Children’s Rights and Parent’s Virtues

Abstract

Philosophers, by and large, have lacked intimate experience of children. Like Plato and Kant, they have been childfree or, like Socrates and Rousseau, they have left the care of their children to wives or orphanages. This inexperience explains an otherwise puzzling neglect of family matters in our moral and political philosophy. Since Plato, philosophers have concerned themselves with macrolevel political institutions and microlevel individual actions. They have ignored that intermediate context of family life within which most people make their political and personal choices. They have made little attempt to discover and assess whatever principles guide our decisions to form, continue or leave our families.