The project has tackled questions in all three areas it identified. (For an overview, see Olsaretti, "The Family and Justice in Political Philosophy", 2021.)
An exploration of Parental Justice involves: i) formulating a positive case for socialising the costs of children when children are public goods; ii) exploring whether it is unjust to socialise the costs of children when adding children creates negative externalities (e.g. because of pollution or overpopulation). The project has pursued both these tasks. Regarding i), several possible arguments for socialising the costs of children have been analysed (Olsaretti, “The Costs of Children”, 2018): some claim that parents suffer a disadvantage (e.g. in welfare or autonomy) if the costs of children are not socialised; others that parents perform a socially valuable function and are exploited unless the costs of children are shared. In her book on Parental Justice (under contract, Oxford University Press), the PI offers a version of the second strategy which meets several challenges (Trifan, “What Makes Free-Riding Wrongful”?, 2020). As for ii), some arguments for why socialising the costs of children may be unjust to non-parents have been shown to be unsuccessful (Olsaretti, “Children as Negative Externalities?”, 2017). Whether a defensible alternative to socialisation is to hold children liable for their own costs has also been addressed (Magnusson, “Parental Justice and the Kids Pay View”, 2018).
Three sets of questions about Childhood Justice have been addressed, concerning: i) Foundational issues, i.e. whether existing theories of well-being can capture children’s claims (Cormier, “Is Children’s Well-Being Different from Adults’ Well-Being?”, 2019) and how to affirm children’s rights despite the so-called Non-Identity Problem in moral philosophy (Magnusson, “Children’s Rights and the Non-Identity Problem”, 2019); ii) Whether parents have special rights and obligations to meet their children’s claims (Olsaretti, “Liberal Equality & the Moral Status of Parent-Child Relationships”, 2017; Magnusson, “Can Gestation Ground Parental Rights?”, 2020), and how to reconcile these with other demands of justice (Olsaretti, “Equality of Opportunity & Justified Inequalities”, forth.); iii) The justification of the exercise of authority over children within a liberal perspective, which requires that authority serve the interests of its subjects to be legitimate. This entails constraints for what views of the good parents and the state have the prerogative to impart in children (Cormier, “On the Permissibility of Shaping Children’s Values”, 2018; “Must Schools Teach Religious Neutrality?”, 2018; “Creating Civil Citizens?”, 2019), and for adults’ moral right to parent (Spotorno, “Homophobes, Racists and the Child’s Rights to be Loved Unconditionally”, 2021).
Both new and old questions were tackled about Intergenerational Justice. How views about parental justice bear on and are in turn affected by views of intergenerational justice, and whether parents’ obligations can be appealed to in order to justify constraints on population growth, have been examined (Olsaretti, “Egalitarian Justice, Population Size and Parents’ Responsibility for the Costs of Children” (2021). How some well-known puzzles that arise in the context of arguing for obligations to future persons, including the Non-Identity Problem and the Asymmetry, can be surmounted, has also been discussed (“How to Reject Benatar’ s Asymmetry Argument”, 2019; “Introduction”, 2019).
The project´s core team presented their work at around 50 academic events in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Holland, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the US and the UK.
