Child-rearing With Minimal Domination: A Republican Account

Abstract

Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of value. Most likely, republicanism requires that we minimise children’s domination. I examine alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism.

Childhood: Value and duties

“…And, as both Sarah Hannan (2018) and Patrick Tomlin (2018b) put it, children's need for guardians leaves them more open to domination, assuming that it would be undesirable, and maybe impermissible, to subject the parent‐child relationship to the kind of public scrutiny needed to eliminate any risk of arbitrary uses of parental power. All things considered, eliminating domination from children's lives seems impermissible because it would entail the elimination of the intimate aspect of the parent‐child relationship, in which children have a powerful interest (Gheaus, 2021). 5 Yet, even if children's domination is all things justified, the fact that they are under the rule of others means that, even when children enjoy good fortune, they do so less robustly than adults: if her custodian had a very bad day, for instance, a child might just as well not have enjoyed the same amount of wellbeing; and some believe that it is prudentially worse to enjoy a good less, rather than more, robustly (Hannan, 2018).…”

“…If non‐domination requires that political power is forced, by the democratic process, to track the interests of children, then perhaps this could not be achieved even by giving children the vote. Following Gheaus (2021), I assume, however, that this is not the interpretation of non‐domination that is most appropriate in the case of children. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this possibility.…”

Relational and Distributive Equality

“…On the one hand, some relational egalitarians claim that those in the distributive camp have, as it were, "missed the point" of equality (Anderson 1999). On the other hand, some distributive egalitarians claim that relational egalitarian concerns can be incorporated within the distributive approach by including "relational" goods among those to be distributed equally (Cordelli 2015;Gheaus 2018;Lippert-Rasmussen 2018b). Others, including Bidadanure, advocate a hybrid approach: they accept that there is an important difference between the two approaches, and seek to incorporate both of them into a general theory of justice (Bidadanure 2021;Moles and Parr 2019).…”

The Indirect Approach: Towards Non-Dominating Dementia Care

“…Assuming that recipients of care are also entitled to be related to as equals, this view of justice would require them to be liberated from domination. Yet according to a number of theorists, including Marilyn Friedman (2008, p. 254), Anca Gheaus (2020) and Eva Feder Kittay (1999, pp. 30-31), the capacity to arbitrarily interfere may be a necessary component of at least some caring relationships.…”