Justice for Students with Cognitive Disabilities" in Social Philosophy & Policy and "An Argument Against Cloning" (with Harry Brighouse) in Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
Michael Cholbi is Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has published widely in theoretical and practical ethics. His most recent work addresses paternalism, grief, and the ethics of suicide. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions (2011) and Understanding Kant's Ethics (2016).
Summary
This book explores important issues at the nexus of two burgeoning areas within moral and social philosophy: procreative ethics and parental rights. It aims to bring expert practitioners from these literatures into fruitful and innovative dialogue around questions at the intersection of procreation and parenthood.
Additional text
"The volume considers procreative ethics, what it means to be a parent, and how to balance parental and children's interests in a defensible specification of how children should be brought up and educated … This is, in sum, a rich if uneven collection that makes a welcome addition to what is now a well-established and rewarding domain of practical normative theory." – Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"...this book is a solid addition to the procreation, parenthood, and philosophy of education literature in three ways. First, readers encounter a broad range of issues and ways to resolve them. Second, the moral problems addressed, while perennial, are growing more complicated with biotechnology enabling greater ability to design children. Finally, the essays build upon foundations laid by David Benatar (2008), Joel Feinberg (1980), Hugh LaFollette (1980), and Derek Parfit (1986) in the area. Overall, it is a fine piece of work." -Dennis Cooley, North Dakota State University, USA
