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Why and How to Prefer a Causal Account of Parenthood

2014; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/josp.12059

1467-9833

Lindsey Porter,

Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse

The most promising account of parental obligation currently on offer is a causal account. According to such an account, parents incur obligation to their offspring by causing them to exist. Causal accounts are explanatorily strong—the moral force of causing someone to exist seems straightforward. They seem to more or less capture our everyday intuitions about who is a parent with parental obligation and why. However, causal accounts are not problem-free. Importantly, causal accounts do not pick out adoptive parents as parents with parental obligation. Further, causal accounts do seem to pick out gamete donors as parents with parental obligation. The difficulty in fitting nongenetic parents into such an account—as well as that of excluding nonparental progenitors (like gamete donors)—has led some to reject the causal account in favor of a consent, or "voluntarist" account of parental obligation. Voluntarist accounts, like causal accounts, seem to have a clear moral mechanism: where obligation is acquired by causing existence on a causal account, it is acquired by consent or volunteer on a voluntarist account.1 Indeed, a voluntarist account of parental obligation is squarely in line with standard philosophical thinking about role obligations more generally: we have role obligations in virtue of having consented to take on the role to which the obligation attaches.2 However, this mechanism seems to fly in the face of our basic assumptions about the nature of parenthood and parental obligation. Importantly, we tend to think that parents are obliged to foster the well-being of their children even if they do not want to; that is, even if they do not consent to do so. We think that parents, even and perhaps especially unwilling parents, can and ought to be held to account with regard to their obligation to their children.3 So, we seem to be left with two equally strong, but equally flawed accounts of parental obligation: a causal account, on the one hand—one that seems to "get it right" with respect to the nonvoluntariness of parental obligation, but wrong on who has such obligation—and a voluntarist account, which seems to match intuitions about nonbiological parents and nonparental progenitors, but seems to inappropriately conceptualize parental obligation as optional.4 Elizabeth Brake has argued that a voluntarist account of parental obligation should be preferred over a causal account of parenthood.5 Causal accounts, Brake argues, suffer (at least) two conceptual weaknesses: there is an explanatory gap between being the metaphysical cause of someone's existence and owing that someone care; and causal accounts belie the socially constructed nature of parenthood itself. Given these weaknesses, Brake argues that the voluntarist account is the stronger of the two accounts. I will argue that the explanatory gap between causing and being obliged can be filled on a more plausible conception of the nature of the obligation; and that, while a simple causal account cannot answer Brake's concerns about the scope and nature of parenthood, there are easy and intuitive modifications available to a causal account, such that a modified causal account can be consistent with recognition of social construction. In section 2, I present Brake's arguments against a causal account. In section 3, I present her positive account and give some reasons for thinking we ought not bite the voluntarist bullet. In section 4, I argue that a causal account that recognizes the difference between being a (social) parent and being a progenitor (what I will call a "maker") is not vulnerable to Brake's social-construction objection. Finally, in section 5, I present an alternative to Brake's libellous-causing account of the moral power of causing: a broadly Kantian account of causing existence as choosing for. On the face of it, causal accounts of parental obligation have much to recommend them. According to a causal account, parents are obliged to care for their children in virtue of having caused their children to exist. On this picture, then, we have an apparently coherent account of why parents are obliged that fits with other accounts of obligation: parental obligation is a sort of liability; it is acquired in virtue of the morally weighty action (causing existence) of the parents. Causal accounts, importantly, have teeth. One does not have to be willing to be held to account. The parent who says "I don't want to" has failed, on a causal account, in her moral duty.6 Consent accounts, on the other hand, appear to be unable to hold "deadbeat" parents, feckless neglecters, and the like, to account. But Brake argues that causal accounts have (at least) two serious problems, and as such we ought to reject them. In section 4, I will argue that these worries arise for a causal account only if we fail to notice the ambiguity in the term "parent"; and that by picking apart the (at least) two distinct roles salient to discussion of parental obligation, we can dissolve Brake's worries. First, I will rehearse the worries below. Brake's first worry about causal accounts is that the connection between causing and being obliged is not so clear as it may first appear. One worry about causing as an obligation-motivator is that it is unclear who should count as a cause: are obstetricians causes? Are gamete donors? Are the parents' matchmakers? A causal account of parental obligation needs a solid account of causation, on pain of picking out the wrong people as parents, and the account must be noncircular. In section 3, I will discuss this smaller worry further and argue that an appropriate conceptualization of causation is available to the causal theorist. However, a larger worry, according to Brake, is with the very conceptualization of parental obligations as compensatory obligations: how do we get from causing human existence to owing care? Brake begins by pointing out that only some acts of wronging an individual oblige us to compensate them for that harm. For example, if I hurt your feelings, I am presumably not obliged to compensate you for this hurt. However, if I damage your car, I probably am. So, an account is needed of why causing someone to exist is the sort of harm that generates compensatory obligations. Brake argues that such an account is unavailable. The first step in explaining the link between causing existence and being obliged to compensate is to motivate the claim that causing someone to exist results in the right sort of harm. Brake notes that compensatory obligations are rectificatory. They are obligations to fix bad states of affairs for which one is morally responsible; to "make the victim whole again." The harm that generates them, then, must be either a rights violation, or a "serious boundary-crossing harm" (2010, 159). So, we will need an account of why (or in what sense) causing someone to exist is either a rights violation or a serious boundary-crossing harm. Some theorists have supposed that the child's neediness is the relevant harm. Making someone needy is, plausibly, harming them in a way that generates a compensatory obligation. When one causes a child to exist, one causes an individual to be needy since babies and children just are needy. The compensatory obligation, then, is the obligation to rectify the child's neediness. Causing neediness, then, would count as a serious boundary-crossing harm. Alternately, we might suppose that causing existence generates rights that must not be violated. Brake considers Feinberg's claim that children have a "right to a reasonable assurance of a minimally decent life" (Brake 2010, 159). On this account, causing a child to exist would be a rights violation in the absence of care. For the sake of argument, Brake assumes that both of these claims are correct: that causing neediness is a harm that demands compensation; and that failure to provide reasonable assurance of a minimally decent life would constitute a rights violation. The harm and the potential rights violation together, then, would generate what Brake calls "procreative costs": what one owes to the child in virtue of the harm done and of the child's rights. On this picture, one would have compensatory obligations toward one's offspring in virtue of having caused the child to exist. However, Brake points out, parental obligation far outstrips procreative costs. If neediness is the bad state of affairs that must be rectified, then the compensation ought to consist of making the child nonneedy. Clearly, children cannot be made non-needy; at best, their neediness can only be minimized. Minimizing neediness, it seems, would require the parent to enable the child to meet her own needs as far as is possible. If a reasonable assurance of a minimally decent life is the right that must not be violated, then the obligation is just to provide reasonable assurance of a minimally decent life. But parents surely owe their children more (and different) than simply enabling of self-sufficiency and opportunities for minimal decency. Importantly, we think that parents owe their children love, interpersonal warmth, and close involvement in their lives for at least many years. So, even if it is right to suppose that children are harmed by being brought into existence, and that children are put in danger of having their rights violated by being brought into existence, it seems that the compensatory obligations generated by this harm and this right cannot fully describe parental obligation. Furthermore, the extent to which parents must provide for the well-being of their children is significantly dependent upon social circumstances. A child raised in a society that lacks basic sanitation, educational opportunities, and so on is by default further off the "minimally decent" mark than is a child raised in a society that offers robust social care. This means that what parents are obliged to, on this compensatory model, will vary with social circumstance. In this sense, the child's "neediness" is not caused by the causal parents alone. So there is a gap. I will argue that this gap is only apparent and that compensation is simply not the appropriate model for understanding parental obligation. In section 4, I will argue that a rectificatory account of the connection between causing existence and owing care is not the appropriate account of the moral weight of causing existence. I will argue instead that we ought to understand causing existence as a (unique) instance of choosing on another's behalf and the obligation it generates as an obligation to choose well. Brake's weightiest worry about the causal account is a worry over the social or institutional nature of parenthood. Who we take to be parents depends upon how our societies are structured. Likewise, what parental obligation consists in is, in Brake's words, "institutional, not natural": both what children need, and what parents are expected to provide them with, are delineated by our social practices. Parenthood, then, is socially constructed. This seems to pose two different sorts of problems for a causal account. First, it seems like it simply cannot be the case that certain people (e.g., biological progenitors) belong to the category "parent" of necessity, or "naturally." And second, it seems that it cannot be the case that parents, of necessity, have the obligations we intuitively assign to parents. Parental obligations are role obligations; that is, they are obligations one has only in virtue of being a parent. So, parental obligations will apply to anyone who occupies the role. It is a challenge for any theory of parenthood to get this right: any good theory needs to explain why parents—that is, the people we (pretheoretically) pick out as parents—are obliged. As a point of clarification, Brake differentiates among three sorts of parenthood: moral parenthood, social parenthood, and legal parenthood. Legal parents are just those who the law holds accountable for the care of children. Social parents are those who fill the social, care role of parent for the child. Moral parents are those who we take to be morally responsible for the care of the child. These three sorts of parenthood come apart. For example, an absent father may be a legal parent—obliged by law to pay child support, say—while having never met a child and thus not fulfilling the social role of parent. Grandparents who take on the full-time care of their grandchildren might be social parents, although we might not think them morally obliged to provide such care. And so on. The primary concern of a (moral) theory of parenthood is to fix moral parenthood; that is, to assign obligations to all and only those people who are moral parents. This task is not straightforward. For example, a simple biological account of parenthood will not pick out all and only those we take to be parents, since we usually think that gamete donors are not parents, despite being biological progenitors. A simple causal account will not do, since adoptive parents—who we take to be parents—do not cause their children to exist.7 So, properly delineating the role of parent is a challenge for any theory of parenthood. Brake's worry, however, goes one step further: the worry is that there is no hard-and-fast delineation of parenthood, or rather, that because "parent" varies so greatly in its meaning across history and cultures, we must conclude that there is no objective moral category to be delineated. It seems like parents are just those who parent. If this is right, then it is difficult to see how we can get from a natural fact—like biology, or causation—to the moral fact of parenthood. One might be tempted to reply as follows: "even if we use 'parent' in many ways, still we can talk about parents; that is, even if someone, say, acts as a parent, and we call him 'a parent,' still we can separate him, in our theory, from a real parent. And it's the real parents who have the obligations." But who might these real parents be? We cannot say that the source of the sperm and the source of the ovum are the "real" parents since gamete donors are not parents. We cannot say that either the biological parents or the adoptive parents are the parents, since adoption just happens to be the legal convention by which we in the west in this day and age formalize familial arrangements centered around children, when we do formalize them. In some matrilineal societies, Brake points out, children are traditionally raised by their mothers and their mothers' families—for example, by mother and maternal uncle. In most societies until relatively recently, children were cared for by larger extended families. Nuclear mother/father families are our paradigm setting for childrearing by social convention, and social convention surely cannot drive moral fact. One might be tempted still to say that, while the extended family may have cared for the child, still the extended family is not the parents. But it is not clear how we can make sense of this stance. In the case of matrilineal communities, for example, where mother and maternal uncle traditionally raise a child, the male progenitor is in the same relationship to the child as is a sperm donor in twenty-first century Western society. If the sperm donor is not a parent, it seems unlikely the male progenitor in the matrilineal society is. If the nonbiological male social parent in cases of sperm donation is the father (and surely he is), then it seems like the mother's brother is the father in matrilineal societies. And there are examples much closer to home: many grandparents, for example, raise their grandchildren. It does not do to point to the fact that the children do not call them "parents": children in China do not call their parents "parents" either, and yet they are. Fixing parenthood seems a serious difficulty for a causal account of parenthood.8 On the one hand, if we understand causation narrowly—such that, for example, only those immediately responsible for conceiving and gestating the embryo that becomes the child are taken to be causes of the child's existence—then our conception of parenthood is tethered to our narrow social understanding. As Brake puts it, it would seem simply to "reflect the heterosexual nuclear-family practices common in contemporary western society," rather than to rightly pick out moral parents (2010, 167). On the other hand, if we understand causation in a way that takes social practice into account, then the moral force of causing seems to melt away. For example, we might say that maternal uncles in matrilineal societies are causes of a child's existence: the child is conceived, gestated, and birthed on the understanding that the uncle will be a primary carer to the child, and has responsibility for the child's wellbeing. The social understanding that he will fulfil this role is part of the circumstances in which the child is brought into being, and he has actively played this role. Therefore, he is a cause. But if we understand cause in this way, causal parenthood becomes impossibly large and indefinite, and the causal account loses its teeth. Fixing moral parenthood will depend on contingent social facts, rather than anything metaphysical; most plausibly, it will also depend on the intentions of prospective moral parents. This will mean, in effect, that one is a cause of a child's existence only if she intends to parent. Causation will drop out entirely in this case, and the account will collapse into voluntarism. Parents will be those who choose to be so, and causing will lose its explanatory power altogether. Brake, then, concludes that the causal account ought to be abandoned and a straightforwardly voluntarist account given. Because causal accounts seem to fall down with respect to motivating compensatory obligation, and fixing moral parenthood, Brake argues that a voluntarist account of parenthood is, after all, the most plausible account we can give. In Brake's terminology, moral parenthood springs from social parenthood, and whether one is a social parent depends upon whether one has consented to occupy the social role parent. On standard consent accounts of parenthood, consent to parent is sufficient, but not necessary for parental obligation.9 This sort of account makes sense of the obligations adoptive parents, and de facto (nonbiological) parents are under with respect to their children, but leaves open the question of how such obligation can be otherwise acquired. Brake defends a stronger version of the consent account, on which consent is necessary, but not sufficient for parental obligation. So on this account, one acquires parental obligation by consenting—either explicitly or tacitly—to parent and by being in the appropriate rights position with respect to the child.10 The plausibility of this view, Brake writes, "derives from the thought that obligations limit liberty, and liberty can only be limited through choice or as a result of wrong-doing" (2010, 156). Because, as we have seen, conceiving of parental obligation as compensatory obligation fails, the curtailment of liberty that parental obligation constitutes must be voluntary. Brake considers the objection that many special obligations—for example, filial obligations—seem to be nonvoluntary: it seems as though we have duties to family members that we did not choose. In that case, it is unclear why we should need to choose to have parental obligations; why parental obligations should not be like other sorts of familial duties. She suggests that these nonvoluntary obligations may be "duties of virtue"—rather than duties of justice—that do not correlate to moral rights (2010, 156). In other words, while I may have filial duties toward my parents, even though I have never consented to have such duties, my parents do not have a right that those duties be fulfilled. I fulfill my duties toward my family as a matter of virtue. If I do not, I am perhaps vicious, but I have not violated anyone's rights. In contrast, if I fail in my parental obligations, I have exactly violated my child's rights; I have perpetrated an injustice against my child. … once someone has chosen not to abort, undergone prenatal medical care, bought some baby clothes, and taken an infant home, the role of parent has been tacitly accepted. In our society, taking a child home as one's own counts as assuming the role of parent—there is no other way to describe this activity, except as baby-snatching. If abortion is an option, then choosing to continue a pregnancy without making plans for adoption constitutes accepting the role of parent.12 In other words, one typically consents to parent by doing it, by parenting. And once one has done so—once one has taken up the social role—one is thereby morally obliged. There is no other way, according to Brake's account, to acquire parental obligation. All parental obligation is (broadly) voluntary. Voluntarist accounts are vulnerable to an objection that Brake has dubbed the "deadbeat dads" objection. Indeed, this objection seems to be the strongest objection to a voluntarist account. Brake argues that the worry is only apparent: that the intuitions we have about "deadbeat dads" can be adequately handled by broader moral considerations in a way consistent with the voluntarist account. According to the deadbeat dads objection, a voluntarist account is implausible because so-called deadbeat dads cannot be held to account: fathers who abandon their children and fail to provide support cannot be said to have violated their child's rights nor ought they be subject to moral scrutiny for having declined to support them. Voluntarist accounts seem to be unable to attribute blameworthiness in the face of global parental failing. Brake argues that the intuition that biological fathers who abandon their children are blameworthy is not apt as a criticism of the voluntarist account. To the extent that "deadbeat dads" ought to be held to account, she argues, they are not so obliged on parental grounds. Thus, although the voluntarist account cannot, on its own, explain why abandoning one's offspring is morally reprehensible—or why fathers ought, for example, to be obliged to pay child support—this does not tell against the account because we can explain these judgments in other ways. First, Brake writes, fathers "owe general duties of rescue to the infant" (2010, 174). Just like everyone else, fathers have a general duty not to knowingly abandon a child to its death. Arguably, biological parents are in a particularly good position to aid their biological children. And anyone in a good position to save a helpless child from imminent death or danger has a (general) duty to do so. So, since biological fathers are often uniquely situated to rescue their children, they have a general (nonparental) duty to do so if need arises. Second, there are strong social-justice reasons in favor of assigning legal parenthood to biological fathers, even if we cannot assign moral parenthood to them. Most notably, single mothers and their children are among the most vulnerable in our society. Assigning legal support duties to biological fathers is in keeping, then, with maintaining social justice by alleviating the vulnerability of both the child and the mother. And finally, Brake argues that "'deadbeat dads' usually describes men who accept obligations and then abandon their families" (2010, 175)—social (and thus moral) dads who walk out on their children. In these cases, a voluntarist account is perfectly able to attribute wrongdoing since these "deadbeat dads" are parents with parental obligation on a voluntarist account. On the other hand, some people we might want to describe as "deadbeat dads" are not social parents who have abandoned their children. They are what Brake calls "reckless procreators": men who do not take precaution against procreation, but do not subsequently take up the parenthood role. These deadbeat dads cannot be held to account qua parents on a voluntarist account, but the blameworthiness of their behavior can be otherwise explained. This variety of deadbeat dad, according to Brake, has harmed the mother: "Pregnancy has life-altering, sometimes devastating, social, economic, and physical effects on women, and reckless male procreators may be rightly blamed for subjecting them to these."13 So, while reckless procreators have not failed in any parental obligation—since they have none—still they can be rightly criticized for harming the mothers of their children on Brake's account.14 But, while this reply to the deadbeat dads worry can account for blameworthiness, it does not get the right sort of blame in. What seems particularly blameworthy about the deadbeat dad's behavior is that he has harmed the child, not the child's mother—although of course, he has probably done that also. This is clear when we consider a situation in which the birth father has declined to provide care for the child and the mother is unable adequately to do so on her own. She is probably harmed, but what troubles us particularly is that the child is harmed: we feel the child is harmed by the birth father, not (simply) the mother.15 And the intuition is that he owes the child (at least) rescue because he bears a unique relation to the child and not simply because he is like anyone able to rescue. To describe the deadbeat dad as violating a general duty of rescue does not seem to capture the intuition about what is wrong with the abandonment.16 After all, doctors and nurses in hospital are probably in a better position to provide rescue to the baby in the first instance, but we do not have the intuition that they must provide sustained care or support.17 An account that could preserve the intuition that the birth father, in particular, owes the child care ought to be preferred. Furthermore, in the absence of a motivation for picking out the biological father as being in a particular moral relation to the child, it is unclear why it would serve justice to assign legal parenthood to him, even given what justice demands for the mother. Why not tax all males of sexual maturity? Why not assign legal parenthood to the mother's nearest male kin—brother or father, say? It seems unlikely that a purely practical reason for holding the father to account could justify compelling him in particular to provide care if we cannot attribute moral parenthood to him. The biological father seems an intuitive choice for legal parenthood precisely because he, unlike other men of sexual maturity, is the reason there is this particular child who needs a legal parent. In other words, assigning legal parenthood to the biological father makes sense because he stands in an appropriate moral relation to the child. Finally, the claim that proper deadbeat dads—that is, those who "stick around" and then abandon—are blameworthy, whereas "feckless procreators" are not strains the concept of tacit consent beyond usefulness. In many cases, these fathers do not, as Brake describes, buy baby clothes or take the baby home. Indeed, these fathers may in many cases play no more of an active role in the child's early life than do the grandparents or the mother's friends. If we are to say that a man who is the biological father of a child has consented to father the child in virtue of having "stuck around," then it seems either that the mother's friends have also consented to be the father of the child—and are thus also fathers of the child18 —or that the biological (or causal) relationship is necessary for the father to be a father. But if this is so, the consent account will quite obviously lose the plausibility edge it seemed to have over the causal account. The problem with Brake's reply to the deadbeat dads objection is just that voluntarism about parenthood is implausible. More broadly, the idea that morality cannot curtail our liberty without our consent is implausible. The relationships we find ourselves in with other persons—whether we enter them purposively and voluntarily (as with friendships or promises), or simply find ourselves in them (as in familial relationships, or even as bystanders or neighbors or fellow citizens)—plainly do generate moral obligations. We do have special obligations that we do not choose, and this is borne out in a great many of our everyday moral intuitions.19 However, Brake is right that an insistence on the deadbeat dad's having violated a special obligation to the child is question-begging in the absence of a plausible alternative account of such special obligations. After all, feckless procreators, anyway, are clearly not social parents. In the next section, I will present a causal account of parental obligation—drawing on the work of David Archard—and show how such an account avoids Brake's social-construction objection, and in the final section of the paper, I will present an alternative to the "liability" model of causal parenthood: a Kantian conceptualization of causing to exist as morally meaningful "choosing for." In this section, I will present my positive account of parental obligation—what I am calling a "bifurcated causal account"—according to which causing a child to come into existence places one in a distinct moral role to which obligation attaches, but does not make one a parent; while occupying the role "parent" also obliges one to one's child(ren). I will call the role one enters when one causes a child to exist the "maker" role, and the role one enters upon becoming a (social) parent simply "parent." I will argue that being a maker implies a pro tanto (but defeasible) duty to take on the role parent, but also implies obligations to the child even if the role "parent" is not taken up. A straightforward causal account of parenthood, unlike the voluntarist account, meets the challenge of the deadbeat dads objection. On a causal account, those who bring children into exi