Parental Rights

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the philosophical foundations of parental rights. Some commonly held accounts are rejected. The question of whether parental rights are property rights is examined. It is argued that there are useful analogies with property rights which help us to see that the ultimate justification of parental rights lies in the special value of parenthood in human life. It is further argued that the idea of generation is essential to our understanding of parenthood as having special value and that parental rights properly belong, in the first instance, to natural parents.     

Resolving Disputes Over Frozen Embryos: A New Proposal

This paper proposes a principle for adjudicating conflicts between estranged couples over whether the frozen embryos they earlier created together ought to be gestated or destroyed. I argue that the fate of the embryos ought to be determined by the party who would be most harmed by having his or her preferences overruled. But I also claim that, when embryos are destroyed against the opposition of one of their co‐creators, the individual at whose behest this was done owes compensation to his disappointed opposite number, in an amount that reflects the harm accruing to the latter as a result of the termination of the procreative project.     

John Rawls and the Social Minimum

ABSTRACT Welfare states are often urged to secure a social minimum for citizens—a level of material well-being beneath which no-one should be permitted to fall. This paper examines the justification for such a claim. It begins by criticising John Rawls's rejection of the social minimum approach to justice in A Theory of Justice : the argument Rawls uses to justify the Difference Principle, based on what he calls 'the strains of commitment' in the 'original position', actually provides a better justification for a social minimum principle. The paper then examines the substance of that argument outside the context of Rawls's contractarianism, showing that there is a general case for seeing to it that desperate need does not go unmet in a liberal society.