Parental Justice and the Kids Pay View

In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls 'K...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethical theory and moral practice
Main Author: Magnusson, Erik (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V [2018]
In: Ethical theory and moral practice
IxTheo Classification:NCB Personal ethics
VA Philosophy
Further subjects:B Patrick Tomlin
B Parental justice
B Kids pay
B Principle of fair play
B Benefit foisting
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary:In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls 'Kids Pay', depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents (a) electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of (b) satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children's needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs.
ISSN:1572-8447
Contains:Enthalten in: Ethical theory and moral practice
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10677-018-9937-z