Why and How to Prefer a Causal Account of Parenthood

The most promising account of parental obligation currently on offer is a causal account. According to such an account, parents incur obligation to their offspring by causing them to exist. Causal accounts are explanatorily strong—the moral force of causing someone to exist seems straightforward. They seem to more or less capture our everyday intuitions about who is a parent with parental obligation and why. However, causal accounts are not problem-free. Importantly, causal accounts do not pick out adoptive parents as parents with parental obligation. Further, causal accounts do seem to pick out gamete donors as parents with parental obligation. The difficulty in fitting nongenetic parents into such an account—as well as that of excluding nonparental progenitors (like gamete donors)—has led some to reject the causal account in favor of a consent, or “voluntarist” account of parental obligation. Voluntarist accounts, like causal accounts, seem to have a clear moral mechanism: where obligation is acquired by causing existence on a causal account, it is acquired by consent or volunteer on a voluntarist account. Indeed, a voluntarist account of parental obligation is squarely in line with standard philosophical thinking about role obligations more generally: we have role obligations in virtue of having consented to take on the role to which the obligation attaches. However, this mechanism seems to fly in the face of our basic assumptions about the nature of parenthood and parental obligation. Importantly, we tend to think that parents are obliged to foster the well-being of their children even if they do not want to; that is, even if they do not consent to do so. We think that parents, even and perhaps especially unwilling parents, can and ought to be held to account with regard to their obligation to their children. So, we seem to be left with two equally strong, but equally flawed accounts of parental obligation: a causal account, on the one hand—one that seems to “get it right” with respect to the nonvoluntariness of parental obligation, but wrong on who has such obligation—and a voluntarist account, which seems to match intuitions about nonbiological parents and nonparental progenitors, but seems to inappropriately conceptualize parental obligation as optional. Elizabeth Brake has argued that a voluntarist account of parental obligation should be preferred over a causal account of parenthood. Causal accounts, Brake argues, suffer (at least) two conceptual weaknesses: there is an explanatory gap bs_bs_banner