Partiality
and Family
Peter
Shea
December
13, 2005
Consider
three stories:
- Someone gives Johnny a pie to share with his three friends. He takes it to the picnic table and divides it as evenly as he can into four equal pieces. He then invites his friends to choose their pieces first.
- The mayor of small city has final authority about the location of a new bridge. There are two possible locations. He gathers the best information he can find about the number of people benefited by the bridge at each location and about the inconvenience caused by the bridge at each location. Finding that one location benefits substantially more people and creates substantially less inconvenience, he chooses that location as the location for the new bridge. Had he located the bridge in the other place, his own drive time to work would have been reduced by half an hour.
- A mother looks out her window and sees her child playing behind a car. The car suddenly backs up, rolling over the child’s leg. The mother calls an ambulance, takes the child to the hospital, and provides whatever money is necessary to repair the damage. She eventually has to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay the cost of reconstructive surgery.
These
are all stories of decent behavior. They, and many others, are the basic
stories by which we come to understand what is meant by “decent behavior.” An
account of decency that sought to show that one of these was not an instance of
decent behavior would not be plausible. These stories – and others like them –
are where we start from, in thinking about decency.
Any
general view of moral thinking that makes one of these stories the central
story is likely to raise problems for the other stories. Perhaps the mother
could have maximized benefit by putting only some of her medical resources into
the repair of her child (perhaps leaving the child with a limp). The extra
resources could have saved some other child’s life. Perhaps the mayor’s bridge
decision means that his son will never get to play sports, because the time
required to take him to practice is just too long, without a close bridge. Perhaps the area of town that would get the
new bridge, under the mayor’s utility calculations, has already received more
than its fair share of benefits from the city.
If
we admit that decency is “constituted” by many stories, we face the problem of
saying what to do in a case in which following the example or analogy of
different stories will lead to different results. If we try to make one story
central, we face the problem of explaining how the other stories are thought to
be central and why they are not central. My guess is that, of the two tasks,
the first one is the easier one.
Suppose
we have this pluralistic picture of the roots of morality. We might spend some
time writing about how a particular action, say “paying for college tuition for
one’s child,” may seem to be simply the result of taking one of these examples
seriously but is in fact a plausible result of taking several of them
seriously. Such a discussion need not be part of an argument that one of the
examples is in fact central or primary. It can be simply a demonstration: how a
reasonable person can think about behaving decently in a case to which several
examples of decency are relevant.
What
do I owe to my children? On that question, many different moral traditions,
many different central examples, have something to say. One might say: a fair
share of the resources I control. One might say: as much of my resources as they
need to flourish. There are strong reasons for thinking that these different
directives have quite different practical consequences. However, one might
argue that my children’s flourishing, rightly understood, promotes the welfare
of others, so that, in the long run, helping my children flourish is a
plausible strategy for equitably dividing my resources among those who need
them.
This
thesis opens a whole box of questions. One may conceive flourishing in many
different ways, and the thesis must surely be evaluated with respect to each of
those different ways of understanding human flourishing.
Surely,
on limited accounts of flourishing, this is plausible. It seems foolhardy to so
constrain my child’s life that he or she feels constantly needy and abused, in
order to do any ordinary sort of public good. This is equivalent to:
contributing value to the general treasury now by actions that produce a
psychology that will demand those same resources back – in counseling, public
assistance, prison – in the future. Beyond that, one might argue that one
equitably distributes the resources that one controls by providing for one’s
children whatever environment will help them to become sensitive to moral
considerations and capable of acting effectively on their moral convictions.
This might require a quite considerable investment in one’s own children, as
the expense of other worthy uses of one’s resources.
I
want to say three things about this problem of fairness versus parental
partiality. First, it is an empirical issue, in any practical context. For any
account of flourishing, from the most basic to the grandest, it will be an
empirical question what degree of parental investment and involvement is needed
to promote that sort of flourishing. The degree of conflict between the
requirements of fairness and parental imperatives toward partiality can’t be
determined in advance of many, many interviews with parents who have creatively
confronted this problem.
A
second point: this problem will be much different for people with different
capacities to do public good that otherwise would not get done. The problem
becomes most acute for those whose heroic engagement is necessary to the
success of important human projects: Dorothy Day, at the Catholic Worker House,
Jane Goodall, at Gombe. Such people may feel obliged to sacrifice time with
their children at critical moments in order to take care of their public
business at its critical moments. For lots of other people, the problem is less
acute: parenting crises and critical moments in public work don’t conflict that
often, alternative strategies are available at every point of decision, and it
seems reasonable to think that someone could work out a reasonable long-term
compromise between the demands of fairness and the demands of parental
obligation.
A
third and last point: different parents have different projects, and those
different projects sometimes involve different conceptions of human
flourishing. I may simply want to raise a decent, sane human being. Depending
on the amount of poison in the society and on the complexities of my child’s
neurological makeup, that project may be fairly cheap or it may cost me a
fortune – in private schools, psychologist’s bills, fines and court costs. But
I would think one could with close to absolute certainty make the case that any
investment needed to produce a decent, sane human being – or to make it likely
that my child will become such a human being – will pay for itself many times
over in advantages to all those whom advocates of fairness would urge us to
consider. First of all, any child who is not sane and/or decent is likely to
demand, in his or her lifetime, enormous resources from somebody, while
contributing very little to the general good. Further, and much more important,
a person who is not sane or decent has little hope of passing on sanity and
decency to his or her offspring, so the offspring are left to learn these
things by themselves – a chancy way to do business. The likelihood is that a
seriously defective person will be the start of a troubled family line,
extending through innumerable generations. Everyone is, like Abraham and Sarah,
the parent of nations. One has every reason to protect the victims of one’s
great great grandchildren’s potential mischief, and it is short-sighted to
leave that out of account.
However,
not all morally serious parents are concerned simply to raise sane and decent
children -- of some flavor or other. Some morally serious parents take
themselves to embody traditions of moral concern and motivation of very
particular sorts. The Adams family, for example, has a particular tradition of
intellectual excellence, tenacity in friendship, and public service. Those
particular capacities and interests can be communicated to children by that family,
in ways that they cannot be communicated to outsiders.[1] If one takes
oneself to be a carrier of an important moral possibility or tradition or
source of motivation, one has important reasons to nourish particular hopes for
one’s children’s flourishing and to invest the – often extraordinary –
resources required to promote that sort of flourishing in one’s children.[2]
Parents
may also occupy social roles that give them extraordinary influence on the
direction of a society. Political power in the United States and many other
places seems to be about as hereditary in 2006 as it was during the Hapsburg
reign. Parents in this position may need to decide whether to pass on their
positional power to their children: to educate and form their children in ways
that allow them to assume roles of substantial influence in public affairs.
This is obviously a difficult decision, since the kind of training and
education that grooms a person to step into the power elite of a country may
also work against his or her sanity and/or decency. Yet, if parents can succeed
in raising a child who is sane, decent, and publicly powerful, those parents
will make a very substantial contribution to the welfare of all those whom
advocates of fairness would hold up as objects of moral concern. If parents
can, in addition, pass on to such children some extra-ordinary moral legacy,
the results may be even more positive, from the standpoint of fairness.[3]
-----
It
is difficult to imagine any level of parental investment in children –
yachts, ponies, Lear jets -- that is not
sometimes justified, not just by the moral considerations arising out of
examples of parental decency, but also by considerations of fairness over the
long haul. One has to stare that fact in the face. At the same time, one has to
recognize that care must be taken, with all of these decisions, to gather
enough information about economical and efficient alternatives and to avoid
grandiose self-deception. Surely, roaring the background of all this thinking
is a non-moral monster that says, “It’s your money. You earned it, and you can
do whatever the hell you want with it.” That monster will keep nudging parents
to give free rein to the natural impulse of partiality, without any concern for
its moral dimension or for the balancing of other moral considerations with
those arising from parental responsibility. The right response however, is not
scrupulosity or reflexive guilt but a careful consideration of the real
responsibilities of parenthood, including an assessment of the particular
parenting project in which one finds oneself.
[1]
I am inclined to think that a genetic connection to the Adams line makes this
communication more likely, for at least three reasons: (1) Adams children are
more likely than average to share whatever genetic endowments facilitated their
ancestors’ remarkable achievements, (2) children who believe themselves
descended from John Adams will be more optimistic about their ability to
emulate his accomplishments than children who believe themselves descended from
ordinary people, and (3) children who resemble accomplished ancestors will come
to think of themselves as like those ancestors in important ways. It is useful
to look at the opening chapters of The Education of Henry Adams to see
how this psychological effect plays out.
[2]
One must of course concede that there is great room for self-deception here,
and that many dynastic families perpetuate nastiness and mediocrity with some
thin veneer of respectability.
[3]
This generates some bothersome paradoxes: the Kennedys enabling their children
to run with the yachting crowd as morally preferable, on considerations of
fairness, to buying them bikes and giving the extra million dollars to the
Boston neediest children fund. But it is unfortunately a requirement of
American social/political life that one have access to the yachting crowd, if
one is to exercise political power.
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