The Right To Be Loved

273 Pages·2015·2.301 MB·English

by  S. Matthew Liao

THE RIGHT TO BE LOVED

THE RIGHT
TO BE LOVED
S. MATTHEW LIAO
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liao, S. Matthew.
The right to be loved / S. Matthew Liao.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–023483–6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Children’s
rights—Philosophy. 2. Children—Philosophy. 3. Human
rights—Philosophy. I. Title.
HQ789.L53 2015
323.3’5201—dc23
2015001733
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
For Wibke, Caitlin, and Connor

Contents
Acknowledgments | ix
Introduction | 1
1. Can Children Have Rights? | 11
2. Human Rights as Fundamental Conditions for a Good
Life | 39
3. Being Loved as a Fundamental Condition for Children | 74
4. The Possibility of a Duty to Love | 101
5. The Duty to Love: Who Has It and to What Extent? | 131
6. Regulating Biological Parenting: The Problem of Possibly
Inadequate Parents | 151
7. Children without Adequate Parents and the Duty
to Adopt | 179
Conclusion | 199
NOTES | 205
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 232
INDEX | 248
vii

Acknowledgments
I embarked on this project more than twenty years ago when I
first became acquainted with Susan Moller Okin’s seminal work,
Justice, Gender and the Family, in which she criticized John Rawls
for not applying his principles of justice to the family; in partic-
ular, Okin had in mind the relationship between men and
women inside a family. Okin made a powerful case that if Rawls
had applied one of his principles of justice, namely, the principle
of equality, to such a family, he would have come to the conclu-
sion that men and women should share household responsibili-
ties equally in a family. When I reflected further on Okin’s criti-
cism of Rawls, it occurred to me that the family often also
consists of the relationship between parents and children. How-
ever, the principle of equality seems less applicable to this rela-
tionship. I became interested in finding out what kind of moral
principles would govern the parent-child relationship.
Given the prominent status of rights language in our moral,
legal, and political discourses, a good starting point seemed to
be rights. I then came across a number of international declara-
tions, bills of rights, and the mission statements of various
charitable foundations that claim that children have a right to
be loved. This claim is intriguing for a number of reasons. For
ix