DISCUSSION
Committing to Parenthood
Volume 29, Number 2, January 2025, Pages 323–332
PDFAbstract
How do adults acquire the moral right to rear a child? In Luara Ferracioli’s new Parenting and the Goods of Childhood, she argues that adults acquire this right when they morally commit to a child. In this note, I will critically evaluate Ferracioli’s account. I’ll first describe the moral commitment view in further detail. After this, I will argue that it suffers from what I call the Swooping Problem. Contrary to Ferracioli’s defenses, her view permits adults to swoop in and acquire a right to rear a child just by asserting a moral commitment to them even when the mother is still gestating the child or when there is already an established parent-child relationship in place. Since these are undesirable and counterintuitive results, we should modify the moral commitment view to avoid them. Along the way, then, I will suggest ways Ferracioli could modify her view to avoid these objections.
Copyright © 2025 Nicholas Hadsell
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