Abstract
The procreative justice debate asks whether justice, and in particular whether a principle of fair play, requires that non-parents share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing. The principle of fair play demands that persons who benefit from the cooperative labor of others share in the burdens of producing that benefit. Non-parents should share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing if reproductive and parental labor count as cooperative labor, but they are not obligated to share in those costs if parents incur them as part of a personal project. I argue that parental labor counts as cooperative labor because becoming a parent involves knowingly assuming a social role whereby one incurs new moral and legal obligations. Even if parents are ultimately motived by personal reasons, they nevertheless constrain their liberty in order to comply with the rules of a cooperative scheme, and, in doing so, their labor plausibly counts as cooperative. Parents have a claim of justice on others, then, to consider whether the benefits and burdens of procreating and child-rearing are fairly distributed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1270-1284 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Journal of Applied Philosophy |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 Society for Applied Philosophy.
Funding
This article was developed in part out of comments I gave on an unpublished paper from Paula Casal and Andrew Williams at Stanford's Political Theory Workshop. I would like to thank both Casal and Williams for their feedback on my position, as well as helpful comments in that discussion from Debra Satz. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the ‘Collective and State Interests in Procreation’ panel at the 2022 MANCEPT workshop for their feedback and discussion about this article, especially Liam Shields who gave detailed comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to give a special thanks to Harry Brighouse who, in addition to giving me helpful feedback on the current version of this article, invited me to take his graduate seminar on ideal and non-ideal theory when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Writing my term paper for that seminar helped me develop my earliest view about what society owes parents, and, more importantly, writing that paper played a big part in my decision to pursue philosophy.
| Funders |
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| Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa Research Association of America |
| University of Wisconsin |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Philosophy