The Limits of Parental Authority

Childhood Wellbeing as a Social Good

Johan C. Bester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000530681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

This book offers a novel theory of childhood well-being as a social good. It re-examines our fundamental assumptions about parenting, parental authority, and a liberal society's role in the raising of children.

The author defends the idea that the good of a child is inexorably linked to the good of society. He identifies and critiques the problematic assumption that parenting is an extension of individual liberty and shows how we run into problems in medical decision-making for children because of this assumption. He develops an objective conception of what is good for a child in a liberal society, drawing on the assumptions of liberty, and from here constructs a set of things that society and its members owe children. There are ways in which society should support and intervene in parental decisions to guarantee a child's well-being. Ultimately, raising children is a social activity that requires input from society. The author then applies this theory of childhood well-being to develop a framework for medical decision-making for children. He also uses practical examples, such as vaccinations, parental leave, and healthcare access, to demonstrate the implications of his theory for public policy.

The Limits of Parental Authority: Childhood Wellbeing as a Social Good will be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and advanced students working in bioethics, political philosophy, and public health policy.

1The Work of This Book

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025108-1

I started my work in bioethics with a foray into the study of the ethics of childhood vaccination. As a practicing clinician, I was confronted by the seemingly ever-raging debate about vaccines, and the doubts expressed by some about vaccination. It raised in me various questions – ethical and otherwise – about childhood vaccines, which eventually led to many years of scholarly work and study in this field. My PhD thesis focused on the ethical aspects of measles vaccination in children. I published a host of articles on the ethical implications of vaccination for society, parents, and medical practitioners.

Part of this work necessarily involved reading and thinking about the way in which decisions are made for children. What is the nature of parental authority, and what are its limits? Can parents refuse beneficial vaccinations, and if they can, what is the moral basis on which they do so? How does medical decision-making for children work? What is the role of clinicians and of society in deciding about vaccines for children? Should societies overrule parents who refuse beneficial vaccinations for their children, and if so, on what grounds? And various questions of this nature.

As I continued my study about these questions, I identified something curious. Almost everywhere I encountered talk of the best interests of children being the primary consideration for making decisions about children, and everyone proceeded as if this was a settled matter. Yet, when I read further, I noticed a clear and yet sometimes unaddressed additional assumption influencing frameworks used to make decisions for children. This assumption was also present and influential in the writing of scholars and in the academic literature about childhood vaccinations. It was as if there was this unspoken and unidentified assumption that everyone shared, everyone knew about, and everyone used in their reasoning that nobody clearly acknowledged or analyzed, but rather just took for granted. This assumption was, to put it simply, that parental authority is a matter of individual parental liberty. Whether one calls it parental autonomy, or parental rights, or parental liberty – there seemed to be this assumption that what really morally grounds childhood decision-making is the deference that societies should have for the liberty of parents. Consequently, it seemed as if some people thought that it wasn’t actually the interests of the child that was the primary consideration in decision-making for children. Instead, some were proceeding as if the primary consideration when making decisions or policies for children is the idea that society owes parents a certain amount of deference. It seemed as if, for some people, the driving force in decision-making for children were the liberty rights of the parents and not the interests of children.

Once I noticed this in scholarly writing, I saw this assumption as being pervasive everywhere I looked. I saw it in instances of pediatric decision-making and in court decisions about children. I heard this in conversations with colleagues and friends. Whenever I suggested casually to people that we should really re-examine the fundamental assumption that parents have liberty rights that ground their authority over children, I was met with either strident push-back or with skepticism, but always with the clear conviction that I was asking questions that ought not be asked. I was challenging something that is central to the cultural milieu in America and in places where American culture is influential. I have gradually drawn the conclusion that the presumption of parental liberty as grounding for parental authority is widely accepted and influential in American society.

The odd thing is that the best interest standard forms the ethical standard of reference in scholarly and legal circles, meaning that it is what best serves the well-being of the child that should be the primary consideration in decisions and policy about children. Yet, if I am correct, there is another assumption, a competing and very different assumption, that animates decision-making and policy about children. And that is the assumption that parents have the right, as part of their individual liberty, to decide about their children what the parents wish. As I studied further, I recognized that the latter assumption seems similar to the ethical and legal standards of long ago – when children were seen as property or chattel, and the father had the right to decide for his child whatever the father wished. Gradually this paradigm was replaced by a paradigm that seeks to place the child’s well-being as the central consideration in decisions and policy about the child. But clearly, the old way of thinking is still influential. What we see, therefore, is a struggle between two different worldviews when it comes to children, two philosophies that argue for dominance. We see push-and-pull between these two views, and I think many of us live with these two competing philosophies in our heads and in our thinking, without realizing it. We may take it for granted that we should consider the well-being of the child as first importance in decision-making for the child. At the same time, we may take it for granted that parents have liberty rights that should be unfettered by the state, and that give parents liberty claims over the affairs of their children. In fact, in medical decision-making I sometimes observe that clinicians substitute for the principle of autonomy as it works in adults the principle of parental autonomy when the patient is a child, seeing parental decision-making for children as morally equivalent to situations where adults make decisions for themselves. It is as if these clinicians view parental decision-making on behalf of the child as the same thing as when an individual exercises individual liberty, and as if it rests on the same moral foundation.

I noticed a second thing during my study related to questions of vaccinations and decision-making for children. Everyone spoke of the best interests of children being a central consideration in decisions about the child. But nobody seemed to have a clear understanding of exactly what is meant by childhood interests or what is included on a list of things that count as childhood interests. People generally proceeded as if it were widely known what is meant by the interests of children, as if there is a list somewhere we all know about and agree upon, so that we didn’t have to explain what they were. But when digging deeper, you find that there really is no such list, and there is really some uncertainty about what is meant by childhood interests, and there is disagreement about what the relationship is between society, parents, and children. The result of this is that everyone makes up their own list of interests when they make decisions for a child. But this should be no surprise if it is true that there is a widespread assumption that parental liberty is the grounding of parental authority. Part of liberty is that I decide for myself what is the good; I pursue the good as I see it. Thus, if parents have liberty rights over their children, it follows that parents decide what is good for the child, and parents decide what it means to pursue the good in relation to the child. Parents define, as it were, what well-being means for the child. This seems wrong; but when I looked around, I saw no clear and widely accepted articulation of the interests of a child that is based on the assumptions central to a liberal society, neutral between different views of the good and different moral theories, that could act as reference instead of a variety of individual notions of the good of the child. And if the interests of the child, the well-being of the child, is a central concern in decision-making about children, then a liberal society ought to have such a reference or list of what is meant by the good of childhood and what is meant by a child’s interests.

It is these problems that I address in this book. I will examine the first claim I made, that there is good reason to think we still have this assumption working in our society that parents have liberty rights over children.¹ I will show why we have good reason to think that this assumption exists, and I will show why this assumption is morally problematic. I will then create a theory of the childhood good which holds for any society in which liberty is an essential component. That is, I will construct an account of the childhood good that takes the assumptions of liberty as a starting point, and I will use this as foundation for the notions of childhood interests, childhood well-being, and the foundations and limits of parental authority. My hope is that this theory will lead to policy and social arrangements that contribute to the well-being of children, but moreover to building a good society: better, kinder, and more just. This book is meant to influence decision-making for children and policymaking that affects children for the good, and I hope that it will do so.

The Work of This Book

This book examines a set of interrelated questions that arise in liberal societies: What does society owe its children? What can be considered the good of the child in a society with many different conceptions of the good and value pluralism as backdrop? What is the scope and the nature of the parental role and parental authority, and what is the basis of this role and authority? It is a work of applied normative ethics which draws on ethical arguments and philosophical reflection together with relevant empirical evidence to advance and ground normative claims. This work is therefore what can be called creative philosophy; I identify a number of problems and construct a theory to address these problems, thereby creating new ways of understanding the moral questions raised. In this book I offer a theory of the good of the child, of the parental role and its moral foundations, and the moral obligations of society toward the children in that society. I am more concerned with describing what should be the case, how we should think about the moral claims of children and the moral grounding for the parental role, than I am with providing an analysis of what is the case in our legal or policy systems. It is inevitable that work such as this seeks to provide moral foundations for law and policymakers, but this is not a work of legal analysis or primarily of policy analysis. It is a work of moral philosophy, and it describes moral obligations and values.

In this extended argument I will establish two main points. First, that parental authority is not a liberty right or an extension of the parent’s individual liberty rights, and should not be treated as if it were a liberty right. Rather, parenting should be thought of as both a social role which aims at identifiable social goods and at the same time a morally significant relationship that affects the good of children. Second, that children are owed a set of goods, necessary for childhood well-being and for achieving the end of childhood, and that these represent moral claims on parents and on society. Society is obligated to guarantee a minimum of these goods for children, as are parents, so that parents and society cooperate to provide these for children. These goods are not matters of parental discretion or things that are nice to have; society is obligated to provide these for children. These goods represent things owed to children and can be called components of the childhood good or childhood interests.

I start with a suggestion: there are factors at work in our society that cause problems when trying to think about the parental role and the nature and limits of parental authority. This has consequences for thinking about the moral claims of children and the role of society in the raising of children. We see these factors emerge in complex situations where decisions for children need to be made in courts or in medical situations, manifested as intractable disagreements about what should be done for a child and who gets to decide. When disputes arise about these matters, there may be persistent disagreement about when society’s institutions (such as government) should intervene on behalf of children. Even when it is clear that society should intervene, there may often be persistent disagreement about what criteria should be used to justify such intervention, what the intervention should look like, and what the scope and limits of parental authority are.

The first factor causing these difficulties is an assumption about the moral source of parental authority at work in our society that is quite problematic. The assumption is that parental authority is an individual liberty right or an extension of individual liberty. Where parental authority is seen as a kind of liberty right, the moral framework of liberty and related liberty-limiting principles are applied to thinking about parenting. This, as I will argue, has a whole host of problematic implications. It drives misunderstanding about the kind of thing parenting is, what constitutes good parenting, what the nature and scope of parental authority is, the role of society in raising children, and the relationship between society and parents.

The second factor is that there is no neutral, agreed-upon account of the good of children to ground the moral claims children have on society and on their parents. This is perhaps a feature of the liberal nature of our society; there are various different conceptions of the good at work within society, leading to different ideas about what is good for children and what is owed to children by parents and society. When disagreements about decisions involving children arise in the medical context or in the courts, it is often not just a matter of who gets to decide that is at issue, but also differing value judgments about what is good for a child pitted against each other. There is no objective statement of the good of the child meant to be neutral between different conceptions of morality that can be used to clarify competing claims. In a liberal society with many different versions of the good, it would be ideal to have an objective account of the good that can stand its ground in various different conceptions of the good in such situations. In bioethics, for example, the principles approach describes the ethical content of medicine and research involving humans by reference to general principles that can be grounded from various different conceptions of the good or by way of different and competing moral theories.² The principles approach in bioethics claims that it does not matter what conception of the good one adheres to or what ethical theory or tradition one is persuaded by, one would see the relevance and value of these four principles as starting points for bioethical reflection. In that way it draws on the large amount of moral agreement between different moral systems and moral traditions. Something similar is needed in the realm of the good of the child, and that is one of the focus areas of this book: to describe a conception of the good of the child that can ground moral decision-making for children in a liberal society.

I have suggested, then, that there are two problematic factors that influence moral thinking about parenting and the moral claims of children.

1. The assumption that parental authority is a kind of liberty right or an extension of individual liberty. This is a problematic assumption with wide-ranging implications.
2. There is no theory-neutral, objective account of the good of the child to ground what is owed children in a liberal society.

These two are related to each other; if we think of parenting as a matter of liberty, then it is up to every parent to decide for herself what is good for the child. In fact, in keeping with this view it is a parental right to define the good of the child, and it is not society’s business to interfere. This, I will argue, has unacceptable implications. It distorts parental authority, undermines the moral claims of children, and frustrates societal goods necessary to establish and maintain a good society. I will argue that parental authority cannot and should not be thought of as resting on individual liberty. A parent making decisions for a child is, after all, not doing the same kind of thing as a free adult making decisions for herself. Following this, I will argue that there are good reasons to think that parenting is a social activity with societal implications and should therefore be regulated by society’s moral code and laws rather than by the framework of liberty.

Once we remove the assumption that parenting is a kind of liberty right, the question, of course, arises: what is the moral foundation of parenting if not found in some right arising from the individual parent’s person? Ultimately, I will argue that parenting is a social role that protects the good of society and the good of children. Society and children, I will argue, have much invested in the parent – the parent is important to the good of the child, and the parent is important to realize specific social goods. Parenting is therefore dualistic: it is a social role aiming at specific social goods, while also being a morally significant relationship between a caregiver/parent and a child. Like any social role, the parental role gives rise to specific obligations and is open to scrutiny and regulation by society and its institutions. This means that raising a child is a social act, where parents have a specific role to play. It also has the implication that society has social goods at stake in the raising of a child, has an interest in the parental role, and therefore that society has a part to play in regulating the parenting role and in the raising of children. So understood we can rescue parental authority from the mistaken assumption that it is a liberty right, and instead recast it on its proper foundations. This shores up parental authority, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement and Dedication
• 1 The Work of This Book
• 2 Issues in Medical Decision-Making for Children: An Illustration of the Problem
• 3 Parental Authority as Individual Liberty – A Problematic Assumption
• 4 Why Parenting Should Be Supported and Regulated by Society
• 5 The Good of the Child and the Good of Society
• 6 What Society Should Guarantee for Children – An Account of Childhood Interests
• 7 Parenting as a Social Role – The Nature and Limits of Parental Authority
• 8 Practical Implications – Society’s Obligations and Society’s Policies
• Index