Why are most books on the ethics of parenting so boring? Family life is a topic that touches everyone, so this is one area where philosophy could engage with highly relevant moral concerns. Instead, the vast majority of books on the philosophy of the family are horribly dull.
There are many reasons for this blandness, but one reason is that the authors are engaged in strategic omission. They are skirting around a number of contentious ethical questions related to the family. When your writing is hampered by a list of things that you must avoid discussing, it makes your book boring and waffly because you (deliberately) don't get to the point. Instead, you spend a lot of time on uncontentious issues that are far less relevant to everyday life.
The topics that philosophers of the family studiously avoid discussing have two characteristics:
- They are widely accepted parental practices.
- They are ethically indefensible.
Here are three questions about topics that share these characteristics and so are strategically omitted by philosophers writing on the family:
- Is corporal punishment a legitimate practice?
- Is circumcision a legitimate practice?
- Is abortion a legitimate practice?
Open any book that claims to be about the ethics of parenting (or any variation on this general theme) and you will probably not even find these topics discussed. Search a digital version of the book for these words and you usually find nothing. Of the three topics, abortion is sometimes mentioned briefly, but even then it is usually only to state that the ethics of this practice are outside the scope of the book.
All three practices- corporal punishment, circumcision, and abortion- constitute acts of aggression that violate the rights of children. Philosophers who agree with this statement prefer to avoid having to state it openly or defend it. Philosophers who disagree with the statement are also apparently reluctant to defend their views.
In his book Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment, Patrick Lenta discusses the silence of philosophers on this topic:
with very few exceptions philosophers have not engaged in a sustained moral assessment of the corporal punishment of children. … It is reasonable to infer from what we know about the near-ubiquity of corporal punishment that most philosophers will have been subjected to it and many will have resorted to it. This in itself may explain some philosophers’ reticence about confronting the practice. … For some who have experienced it, corporal punishment may be too personally disturbing, too deeply and troublingly a constituent of their psyches, to be confronted directly. …Loyalty towards one’s care-givers and defensiveness about one’s own use of corporal punishment as a care-giver, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, the weight of historical support for it, may make the practice appear natural and not in need of moral justification.
Lenta's hypothesis could equally apply to the silence of philosophers on circumcision and, with minor differences, on abortion. Walter Block and Patrick Testa remark on the lack of ethical debate about circumcision:
The reality of the debate on neonatal circumcision is that it hardly exists at all. … Even for many of those who disdain violence and the struggle to retain archaic social norms, it is almost as if circumcision is a topic off-limits to debate—perhaps out of denial or an appealing sense of conformity. But underneath the guise of culture, neonatal circumcision is a violation of the right to bodily integrity, an overreach of religious freedom, and a coercive act on the most helpless of us all.
For anyone not interested in the ethics of parenting, if is fine to choose not to engage in these topics. But if you write a book about the ethics of parent-child relationships and avoid discussing these issues, you are engaging in strategic omission. Any practice that is widely accepted yet ethically questionable is exactly what philosophers of the family should discuss. Even if such topics are not the central focus of their books, they should at least spend a couple of paragraphs explaining why they think these practices are either justified or not justified according to their understanding of the ethics of parent-child relationships.
I have already written numerous posts about abortion. In future posts I will address corporal punishment and circumcision.
I highlighted these three topics because they are longstanding practices and therefore even books about the ethics of the family written some years ago should have addressed them. There are many other parenting practices that are widely accepted and ethically unjustifiable which have become prevalent more recently, for example:
- The use of psychotropic drugs on children
- The use of puberty blocking drugs on children
- sex-change surgeries undertaken on children.