Toward a Pluralist Account of Parenthood

Abstract

What is it that makes someone a parent? Many writers--call them 'monists'--claim that parenthood is grounded solely in one essential feature that is both necessary and sufficient for someone's being a parent. We reject not only monism but also 'necessity' views, in which some specific feature is necessary but not also sufficient for parenthood. Our argument supports what we call 'pluralism', the view that any one of several kinds of relationship is sufficient for parenthood. We begin by challenging monistic versions of gestationalism, the view that gestation uniquely grounds parenthood. Monistic and necessity gestationalism are implausible. First, we raise the 'paternity problem'--necessity gestationalists lack an adequate account of how men become fathers. Second, the positive arguments that necessity gestationalists give are not compelling. However, although gestation may not be a necessary condition for parenthood, there is not good reason to think that it is sufficient. After further rebutting an 'intentionalist' account of parenthood, in which having and acting on intentions to procreate and rear is necessary for parenthood, we end by sketching a pluralistic picture of the nature of parenthood, rooted in causation, on which gestation, direct genetic derivation, extended custody, and even, sometimes, intentions, may be individually sufficient for parenthood.

How Do We Acquire Parental Rights?

“…41 They argue that various people may be causally implicated in the creation of a child-for example, by providing genetic material, or by gestating her. According to them, each person who is appropriately causally related to a child is a moral parent of that child, and so has parental rights.…”

Paternity testing: a poor test of fatherhood

“…But being a father denotes much more than this, which is clear both from our examination of the term as a philosophical concept and from our empirical work (Ives 2007, Ives et al 2008. We are not alone in questioning the primacy of biological relatedness in familial relationships -either on sociological or moral grounds (see, for example, Smart and Neale 1999, Weston 1991, Dowd 2005, Kaebnick 2004, Fuscaldo 2006, Bayne and Kolers 2003. We are also not alone in noting a fragmentation in the concept of fatherhood (for example see Sheldon 2005, Collier andSheldon 2009).…”

Adoption is Not Abortion‐Lite

“…24 As Bayne and Kolers point out, 'it seems that including the gestational and genetic parents is a litmus test of any account of the right sort of causal linkage'. 25 So counterfactual causation might not bring about a tremendous proliferation of parents, but it seems to go too far in the opposite direction.…”