The causal theory of parental obligations had odd beginnings. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the basic principles of this theory were stated by three different thinkers, yet none of these early proponents explored the wider implications of the idea. It was not until the twentieth century that a few people started to realise the enormous significance of this theory. In this post, I will outline how the theory emerged.
The earliest presentation of the causal argument for parental obligations is by the legal theorist William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. Blackstone argued that creating a child entails the obligation to care for it:
The duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children is a principle of natural law; an obligation, says Pufendorf, laid on them not only by nature herself, but by their own proper act, in bringing them into the world: for they would be in the highest manner injurious to their issue, if they only gave the children life, that they might afterwards see them perish. By begetting them therefore they have entered into a voluntary obligation, to endeavour, as far as in them lies, that the life which they have bestowed shall be supported and preserve
In this brief passage, Blackstone captures some essential features of the causal argument:
- It is the actions of the parents (in creating the child) that give rise to the child being in peril.
- If the parents were to fail to care for their children, the result would be that the child will perish.
- Therefore the parents have an obligation to prevent this happening.
Blackstone credits Samuel Pufendorf as the source of this causal argument, but it is not clear that his interpretation of Pufendorf was correct. In his On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673), Pufendorf had made a slightly different argument that parental authority rests on natural law and the "tacit consent" of the offspring. It seems to have been Blackstone who first stated the causal argument clearly, although Blackstone himself only offers this brief statement of the argument and does not elucidate its further implications.
The first major philosopher to put forward the causal argument for parental obligations was Kant. There is no evidence that Kant got this argument from Blackstone. He may have read Blackstone or deduced the argument independently. In Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1797) Kant argued parental obligation comes from bringing an infant into the world without consent and placing it in peril:
From the fact of procreation…, there follows the duty of preserving and rearing children as the products of this union. Accordingly, children, as persons, have, at the same time, an original congenital right — distinguished from mere hereditary right — to be reared by the care of their parents till they are capable of maintaining themselves; and this provision becomes immediately theirs by law, without any particular juridical act being required to determine it. For what is thus produced is a person, and it is impossible to think of a being endowed with personal freedom as produced merely by a physical process. And hence, in the practical relation, it is quite a correct and even a necessary idea to regard the act of generation as a process by which a person is brought without his consent into the world and placed in it by the responsible free will of others. This act, therefore, attaches an obligation to the parents to make their children — as far as their power goes — contented with the condition thus acquired. Hence parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making; for a being endowed with freedom cannot be so regarded. Nor, consequently, have they a right to destroy it as if it were their own property, or even to leave it to chance; because they have brought a being into the world who becomes in fact a citizen of the world, and they have placed that being in a state which they cannot be left to treat with indifference, even according to the natural conceptions of right.
Kant clearly set out the creation of peril argument. In this brief paragraph, he captured all the main points of the causal theory. Kant specifically repudiates the theory of parental ownership and argues that children have rights. He also argues against the idea of tacit consent of the child. Instead of a merely biological explanation of obligation, he is making a clear argument that obligation comes from the actions of the parents. However, like Blackstone, Kant did not explore the wider implications of this argument.
The causal argument for parental obligations was restated by the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick in the 1874 book The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick had certainly read both Kant and Blackstone, so it seems likely that he knew of the causal argument for parental obligations from their earlier statements of it. He restated the principle in his own words, although this was again only a minor argument in the book and not the main purpose of the work. Sidgwick argued succinctly that parents have causal parental obligations based on creation of peril:
And this leads to what we may conveniently examine next, the duty of parents to children. This too we might partly classify under a different head, viz. that of duties arising out of special needs: for no doubt children are naturally objects of compassion, on account of their helplessness, to others besides their parents. But on the latter they have a claim of a different kind, springing from the universally recognised duty of not causing pain or any harm to other human beings, directly or indirectly, except in the way of deserved punishment: for the parent, being the cause of the child’s existing in a helpless condition, would be indirectly the cause of the suffering and death that would result to it if neglected.
After this brilliantly clear summary, Sidgwick begins to waffle that this issue is all very complicated, and then changes the topic. He did not explore the theory in any more detail. Nonetheless, many later writers who have made the causal argument from parental obligations have referred to Sidgwick as an influence.
What are the implications of this theory that all these early thinkers fail to remark on? This will be the subject of a future post, but one mind-blowing example is that you cannot give up parental obligations.