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Adam Swift
So first, just want to check, can you hear me? I have this microphone on partly so I don't have to work too hard, but mainly so that the podcast will definitely get the thing. So that's the main reason. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure for me to be here at the Forum for European Philosophy, because this gentleman sitting in the front row is Alamo Tifiore, who was my tutor when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and he founded or helped to found the Forum for European Philosophy. So it's a very special occasion for me to be here talking kind of in this forum. Okay, so I'm going to talk about ethics in the family. And as Gabriel said, the reason is that I've just published this book about it. I'm going to talk for about 45 minutes and then there'll be 45 minutes for questions. So unless you really can't wait, please try and wait and ask me the questions afterwards because it will just flow better and maybe I'll answer the question as we go along because I only have 45 minutes and this is work that, as we've heard, took a very long time to produce. It's kind of bizarre for me to have to try and summarize all these years work in a 45 minute talk. So what I will mainly do is just give you our conclusions. This is really bad philosophy, right? I won't give you any of the arguments, but at least some of the arguments and some of the consideration of alternative positions on the topics I'm going to talk about are of course in the book. But it will seem to you like glib assertion. The claims I'm going to make about the ethical issues that arise within the family. So back to basics. To talk about family values is to kind of engage with controversial, actual real world political terrain. There is debate out there about what families are, whether it's bad that families are breaking down or disintegrating. A lot of the debate about same sex marriage, for example, can be thought about in terms of what is it for something to be a family. And that's partly because of two kinds of changes, two big kinds of developments. On the one hand, there have been scientific developments to do with how we create children. So we can now create children through choice to some extent, in ways that we could not before. And that has created lots of ethical issues about who should be allowed to create children, how many parents should a child be allowed to have, and so on and so on. Because the Biology of the creation of children is now extremely complicated. And of course, there have been massive social changes around family formation and what families are like. So increasing numbers of single parent families. There have always been lots of single parent families owing to the death of one of the parents. But increasingly people are choosing to become single parents. Of course, there's the issue of same sex parenting and so on. And the issue of same sex parenting obviously collides with the issue of the artificial reproduction techniques that are used to create children, semen donors, artificial insemination and so on. So there's a lot of flux and uncertainty out there about what family values really are. What are we talking about when we talk about the value of the family? So the way philosophers think about that state of flux is to go back to basics, go back to kind of philosophical first principles and start to think about what families are for, normatively speaking, which may seem a strange question, but I think it's a decent philosophical question to think about why we would want there to be families. And if we think about that, then we can think about what kinds of families we think there should be. So back to basics, as some of you will know, is a kind of echo of a phrase made popular by John Major, who was the Conservative Prime Minister in the kind of early to mid-90s. And he was very keen on kind of restoring a traditionalist moral agenda and talked a lot about going back to basics. And it was only several years later that it was discovered he'd been having an affair with Edwina Currie. All the time he'd been telling us about the importance of family values. So family and gender. We'll go back two slides to that. I was just telling Gabrielle when I gave a talk in Amsterdam recently, the main thing they wanted to talk about was how objectionable our cover was right now, of course, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? The fact that they noticed the COVID and thought it was striking is a success as far as we're concerned. But one of the main things they. I mean, there's loads to object to, right? They're all white. The woman has clearly spent time producing this dead animal, right? So there's all kinds of reasons why you might think the COVID is politically incorrect. So talking about gender, a lot of philosophical attention has been given to the family by people interested in feminism and the kind of gender critique of the family. And some of it has been done by people in this room. We endorse the feminist critique. That's such a kind of crass thing to say. As if there were the feminist critique. But what we mean by that is we're not querying any of the kinds of claims that feminists have tended to make about what is wrong, morally speaking, about the family as it has traditionally existed as a site of domination and exploitation of women. But it's not what we are talking about. So I'm not going to say anything more about the gendered aspect of the family as it currently exists, except to point out maybe later on how our theory doesn't have certain kinds of implications about gender and the family. So we're interested in specifically parent child relationships. So that's what the family is for us. In fact, in the book we just say we're going to define the family as the parent child dyad. So if there's a parent and a child, that's a family, and there might be one parent, there might be three parents, there might be two, there might be a the same sex, they might be of different sexes, that's a family. And notice that if there's two adults living together and living domestic life together, but there are no children, that's not a family on this view. But this isn't a kind of. This is just a stipulation to make clear what our topic is. That's all. Okay, so again, I'm going to just set it up very generally because I understand, you know, to the philosophers in the room this will all be very familiar. But to the non philosophers in the room, a good, decent general way of thinking about social justice is to think of it as about trying to get the right balance between liberty and equality. So on the one hand, we want to respect individuals freedom. We want to respect individuals freedom to live their life as they think best on the whole. But we want also to respect that freedom equally. And so most contemporary liberal theorists, liberal theorists who care about individuals living free lives also think their theories have distributive implications that follow from the fact that it's not just some people's liberty that matters, but everybody's liberty matters equally. And that will then have implications for what a just society will look like if it's going to respect people as free and equal. So what I'm trying to do is to balance freedom and equality in our thinking about the family. That's one very general way of thinking about it. Question, isn't the family just part of the private sphere and therefore not on the agenda for political philosophers like me? Right. That's a kind of a view with a long and very respectable tradition that would have been Aristotle's view, for example, that the family is a natural unit and that politics only really starts when people move out of the family and into some kind of community with others and presumably with other families. Now, of course, the idea that the family is part of the private sphere has been much criticized, and a lot of brilliant work has been done exposing the problems in that kind of view by feminist theorists. The general answer to this question is what should be private, that is, what should not be subject to political regulation is itself a question for political philosophers. It's not that we start with this obvious view that this is a private institution where the state must keep out and just let people do what they like in their families, which already it's unclear who's doing what they like. The man, the woman, if there's a man and a woman, the children, it doesn't make any sense. If the family were a single individual unit, we could maybe think of it as something we should leave people free, a sphere for themselves. But the family is made up by definition of more than one person. So what is involved in leaving it free is unclear who's being left free. So we need to do political philosophy to find out what should in fact be private. Okay, so I've set it up, I hope in terms of a kind of contrast between liberty type issues and equality type issues. And that's in fact the way that the book is structured, the way the framing of the problem is set up. So if we think about liberty in the family, the first thing we have to notice is that parental rights, the rights we have as parents, are by definition rights over other people. Or maybe children aren't quite people, or at least maybe they're not quite persons yet. Philosophers might say that, but there are certainly other human beings who most of them have the capacity to become persons. So there's something very distinctive about liberal parents rights because they're not like my right to freedom of sexuality or freedom of religion. That's a right over myself. A parental right is a right over somebody else. So we've got a problem immediately in thinking about what kind of liberties parents should have with respect to their children. So the question is, to what extent must we respect parents freedom to raise their children as they wish? That's the kind of question, for example, classic kind of issue. Do parents have the right to raise their children in the parents preferred religion? Or perhaps do they have the right to prevent them knowing about other religions? You might think it's obvious. Many people think it's obvious that parents have the right to do that. I don't. In fact, I'll be arguing that they don't in fact have the right to do that, or at least not straightforwardly. But many people think there are limits on the extent to which parents can raise their children in their own religion. So that's the liberty problem. That's why the family is a problem from the liberty perspective, but the family is also a problem from the equality perspective, because loads of work on social mobility has revealed to us, surprise, surprise, that the main mechanisms for that generate inequalities of opportunity between children born in different families are the families that they're born into. The main sources of unequal chances between children born into different parts of the society are the familial interactions, things that go on within the family. For example, the gifting and bequeathing of property from parents to children. Obviously, elite schooling and private tuition, which, as Gabrielle said, I have written a separate book about. And I think of this project as generalizing what was a particular. I think of the issue of school choice as a particular example of the ethics of parenting. And this is now trying to be a general theory about the ethics of parenting. So here's another way in which parents disrupt equality through their acts in favor of their children or their inability to perform those acts in favor of their children through their social networks. Right? Imagine that you weren't allowed to bequeath money to children. And imagine that we'd abolished all elite schooling and private tuition. Still, of course, there'd be huge inequalities between children simply due to the different kinds of social networks that those children would be members of, who their parents, friends were, and so on. All the processes of value transmission and ambition formation that happen within the family that look increasingly to be the kinds of sources of inequality between children born into different families. And I'm going to use a lot the example of bedtime stories. Some families are the kinds of families in which children get bedtime stories and some aren't. And there's a huge difference in the life chances between the children who get bedtime stories and the children who don't. Much bigger than the difference in life chances between those who go to elite private schools and those who don't. That's a trivial difference compared to the difference between getting and not getting bedtime stories or things like bedtime stories. Okay, so the equality question is what are the limits of legitimate parental partiality? How are we going to set a proper boundary to parents acting partially for their children? The strategy is, first identify what's really important about familial relationships. This is going back to basics. Why exactly would it be bad if we decided to abolish families? Because we could. We could decide that every time a child is born, it's immediately carted off to some institution to be raised. Right. That would be bad. But why exactly would it be bad? The idea is, having answered question one, which I'm going to try and do in the next 10 minutes, is to derive from that an account of what parents rights are over their children. The idea is what claims to do things to with and for your children can be justified by appeal to the answer to question one, namely why we should have families in the first place. Right. So the idea is see what's important about the family and see what that means for parents rights. And the key concept that we've introduced is this idea of familial relationship goods. So these are the distinctive goods contributed to human lives by the fact that humans engage in familial relationships. Remember, I'm just talking about parent child relationships here. Yeah. And these aren't goods in the economist's sense. They're not things like money or washing machines. These are just the philosopher's sense of goods. They're just good things that happen or contribute to people's lives going better or worse. Okay. So the first step is to work out why we should have families, which we call justifying the family. Explaining why we should have families, even though they have all these moral problems, they create inequalities. And there are kind of problems about the autonomy of children when they're raised by particular adults in certain ways. So justifying the family, what is it that makes parent child relationships valuable? Why do we want them to exist? And that's just another way of putting the question, why do we want to do it this way rather than the other? Different ways in which we could raise children. And we've got two ways of thinking about this question. We can look at it from the child's point of view. Why is it good for children that they be raised by parents rather than by institutional professionals? And we can look at it from the adults point of view. Why is it better for adults that they get to be parents rather than having children carted off and raised in these institutions? So there's two sets of interests. We can look at the child's interests and the adult's interest in the family. So we'll start with the children. The familial relationship is good for children. Here's an example of a huge sweeping Claim in one sentence. That kind of does loads of the work in the theory. But the claim is that there's something very special and important for children's development into flourishing human beings and adults about experiencing intimate, loving, but authoritative relationships with particular adults. Yeah. And it's important that those particular adults, especially looking out for those particular children. And all I'm really appealing to here is kind of, I think, what is now generally accepted, let's call it attachment theory. A theory about how children need certain kinds of particular emotional attachment at early stages in their lives in order to develop emotional capacity and indeed also to develop morally and cognitively. That seems to be what the evidence shows. These relationships are really important. You imagine studies of orphanages where they can show that children are not getting this good stuff because they're lacking the parental relationship. Okay, so we could contrast all these other ways in which we might raise children. And some of these have indeed been tried, and some of them don't do completely, terribly by all measures. So the kibbutz did seem to develop certain kinds of moral sense in children, but it looked as if the evidence shows that there were certain kinds of deficiencies in that system in terms of generating flourishing, healthy adults capable of healthy adult relationships. But we could imagine these different things. Imagine, you know, just to take one example, a really, really highly skilled programmed parenting robot that really knows everything that there is to know about parenting. Right. Something's missing. Right. Something that child needs, is missing from however clever your app or your little device, it's not going to do what human being need as children to create flourishing adults. So that's a very summary view. So, and we say, and again, you need to do a load of philosophy to get to this claim. But we say so these familial relationship goods are so important for children that they have a right to be parented. We collectively have a duty to parent children who are created. So if I suddenly discovered a baby, a foundling that had just been left down in the corner here, right. There would be some people under a duty, maybe all of us collectively would be under a duty somehow or other to make sure that this child got some kind of parenting. And we do try and do that. We do it abysmally, but we kind of accept the attempt to provide a child who needs it with a parent. Okay, so that's the children's angle from adults point of view, if we think about it this way. I'm going to go back. I don't want you to read that. Imagine if we only cared about Children's interests. When we thought about the family, that would mean that what we should be doing would be allocating children to whoever would be their best parent.
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Audience Member 1
Right.
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Adam Swift
And that could imply that there would be loads of adults who would be perfectly good parents who would never get to be parents, because the only interests that matter on that view would be the children's interests. So you would just simply go for whatever allocation of children to adults would be best for the children. But that looks wrong. It looks like adults have claims to be parents as long as they meet certain conditions. Right. They've got to be, let's call it a good enough parent. But supposing one is a good enough parent, it looks like there would be a problem with having your child taken away just on the grounds that somebody else would be a better parent. Right? So we say adults have an interest in being parents. And there's something very distinctive and very weighty about parenting as an activity. We don't claim that all adults need to be parents to flourish. There are some adults whose lives go much worse for trying to be parents. It's not a universal claim, but parenting makes a distinctive and weighty contribution to people's lives because it's such a distinctive activity. This is the way we characterize the activity of parenting. What you're doing, if you're doing it well, is discharging a fiduciary role. That is, you are taking responsibility for and acting as the trustee of another person. It's a massive, massive moral responsibility. Right. And the way that you do that is through having the same kind of loving, intimate, but authoritative relationship that is valuable for the child. And people who talk about the joys of parenting are talking about the joys of having this kind of relationship. And that's different from lots of other relationships that human beings have. Right. It's different from your relationship with your spouse or partner, because your spouse or partner is also an adult, is not dependent on you in the same kind of way. You're not responsible for him or her in quite the same kind of way. Different from a friendship relationship, different from a relationship with a pet. Not entirely different. People have written articles criticizing our view, saying, look, pets are pretty good, you know? But in my view, it would not be an adequate response to somebody who was desperate to have a child to say, look, get a dog. Why? Because there's something very different about the moral responsibility of creating a flourishing human being and of what you get to do and what you need to do in order to go through that process. So think about the Tamagotchi. Do you all know what Tamagotchi are? Yeah, they're those little gizmo things. Right. So imagine that the way to raise a child to be a healthy, flourishing human being was simply to remember to press buttons at the right moments. And if that were true, then the robot app we imagined before might be perfectly okay at it. Right. I think actually that would still be a valuable activity to perform for an adult because you'd have a great moral responsibility to remember to press those buttons. Yeah. And I think it would be very good for you to have the responsibility of remembering to press the buttons and feel that you had by yourself, discharging your obligation created a flourishing adult. But of course, it wouldn't be the same as what actually is involved in good parenting, because what's actually involved is a loving relationship with another human being. It's not just pressing the buttons. So it's the way that we discharge the fiduciary role that is especially valuable for the adult. So we say lots of philosophy. Adults have a right to be a parent. Yeah. And that might be a negative right. That might be just a right to be left alone in the activity of parenting, but it might be a positive right. It might be a right to assistance to become a parent. And our society does seem to assist people in becoming parents in various ways. For example, through the health service and subsidising artificial reproductive technology, or in supporting adoption or. Although I think most of the support for adoption is actually on child centered grounds and not on adult centered grounds. Okay, I'm going to have to go so fast because I'm already aware I'm going to run out of time. So I want to make a distinction between the right to parent right. And I say relationship goods help us understand why we have a right to parent. And that's different from the rights of parents, which are the rights you have as a parent with respect to the children that you are the parents of. Yeah. So we've got two kinds of rights. The right to be a parent and the rights you have as a parent. Okay. And the big picture on the right to parent. And this is where the COVID comes back in. Notice nothing I said about familial relationship goods assumed that there were two parents. Nothing I said assumed that if there were two parents, they were a man and a woman. Right. And nothing I said assumed that there was any biological connection between the adult and the child. All those relationship goods can be understood in ways that don't involve any kinds of claims about the value of single two parent families or same sex parent, opposite sex parents or biological parents. So there's one whole aspect of the theory that is going to defend or criticise conventional views about the family on the grounds that you just don't need to have that kind of family to have a healthy, flourishing family life as we understand what that is. And then I've already said that the right could be positive or negative. So just to say something about biology, because people always want to talk about this, it's useful, I think, to distinguish two aspects to the biological connection that there might be between an adult and the child at children parenting. On the one hand there might be a genetic connection, but on the other hand there might be a gestatory connection and those two don't have to coincide. For example, all men so far who have been genetic parents have not also been gestatory parents. And some women have been gestatory parents to children to whom they have no genetic connection through surrogate pregnancies and so on. So we can distinguish the different kinds of claims there might be to get to parent your biological child. We say there's no right to parent your genetic child. The mere fact that this child is your genetic product or contains your genetic material in some way or however you understand that connection, that doesn't establish a right to parent that child. Right. Maybe there is a right to parent the child that you just stated. Why? Because it's not clear when we should think of the valuable relationship as starting. And if we think of the relationship as starting in utero, then we're severing a relationship when we, if we were to reallocate the child to somebody else. So you might claim a right to parent the child that you have just dated. In our view, that would be on relationship grounds. Of course, other people offer different accounts of why you should get to parent the child. You just stated, for example, all the hard work you put in, but it's not clear why. The fact that you put all this hard work into producing a child means you get to parent that child rather than another child. So that's why we think you're going to need the relationship account to get out. Now, don't get me wrong, there may well be very good sound reasons why we should typically leave children with their biological parents. I'm not arguing for redistribution of children away from their biological parents. In general, I'm making a philosopher's claim that there's no right to parent your biological child. It seems to me very plausible that we should leave children with their biological parents. Because on the whole that's going to be best for children. And there might be loads of sociobiology that you might draw on, explain why that might be the case. Epistemic problems gathering the information that we would need to have in order to transfer kids around to better parents. So I'm not saying there's no proposal that we should go in for some radical revision, but we should be clear that it's not the case that adults have a right to parent the genetic child. On our view, okay, big picture on parents rights. That was about the right to parent. Now I'm on the parents rights. The big picture story here. I'm just going to get some water. And the kind of point of the book as I see it, is to argue that familial relationships, once we've understood what's really important about them, don't justify anything like the rights we currently give to parents. So we give parents far more rights over their children than they need to get the good stuff and than their children need to get the good stuff. So on the liberty side, we still have this residual, what we call proprietarian idea. That is the idea that children are in some sense the property of their parents. So in Roman law they were literally the property of their parents. The father had the right to kill the child. It was his property. If he wanted to kill it, fine. We don't think that anymore. But I think we still have residual proprietarian traces, more than traces in our practice and in our culture. Children do not belong to parents. When we talk about my child, we have to be very careful about what we mean when we say my, it's not mine in the sense that this is my book or this is my watch. Right. And they're not on our view, vehicles for parents creative self extension, which is how many adults seem to treat their children. They treat them as ways of extending themselves into the world. And some philosophers have argued that that is kind of the point. And I think that's wrong. I think that's treating children as means to parents ends. That's one way of putting it. So that's what I'm going to say about liberty very quickly. Equality. I think we allow parents to do too much for their children in the name of the value of the family. We defer to parents claims to be allowed to benefit their children in ways that disrupt equality, ways that are bad for other people's children more than is justified properly by appeal to the value of a family. So I'm going to just do both Those very quickly. So if we think about, for example, parents rights to shape their children's values, for example, by raising them in a particular religion or educating them in a particular kind of, let's say, religious tradition, a common defence of raising your child in your religion is that that's part of your religious freedom. That's how it gets argued in America and that is respected by the American Constitution. This is what is the law in America. The parents have the right to send their children to very religious schools because that is part of their freedom of religion. But as I said right at the beginning, there's something weird about that because these are other people who are being sent to these schools as an implication of somebody else's freedom of religion. Another way this gets argued is the interest that adults have in passing their identity onto their child. It's important to be allowed to kind of create a child that is in some sense sharing an identity with you or believing the same kinds of things as you. And that might be religious, might be cultural, might be all kinds of things. What we do in the book, I can't kind of go into the arguments if we want to talk about them. We can. I think some kinds of value shaping will happen in families of the kind that I'm imagining, right? But it will happen because that's an inevitable byproduct of a healthy, loving, but intimate relationship. It won't happen because the parent is thinking of her child as a means of creating another good little Christian or a good little atheist or a good little aesthete. Right? That's the wrong way to think about the child. Of course, you might in practice produce another good little aesthete simply by sharing your enthusiasms with your children and spontaneously saying what you think is important in life and what isn't. And I think it's okay to do that. But anyway, that would be the way we approach the question of value shaping. Of course, some value shaping is part of the job of being a parent, right? We want children to be raised to be honest and trustworthy and cooperative and productive and self reliant and things like that. So the argument isn't that no value shaping is part of the parent's job. So we need a distinction between the kinds of values that it's proper for parents to instill in children. That's part of the job description on the one hand. And then other kinds of values where it starts to look like the parent just favoring her particular value system and using the child to pursue that. Okay, on the equality Stuff. I'm going to make a distinction between bedtime stories, which I used before as a kind of paradigm case of a kind of. The kind of thing that goes on in a healthy family. Bedtime stories are central to intimate sharing of lives. Elite private schools are not. They're not. Normally, I'm sure some clever people will think of some exceptions and we'll talk about those if you want, but on the whole, it's not true that parents need to send their children to elite private schools in order to enjoy these familial relationship goods.
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Audience Member 1
Right?
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Adam Swift
So we try and make a distinction between different types of activity, those activities that are indeed part of the healthy family producing the relationship goods, and those that aren't. But be clear, bedtime stories and elite private schools are just examples. I mean, we can talk about those if you want, but it wouldn't bother me if you said, look, you could have a healthy family life without any bedtime stories. Yeah, I think that might be true. I think you'd need to have things like bedtime stories, maybe like lunchtime stories or bedtime songs or.
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Audience Member 2
Sorry, minor concession.
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Adam Swift
A minor concession? Yeah, it's a minor concession. The thought is there has to be times for intimate sharing of time together. And it's through these kinds of activities that emotional bonds are formed that are valuable. And it's true that they will tend to disrupt a sometimes if some are getting them and some aren't, but so be it. Whereas elite private schools and lots of other things that parents do for their children just aren't susceptible to justification by appeal to these relationship goods. So I sometimes get the objection that this is a really convenient theory for the Guardian reader, right? Because it says it's okay to hang out with your kids and take them on holiday and do like nice family stuff. And if that transmits advantage to them, well, that's just. We've got to accept that because we've got to respect that kind of interaction. But all these horrible people who buy private schooling or buy other advantages for their kids or are obsessed with investing in their children to benefit, to kind of maximize their market power in the long run, they've kind of got something wrong. Yeah, so I'm sometimes accused of. This is kind of like a complacent view in a way. It suits those with cultural capital because it suits those who, through whom simply by informal, healthy familial interactions, their children are going to be better off. And that's kind of true, but it's not a defence of existing inequalities. Right. Because we're not defending the inequalities that currently exist between those who get and those who don't get bedtime stories. We're doing the opposite. We're pointing out that you could allow this familial life to go on and not allow it to have all these huge ramifications for how well people are rewarded later in life. We don't have to organize the distribution of advantage in society in ways that corresponds so closely to the kinds of things that people who've had bedtime stories get, right? So the reward schedule or the way we distribute burdens and benefits in society so could take a completely different form. So one way of thinking about it is we could try and isolate the family and insulate what goes on in family life from all these accidental, incidental things that they tend to produce. But the element of truth in the critique is that given the world as it is, we've got hard cases, right? Because given the world as it is, it may be that if you're allowed to read bedtime stories to your kids, even on our theory, then you will end up benefiting your children in ways that other people are not able to or not willing to benefit theirs. So on our view, it may be that in the world as it is, parents are in fact entitled to to do things that will in fact transmit advantages and create inequalities. Even though there's no real defence of the inequality producing stuff, familial relationship goods can be thought of as things we should care about the distribution of. So typically in political argument, family values are regarded as constraints on egalitarian or redistributive measures, e.g. bequests and inheritance. When they tried to introduce a very, very modest estate tax in the United States, it was a complete political disaster because people kept going on and on about the value of the family. We've got to respect the family. We can't violate parents rights to transmit the money, keep the money in the family, right? So family was invoked as a reason not to engage in what was actually a very, very modest redistributive proposal. School choice is another obvious place where this happens. These are my children. I have the right to send them to the school I want to send them to, right? Therefore you can't engage in all this egalitarian tinkering with the system to try and produce more equal chances, but between children, that's how it normally goes. But we're suggesting that we should think of familial relationship goods, family values, as things we care about. The Distribution of who's getting them and who isn't. How could we reorganize society so that there's a fairer distribution of access to familial relationship goods? So the family ceases to be an obstacle to distributive goals and becomes itself something we care about the distribution of. It's very hard to have a healthy family life if you're struggling to make a living. You've got two or three jobs in order to earn enough to feed your kids. So an obvious implication of really caring about family values would be severe anti poverty measures, because poverty is, I think, a major obstacle to the realisation of family values. And that's bad for children and it's bad for adults because they're not able to get the stuff I've been talking about, about going to make a slightly. I've been very simplistic so far, so I'm going to just make a slightly complex case to show you how things get a bit more interesting. Helping with homework. Right? So I refused to help my kids personal statement on their UCAS form, right? And I was told, you know, I was the only parent in the whole of Oxford, you know, who was not not only helping, but basically writing the personal statement, which of course is what we know this side of it. We know that's what happens. But there's a difference between helping with homework and other kinds of assisting. And I want to just explain why I think there is, just as an example. So I think it's a completely natural parental motivation to want to help your child. And it's certainly a natural parental motivation to want to help your child if she's in distress because she can't do her homework. There'd be something wrong with you if you weren't kind of feeling that you should be able to help, feeling that you want to help. It's like, you know, I'm doing this for homework, dad, you know, can we talk about it? No, sorry. I don't want to give you any unfair advantage over the other kids. Right. But there's something wrong. Something going wrong there. Yeah. So what it. So we say it's important for healthy familial relationships that parents have a sphere of discretion over what they do with their children and that they can act spontaneously with their children. They don't want to be subject to the homework police who go around from door to door making sure parents aren't helping their children with their homework on egalitarian grounds. That would be a bad idea. It would be a bad idea on our view because it would destroy family life. Family life depends on being left alone to get on with stuff and do things with your kids. In a way, not only you're not policed, but you don't have to police yourself too much either. If I'm constantly thinking what am I allowed to do with my child? Am I allowed to do that? Am I allowed to do that? Is that going to be fair? Is that going to be unfair? That's hopeless. Right? Then I'm not having a healthy, loving, spontaneous relationship with her. So things like spontaneous helping with homework every now and again, that's not the same as getting them home from school and sitting them down and helping them do their homework. I'm not talking about that in a systematic way. That looks like a policy decision. Yeah, and I don't think you should do that. So we say, look, some things like spontaneous helping with homework, there'll be loads of other ways in which you'll benefit your child through your interactions with them. I say you. I'm assuming that the people I'm addressing are those whose children are going to benefit from these interactions. Of course there's all kinds of. There are other cases where the benefit isn't there in the interactions. And that's the problem from the equality point of view. So helping with homework just looks like a different kind of thing from deliberately choosing to send your child to an advantage school in order to benefit her in a way that will disadvantage other children through removing equality opportunity. So the conclusion I've got to the end. The idea is that we offer a theory of familial relationship goods. And the idea is that we can derive from them claims about what in principle parents have the right to do to, with and for their children. The idea is to give us a kind of criterion for thinking about what parents rights should be. The general aim is just to locate the family properly in terms of this balance between liberty and equality. We're going to massively limit parents liberties compared to the amount they currently get. And we're going to massively increase equality compared to the amount that there currently is. But we say we're still going to be getting the right balance. We're way out of kilter at the moment. That's roughly what our theory is says and it has implications for what parents can do with and to their children and also implications for what parents can do for their children. And I just want to end, I don't know if any of you know this beautiful fragment of a poem by Kahlil Gibran he says your children are not your children. Right. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, that they belong not to you. This is just what I said. And look at the last lines. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. Right. Because if you seek to make them like you, you are using them as instruments. So something as a project of yours. Okay, I'm done. Thank.
- [44:42]
Moderator
Thank you very much, Adam. We have 40, 45 minutes for questions. If you could leave up your hands for a little while so I can take note of everyone who wants to speak. There's a mic coming around. Make sure to speak into the mic for podcast. We start on here.
- [45:02]
Adam Swift
So I'm just. I'm just getting a pen because I realize I had an apple.
- [45:08]
Audience Member 3
Right, I'll wait.
- [45:16]
Adam Swift
Okay.
- [45:17]
Audience Member 3
Is the microphone on?
- [45:18]
Adam Swift
Okay. So we have. I suppose many of the people in.
- [45:21]
Audience Member 3
This room have ambitions about our own lives. We probably worked hard in school to get into the LSE or Oxford or what have you. And then we strive to get a good job. And this is all thought to be all right. Now we say, well, we've got some sort of prerogative to look after our own interests as opposed to the interest of strangers. Now, I take your point about parents not imposing their own values or will on children. But suppose that given the special relations, special ties with the children, they try to do as much for their children's education and future that we strive for in our own case only when the child welcomes it. And perhaps a lot of children would welcome a lot of assistance from parents. Is there a way of making an argument for being able to promote one's child's interest in the same way that we think it's fine that we strive to promote our own interests in these various ways?
- [46:32]
Adam Swift
Thank you. So did you all heard that? You all heard the question? I don't need to repeat.
- [46:40]
Audience Member 1
Not really.
- [46:41]
Audience Member 4
No.
- [46:42]
Adam Swift
No, you didn't hear it.
- [46:43]
Audience Member 1
Well, I heard the wording, but.
- [46:45]
Adam Swift
Okay, I'll explain it.
- [46:47]
Audience Member 1
Conclusive part of the subject, what he's on about. Specific part of things.
- [46:55]
Adam Swift
Yeah. Okay. So the question was, since it's. Since it seems that I think it's all right for us to pursue our own projects in our lives, even in ways that might create inequalities, maybe. Is that the idea? Why is it not okay to promote our children's benefit in ways that might produce inequalities? Okay, so there's Two kinds of. Mike is a professional philosopher, just tell you that now, just so you know. So there are two kinds of answer. I mean, there's loads of kinds of. Here's two. So one is what we're doing here is specifically looking at reasons for benefiting children that arise from the familial relationship. So there may be further prerogatives to benefit your children that derive simply from a prerogative that you have to pursue what you think is important. Right. So there's a. So most, even most egalitarian political philosophers think that people do have a prerogative to pursue their own self interest to some extent, even if they could be doing more good for other people. Roughly, yeah. And the techie answer is we think there might be a prerogative of that kind in addition to anything we say, which would extend to. So if you have a prerogative to pursue your own self interest, then part of the way you, as it were, might use that prerogative would be by benefiting your children. But that wouldn't involve the thought that it's because it's your child that you have. It would be no different from pursuing, you know, giving the money to an opera company or giving the money to some other thing you wanted to benefit. So we're trying to isolate distinctively the reasons that arise from the familial relationship. There's going to be further conceptual space perhaps for parents to benefit their children, but that space isn't about the value of the familial relationship. It's simply about the prerogative to pursue things you care about. Thank you.
- [49:11]
Audience Member 5
I'm really amazed by your starting point. I mean, defining the family as a unit made of two adults and the children and forgetting about the family as a social group. I mean, as a entity which has a history, a past, a future contemporary relationship with, let's say, cousins or friends of the family, extended family, etc. So you start with a very claustrophobic view of the family and parents are all powerful in that context, whereas lots of different adults can interact with the children and makes such a big difference to the protection or the development of the child. I mean, it's. I mean, it's a very individualistic view of the family, which I think is restricting your analysis of liberty and equality.
- [50:14]
Adam Swift
Okay, thank you. So it's worse than you said because I don't assume the two parents. Yeah. So what I'm doing is simply looking at, as I said at the beginning, like the parent child dyad as the elementary unit and Then there are complicated questions about how many parents a child can have consistent with getting these relationship goods. It looks like you could have two, three, maybe four parents. Some of you may know people who have two, three, or four parents. I do. But once you start to get to 10, it looks like you're not really parenting anymore. There's some, like running something by committee or something is happening. Okay, so Katharine is suggesting that I'm neglecting the value of extended family, the value of other influences on children and so on, and the history and so on. So I'm not. I'm just not talking about them. It's perfectly compatible with everything I've said, that children need influences from outside the family. And so one really interesting question for parents is what rights do they have to protect children from outside influences? And I think they have very limited rights to do that. And I think that all kinds of rights, relationships with adults other than your parent are important. In fact, I think parents have a duty to make sure that their children have relationships with people other than themselves. So it's not the case that I'm saying this is the only stuff that matters. It's just that I'm specifically talking about this particular relationship. And then we think about, so what duties do parents have? Maybe they have children duties to allow children to see their grandparents, for example. And there's an increasingly controversial set of issues about grandparents rights where the parent and the grandparent fall out and the parent says, okay, you're not seeing your grandchildren anymore. And the grandparents go to court and demand access to their grandchildren, for example. And they might be right that grandparents also have rights. I just haven't said anything about them. And it might be right that children have a right to a relationship with their grandparents. I just haven't said anything about that in the book. I do say a little bit more. So I've only talked about one particular thing, but I don't think that means I'm not aware or the theory can't allow these other considerations as well.
- [52:52]
Moderator
Gentlemen.
- [53:00]
Audience Member 1
Sir, thank you for your talk. What do you think of the following? That there is a national program for every baby that comes into the world to undergo reversible sterilization such that when they reach an agreed age and they want to enter into the subjects that you presented, their peer report is looked at, their medical report is looked at, and they are undergoing. They undergo a program of national eugenics. The word eugenics, if abused, as it was in the past, by various organizations, will kill you. It's like drugs. If you abuse Drugs, they may kill you. But if you use particular drugs, if as or when necessary, they may help you to live. It's all a question of use and abuse. If you apply proper eugenics, national eugenics drawn up by balanced, intelligent men and women in the government, you may produce children that have a very high quality of life or a very high chance. Can't guarantee it, of course. Nothing in the universe is guaranteed but a very high chance of undergoing a high quality of life without suffering defects which might be passed on by selfish parents knowing that they have heritable defect and still wanting a child or two or three or lots of children. Also, just in conclusion, what do you think? That every man and woman who are going to go into a relationship producing a child are firstly, genetically profiled, both their DNA and their RNA for defects. Secondly, to test whether they are in a permanent relationship as far as possible. Thirdly, that they have the money to look after the child. Fourthly, that they have the mentality that they want a child. Okay. And fifthly, that there is no conflict in the country. For example, who would think about having a child at the moment in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else where there is killing conflict? I wouldn't want to produce a child. Leave it at that point. There's lots more to say, but leave it at that point. Sir. Thank you.
- [55:51]
Adam Swift
Okay, thank you. So one of our key claims is that adults have a great interest in being parents. It's a very, very valuable thing to be allowed to do. So the suggestion that we should prevent people becoming parents on the grounds that they have certain kinds of genetic predispositions or whatever is going to come, if we were to do that would come at a serious moral cost to the lives of those adults. Now, if we had reason to think that the children's lives would not be worth living, then I would be on your side. Right. I don't think you have the right to produce a child who it is reasonable to expect whose life will not be worth living. But I don't think that is the case in many of the examples that you gave. So the value to child of being born is positive because their life is worth living by definition and the value to the adult is positive, assuming that they are able to get these familial relationship goods. Now, there's all kinds of other restrictions that I might be willing to countenance. So there is a literature on whether parents should be licensed. We don't allow people to drive cars on the road without a license because it might be dangerous. But we Allow people to produce and parent children without any competence test at all. And it's not clear to me that that is the right policy because these are human beings. And the idea that in principle there's all kinds of practical problems with it, but the idea that in principle we might want to make sure people have passed some kind of competence test in order to certainly we're going to help them become parents. Which is in fact the case with adoption. Right. In order to get to adopt you have to pass far more demanding tests than procreating naturally. So I'm not averse to restrictions on as there were some kinds of criteria for getting to be allowed to be a parent. But I don't see the eugenic case, as you've put it, unless we're talking about defects that are so grave that the child's life is not going to be worth living.
- [58:29]
Moderator
We go to the back, third row from the back of the centre.
- [58:37]
Audience Member 6
Hello. I'd just like to say it's been a really enjoyable, fascinating talk on a topic that I don't think gets discussed enough almost. I want to make a point in that I think it's very interesting you're considering what it means to be a parent. But I think it's also important to consider what a child is and what makes them distinct as human beings. Because I think there are characteristics in terms of. I think children are, and I might be quite generalizing here, quite impressionable and naive and vulnerable. And that makes them quite distinct from the adult population. In which case there is the argument that there is a responsibility, a certain responsibility, a certain kind of paternalism and that, you know, influence is kind of inevitable. It's not something that is chosen almost. And if the parent doesn't have the role to be the strongest influences, I mean, is it right or even like that viable that the state would take that responsibility? I mean, because like the parent have the experience of knowing them and knowing their history and perhaps sharing certain genetic similarities. I mean, surely these things should matter. And surely that is an argument that your children is yours. And that kind of possessiveness is actually quite healthy.
- [60:21]
Adam Swift
Okay, so. I'm a big fan of paternalism when we're talking about children, right? So there's an audience that I'm arguing against were kind of child liberationists. I don't know if any of you have heard of child liberationism, which was kind of analogous to women's liberation. So why should children be subject to adults authority so much? You know, let them kind of. That seems to me like a Disastrous idea. Okay, so I saw. So I agree with you on that. And now there's the question, who should have the authority over the child? Right? Who should have the authority? And I agree with you. I think. I agree with what you said, which is that there's every reason to expect it to be the parents and indeed the biological parents. Yeah. So I agree. I think that's the natural default. And I think parents should have to show abuse and neglect or should fall below certain kinds of standards before we even think about taking them away. But alas, you know, if you follow British news, you know that this is happening all the time, that the authorities are deciding reluctantly that they need to take children away from their parents because on these particular occasions, the parents are failing the children. They're neglecting duties that adults have when they're raising children. So. And I don't think you're arguing that, you know, they should always be left with their families. I think you're arguing that they should kind of normally be left with their biological parents. And I agree with that. I agree with that.
- [61:55]
Moderator
Gentleman with the purple shirt in row number three in the back.
- [62:01]
Adam Swift
So I was wondering if you would consider another case for allowing parents to produce inequality. So suppose that you have a very well offset of parents. Could not be the case that the children have claims against their parents to be lived in equally good circumstances or something like that. So the cases where. So I'm the child of wealthy parents and the thought is that I have a claim against my parents to be as wealthy as them or something like that, to be somewhat wealthy. Yeah. In addition to the. I can't see where that would come from, that claim. So I'm kind of lucky, right? I'm lucky. I'm the child of wealthy parents. So at least my childhood has kind of been privileged, let's say. And now your thoughts. So supposing I was to propose 100% inheritance tax, for example, Right. Which does kind of follow from our theory, right? It follows because inheritance and bequest, they're not the kind of things you need to do for your child in order to have this healthy, loving relationship. We say, certainly not in a world where nobody is bequeathing their wealth to their children. Right. So it may be that in the world we live in, if parents don't leave something to their child that would be evidence of, or taken as evidence of not loving their children. But imagine we decided just to have 100% inheritance tax across the society, then nobody could think that a parent who wasn't giving money to their children was failing them, failing to love them enough or something like that. Now your thought is, as a child of wealthy parents, I have some claim to their money and I just don't see why I would have that. Okay, claim that I have claim to their time and attention. Definitely. Yeah, that's right. I have a claim to a parenting relationship with them. And the claim might sufficiently be strong to knowingly generate inequality. Yes, it can knowingly generate inequality, but as a byproduct of the form of the relationship, what I have a right to is the relationship. I don't have a right to the benefits that it will tend to produce. That's one way of putting it. Yeah. Does that make. Does that help?
- [64:23]
Moderator
Center of the fourth row from the back.
- [64:29]
Audience Member 7
So I was just wondering if as a child, I have a right to have a parent and have a right to be parented, at what point does that end? Does that end when I'm no longer a child? And kind of relatedly, what happens if I'm a child who is also a parent? So I'm 13 years old and I have a child, Do I then have parenting rights and child rights at the same time or do I automatically transition into the adult situation? You know, that kind of. That kind of thing.
- [64:54]
Adam Swift
Very good. Those are really good questions and you know, good in the sense I don't know the answer. Yeah, they're really good questions. What was that? So I certainly don't have an answer to the 13 year old who's a parent and a child. What I mean is I would need to find. Think about kind of exactly what I think about that case. But the first thing you said was something slightly different and was interesting.
- [65:18]
Audience Member 7
When do I give up my right.
- [65:19]
Adam Swift
To have a parent?
- [65:20]
Audience Member 7
Like 1821, where I don't need it anymore?
- [65:24]
Adam Swift
Yeah. So the right to a continuing relationship with your parent and the right of parents to continuing relationships with their children get really messy once you're talking about adults because it's not clear how you can claim a right against some other adult to have a relationship with you if they don't want to. If they don't want to. It kind of is weird to think that you've got a duty to kind of continue to see me. Now. You might think that there are, you know, there is a conventional view that there are filial obligations, that. That there are in fact duties of children back to parents. And one of the things we say at the end of the book is that that would be another agenda that you could try and Apply some of our theory to that issue. So if you're looking for a PhD topic, I've got one for you. Right. Do that. Right. Because I think it's really interesting to think what a relationship goods account would imply for obligations from children to parents, but I don't know the answer. That's why you need to do the PhD on it.
- [66:34]
Moderator
Corner of the final row.
- [66:37]
Audience Member 2
Thanks. So you've been somewhat pluralist in your presentation looking at both liberty and equality, but another value wasn't really included, namely the aggregate welfare of society. So here's just one consideration. I mean, when we sort of rule out inheritance taxes, sort of a familiar consideration is that people might work less hard and some less wealth. But here's, I think, a better kind of example. Consider two types of tutoring that I might do for my child. I don't have a child, but in any case, one is I help the child learn math better. Right. The second is I help the child figure out tricks for the SAT in the us. Right. I'm not giving them any additional knowledge. I'm just helping them get a leg up in admissions without producing any kind of human good other than the fact that they have a slight advantage.
- [67:34]
Adam Swift
Now, just. That's like the UCAS personal statement case. Right. You're not actually creating any good thing at all. You're just positioning your kid in this stupid competition.
- [67:44]
Audience Member 2
Yeah, exactly.
- [67:44]
Adam Swift
Exactly. Right.
- [67:46]
Audience Member 2
Yeah. No, it's a good analogy, I suppose.
- [67:49]
Adam Swift
So.
- [67:49]
Audience Member 2
It seems to me that there's a difference between those two cases. And one of the ways you can understand that difference is that, look, the welfare of society as a whole is a relevant moral consideration. And, you know, although we don't want to help parents giving them the tricks, nothing is gained from society from that. You know, teaching them math, although it creates problems of equality, is different because there's this other benefit that seems morally relevant.
- [68:14]
Adam Swift
Great. Yeah. So there is a great benefit to kids learning math. Yeah. That doesn't imply that. Supposing I'm good at math, and I think there's a great benefit to kids learning math. I haven't got an argument for why I'm teaching my kid math. I should be teaching math to the kid who's going to get most benefit from the math lesson. If the argument is there's a benefit to this educational stuff, then the benefit should go where the benefit will be most valuable, either to the kid herself or what she will do with it in terms of the social product. Now that will be implausible as a policy. Right. The Idea that I will kind of work out which kid in my neighborhood is going to get most value from my math tuition. So I'm not suggesting that in practice we could do much of this or I think we could do more of it. Right. I think people who are good at math could go into schools where they lacking maths teachers and create some more human capital by spreading maths around rather than just keeping it in the families of the parents who are good at math.
- [69:23]
Audience Member 2
But it might be the case that I don't have the incentive, the necessary incentive. I can't motivate myself and I don't get a lot of welfare if I'm teaching some random kid mapped, but I get a lot of wealth fit from teaching my own kid math. So both, we have both more math teaching going on in society if we allow this kind of thing. And also the pain of actually going through and teaching somebody math is less when we have the parents teach their own kids. So I'm not convinced that aggregate welfare considerations wouldn't affect this calculus in an important way.
- [69:56]
Adam Swift
Good. No, yeah, I agree that kind of for sure it if we're interested in aggregate welfare, then the fact that parents derive welfare from benefiting their kids is going to go into the equation. That's for sure. I agree. How that will weigh against the welfare benefits to these guys and the long run welfare benefits to investing in kids on a fair basis is going to be an open question. My guess is we're going to get a lot more welfare in the long run run if parents with cultural capital don't devote quite so much of it to their own kids and spread it around a bit. But yeah, I agree it's a good, it's an important thought which I haven't had. Yeah, it's good.
- [70:49]
Audience Member 4
Your emphasis early on, on the page parental rights jarred slightly with my understanding of the major movements in child care policy over the years, which has really, if I got it right, has tried to substitute the idea of responsibility for rights. Now I'd be very interested to know how far you think that succeeded and what it's all about. But the second part of my question is links back to something someone said earlier on how long does that responsibility last in reality? We have our children, we have our parents, and I think parental and parental relations are a lifelong issue for many people. And if you substitute the word offspring for child, then you get a better balance of what I'm talking about. We're talking about the relationship which can last right through life, be influential right through life. And deal with, for example, children who approach adulthood with severe problems which can't be resolved during childhood and can only be dealt with during their adult life, if at all.
- [72:10]
Adam Swift
Thank you. Yes, now that's very helpful. Yeah. So we use this word child in at least two completely different ways. We use it to refer to a stage of life when one is a child as opposed to an adult. But we also use it to refer to a place in a relationship. So I am my parents children, and I will be after my parents child and I will be after they're dead. And I will, I will be after I am dead, I will still be my parents child. So yes, I agree. And so the question about, I mean, I can only repeat my answer to the second part. The first part I'll come back to. Yes, that's exactly right. There's a huge question about the obligations of adults to, well, let's say now, let's call them parents to their children at different stages of their children's lives, just as there is. And I just really didn't talk about that very much and I haven't really thought about it very much. And what would be interesting for me selfishly would be, does our approach help us think about those questions or doesn't it? I think it probably does. So that's really good. On the question of responsibilities as opposed to rights, remember that the interest in being a parent, I said, is an interest in playing the fiduciary role and that means having the responsibilities. So it's not that our view privileges parents rights as opposed to parents responsibilities, it's that what it's important to get to do on our view is to be the person who has those responsibilities. So parental responsibilities are still really central in our picture. But parental rights matter too. Because if the state just came along and said, okay, we found a better parent for this kid, you would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I have a right to parent this child, even if it's just because I've been doing it for the last five years or whatever. So we don't want to lose the whole idea that parents have rights against what might be proposed to state policy. But I totally agree that responsibilities are central. Absolutely.
- [74:31]
Audience Member 1
Thank you.
- [74:34]
Audience Member 8
Thank you for a good lucid and fluid fluent speech, which is not always the case. The question is.
- [74:41]
Adam Swift
Thank you.
- [74:44]
Audience Member 4
Good.
- [74:45]
Adam Swift
Yes.
- [74:45]
Audience Member 8
The question is often when parents split up, I don't know what the percentage is, it must be quite high. There is a tendency for the man to have restricted or difficult or perhaps blocked altogether access to child or children. And this can mean a narrow and restricted and prejudiced upbringing for the child, which can result in backwardness socially and intellectually and possibly juvenile delinquency. So do you. Oh, and there are organizations for fathers which are eagerly supported and, but which are impecunious and don't appear to have much political clout. And the media often treats them as. They only come up in the media when there's something sensational, you know, climbing Big Ben or something that's slightly comical about them. So do you think the courts are leaning too much in favor of female axis and the restriction of the other parent for axis and, and help and upbringing?
- [76:04]
Adam Swift
Yeah, thank you. That's a really good question. So my answer is a bit complicated, but I'll try. So if you think about the way I set up our view, we say adults have an interest in being parents. So if when the parents separate, one of them is denied access to the child or has much less access to being a parent playing that role, then that looks like a real cost to that adult. So you would think that our theory would kind of be in general on the side of allowing both adults to maintain a parenting relationship with the child and certainly if that's good for children, but also on the adult interest grounds. Right. So as it were, at the level of principle, I should be quite keen on Fathers for Justice and other organizations like that. Right. But you have to remember that we're talking now about cases of parental separation where the child is particularly vulnerable and I've read quite a lot of evidence about this and the idea that there should be a presumption in favour of the child staying with the mother rather than equal parenting looks to me to be justified on child centred ground. So I think in cases of parental separation the child really has to come first, the child's best interests have to come first. And on the whole, as a matter of general policy, it looks as if it's the case that the presumption it's not, not conclusive, it can be defeated. But it's not unreasonable for courts to act with a presumption that the child should primarily be parented by the mother because the kind of toing and fro it depends on the age of the child, but the kind of toing and froing, or if the parents are in a very conflictual relationship, then trying to maintain an equal relationship with both in certain stages can be very traumatic for the child. So I would say that in these cases the child's interest in practice will come first and that will often yield a presumption in favour of maternal custody. Just while the mic's going for. So in Australia they introduced a policy whereby the father had a right to equal parenting with the child post separation. And what implication that had was that loads of men who'd had very little to do with their children up to that point, and maybe that's why they split up suddenly had the right to equal access to the child and they'd shown little or no interest in parenting before that. So you would at least want to consider it on a case by case basis and not have a default 5050 rule. Because when they introduced that in Australia, my understanding of the evidences and it was deeply problematic for children. Sorry, I went on the bit. Sorry.
- [79:13]
Audience Member 4
Yes. To the extent that the theory that.
- [79:16]
Adam Swift
You'Ve developed has yields specific sociological outcomes.
- [79:24]
Audience Member 4
Or a system, is there any example.
- [79:28]
Adam Swift
That you're aware of from history that approximates what that outcome might look like? For us, The question was whether there is any example in history of something that would look like this kind of society or the way of thinking about the family that I would propose. Well, I think Sweden isn't that far off. Right. So in Sweden, what happens is that the level of inequality between children born to rich families and children born to poor families is much less. So there's much less at stake in whether you're lucky with your parents or unlucky with your parents. Parenting is a much less stressful activity because there is a social welfare net safety system. So I'm not neurotically worrying about investing in my kids in order to protect them against possible real bad outcomes because the society has created a social insurance model to protect them. So that looks like there's going to be more good family stuff going on. And the, as it were, negative effects of the familial interactions, the kind of disruption of inequality will be less. Of course, there's still some. Of course, in Sweden, children of rich parents do better than children of poor parents in a way that I think is still unfair, but it's much, much less. So that's why in a way, the kind of policy implications are rather kind of. Some of them anyway are kind of rather conventional. They protect all of us from really bad outcomes, mitigate the inequality in the reward schedule, and then we can go about our parenting without worrying about all these unequalizing consequences or worrying less about.
- [81:30]
Moderator
We have time for a final quick question in the very center.
- [81:44]
Audience Member 6
Hi, you focused on this parent child dyad and some of the questions have gone to talk about the role of Single parents. And you've mentioned this throughout your talk as well. So is there a right for someone to be a single parent, especially when they elect to be a single parent? That may be in terms of adoption or in women going to sperm banks and creating children. When the intention is to be a single parent, is there a particular right and does it change if you are electing to be a single parent?
- [82:27]
Adam Swift
Yeah. Good. That's a good question. So in the adoption case, you know, it seems to me that in that case what we need to do is look at kind of what's going to be best for the children on the whole, because these are children, you know, who almost by definition are vulnerable and likely to fall below some kind of adequacy standard unless we're really careful. So for me, the kind of policy question would be if there are enough. So what kind of parents are most likely to be most helpful to adoptive children in current circumstances, probably two parents are going to be better. There's twice the energy, there's twice the, you know, other things equal, there's twice the income. So it would look like, you know, but that's not to say that we shouldn't reorganize the way, you know, rewards are distributed and make it possible for single parents to parent just as well as two parents. So children of single parents do tend to do worse than children of two parents. But nearly the whole effect is because single parents have less money than two parents. And if you control for that, then it looks as if the difference in the outcomes for children is not that great. So that means if we wanted to, we could facilitate single people becoming parents by subsidizing them to do that if we wanted to. There's all kinds of other reasons why we might want to do that or why not want to do that. Do people have a right to be a single parent? If it's true, as seems to be the case, that children of single parents do, okay, then the adult interest in getting to be a parent looks like it might support some claim to be supported in the activity of becoming a parent, even if you want to do it on your own. Yeah, but it would all turn on very controversial empirical evidence about the effects on kids of being the children of single parents. And I think, go back to another question. I think if you are a single parent, you have even more responsibility to allow in to your child's life other adults, partly on gender grounds. Right. So this comes up when you think about gay parenting or lesbian parenting. Is it important for the child's emotional development. Supposing she's got two lesbian mothers, is it important for her to be exposed to men? My crude understanding of emotional development theory would say, yes, it is pretty important to that. But, you know, that's a whole other. Whole other discussion.
- [85:14]
Moderator
Unfortunately, we don't have any more time for further questions. But we do have enough time to thank everyone for asking their questions. In particular, thank Adam for answering the questions.