Anca Gheaus

The gendered division of labour in combination with the feminisation of international migration contribute to shortages of care, a phenomenon often called ‘care drain’. I argue that this phenomenon is an issue of global gender justice. I look at two methodological challenges and favourably analyse the suggestions that care drain studies should include the effects of fathers’ and other male caregivers’ migration and, in some cases, the effects of migration within national borders. I also explain why care drain is a problem of distributive justice, by looking at the background conditions that result in much of the care-givers’ migration.

Concerns about the under-representation of female academic philosophers and about the stereotype that philosophy is best done by men have recently led to efforts to make academic philosophy a more inclusive discipline. An example is the Gendered Conference Campaign, encouraging event organisers and volume editors to include women amongst invited speakers and authors. Initiatives such as the GCC raise worries about tokenism. Potential invitees may be concerned about unfairness towards whose who would have been invited in their place in the absence of affirmative action and about the way in which affirmative action can affect the quality of the conference or volume in question. And women philosophers often worry that, if formal rules or significant social pressures towards gender inclusiveness play a role in selection processes, their achievements will be discounted. I argue there is no good reason for these fears: there is no pure meritocracy in academia, nor is the ideal of pure meritocracy either feasible or desirable. There are several legitimate grounds — independent of professional competence — for including people in positions of visibility and prestige; gender is such a legitimate reason

In this paper we provide a critical discussion of how the most progressive parental leave policies are doing with respect to three goods which we identify as essential for liberal egalitarian feminists interested in parental leaves: the good of parental care, the good of gender fairness, and the good of individual choice. Then we offer our own model, based on the power of defaults, which promotes the goods of parental care and gender justice by sacrificing as little as possible of the good of individual choice.

In this chapter, I argue that children who were selected for particular traits or genetically enhanced might feel, for this reason, less securely, spontaneously and fairly loved by their parents, which would constitute significant harm. ‘Parents’ refers, throughout this chapter, to the people who perform the social function of rearing children, rather than to procreators. I rely on an understanding of adequate parental love which includes several characteristics: parents should not make children feel they are loved conditionally, for features such as intelligence, looks or temperament; they should not burden children with parental expectations concerning particular achievements of the child; and parental love is often expressed in spontaneous enjoyment and discovery of children’s features. This understanding of parental love provides a reason to question the legitimacy of parental use of selection and enhancement and to explain why parents should not engage on a quest for the ‘best child’

This chapter discusses gender in relation to the most influential current accounts of distributive justice. There are various disparities in the benefits and burdens of social cooperation between women and men. Which of these, if any, one identifies as indicative of gender injustice will depend on the theory of distributive justice that one endorses. Theoretical decisions concerning the role of personal responsibility, the goods whose distribution is relevant for justice, and the site of justice - institutions-only or individual behaviour, too - all influence how one thinks about gender justice.

Forgiveness is a compelling Christian ideal. By contrast, to many philosophers it is not clear that forgiveness should be endorsed as a moral requirement; some argue that unconditional forgiveness is morally wrong. Those who are required to exercise forgiveness can feel that their own dignity and moral worthiness is diminished by such requirement if insignificant recognition was given to the harms they suffered as victims.  This is particularly significant when thinking about women’s lives. Forgiveness and justice occasion particularly painful quandaries in feminist ethics. However, an important stream of feminist ethics—namely the ethics of care—can make a convincing case in favor of forgiveness. A main goal of an ethics of care is preserving relationships for which, in the less than ideal conditions of human life, forgiveness is essential. Thus, the ethics of care casts additional light on the tension between pursuing forgiveness and justice.   By spelling out these various dilemmas, I illustrate how a feminist ethics and a feminist philosophy of religion can be fruitful intellectual allies. A feminist ethics will benefit from cautious reliance on religious wisdom, concomitantly acknowledging the need for forgiveness and qualifying the requirements of forgiveness such that this ideal does not become, once again, oppressive for women. And a feminist philosophy of religion should be to some extent informed by feminist ethical goals, helping to unveil religious resources that give credit to our ongoing need for forgiveness, without however overlooking the importance of (gender) justice.

I argue that, in the currently gender-unjust societies a basic income would not advance feminist goals. To assess the impact of a social policy on gender justice I propose the following criterion: a society is gender-just when the costs of engaging in a lifestyle characterized by gender-symmetry (in both the domestic and public spheres) are, for both men and women, smaller or equal to the costs of engaging in a gender-asymmetrical lifestyle. For a significant number of women, a basic income would increase the costs of leading gender-symmetrical lifestyles because it would make it easier for both women and men to pursue gender-unjust preferences. I argue that preference satisfaction is distinct from justice. I conclude by showing why a basic income would lead to further privatisation of caregiving, and I outline the negative effects this would have on women.

I distinguish between three different ideas that have been recently discussed under the heading of 'the intrinsic goods of childhood': that childhood is itself intrinsically valuable, that certain goods are valuable only for children, and that children are being owed other goods than adults. I then briefly defend the claim the childhood is intrinsically good. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis, and rejection, of the claim that certain goods are valuable only for children. This has implications about how a good society should trade off economic productivity on the one hand and goods such as play and unstructured time on the other hand.

Worldwide, many impoverished parents migrate, leaving their children behind. As a result children are deprived of continuity in care and, sometimes, suffer from other forms of emotional and developmental harms. I explain why coercive responses to care drain are illegitimate and likely to be inefficient. Poor parents have a moral right to migrate without their children and restricting their migration would violate the human right to freedom of movement and create a new form of gender injustice. I propose and defend an institutional solution. Taxes levied on the remittances sent by temporary migrants ought to be used to provide migrants' children with psychological counselling in order to mitigate the harm resulted from discontinuity in care.

The ideal of distributive justice as a means of ensuring fair distribution of social opportunities is a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory. Feminists from various disciplines have developed arguments to support the redistribution of the work of care through institutional mechanisms. I discuss the limits of such distribution under the conditions of theories that do not idealize human agents as independent beings. People’s reliance on care, understood as a response to needs, is pervasive and infuses almost all human interaction. I argue that the effect of care on shaping the social opportunities of all individuals is huge, although often invisible. Much of the optimism of theories of distributive justice comes from ignoring or downplaying the way in which care influences most factors of social success. Jonathan Wolff distinguished between three types of resources whose fair distribution is important: internal, external and structural. Care, I argue, does not fit well in any of these types. Inseparably interwoven with relational realities, care cuts across these categories and thus poses a challenge to the feasibility of equal chances. I focus on the under-analyzed issue of bad care and show how difficult it is to dismantle legacies of bad care. Their effect on even close-to-ideal social arrangements is too significant to be disregarded, yet very difficult to tackle through institutional mechanisms. A commitment to certain elements of individual ethics – as opposed to merely political institutions – is required in order to bridge the gap between ideal theories of justice and feasible practical aims.

Some Romanian feminist scholars argue that welfare policies of post-communist states are deeply unjust to women and preclude them from reaching economic autonomy. The upshot of this argument is that liberal economic policy would advance feminist goals better than the welfare state. How should we read this dissonance between Western and some Eastern feminist scholarship concerning distributive justice? I identify the problem of dependency at the core of a possible debate about feminism and welfare. Worries about how decades of communism have shaped citizenry feed feminists' suspicion of the welfare state and fears of paternalist policies. I criticize the arguments in favour of neoliberal policies and I suggest a crucial distinction between legitimate, universal forms of human dependency and dependencies that result from particular social arrangements.

Several philosophers argue that individuals have an interest-protecting right to parent; specifically, the interest is in rearing children whom one can parent adequately. If such a right exists it can provide a solution to scepticism about duties of justice concerning distant future generations and bypass the challenge provided by the non-identity problem. Current children - whose identity is independent from environment-affecting decisions of current adults - will have, in due course, a right to parent. Adequate parenting requires resources. We owe duties of justice to current children, including the satisfaction of their interest-protecting rights; therefore we owe them the conditions for rearing children adequately in the future. But to engage in permissible parenting they, too, will need sufficient resources to ensure their own children's future ability to bring up children under adequate conditions. Because this reasoning goes on ad infinitum it entails that each generation of adults owes its contemporary generation of children at least those resources that are necessary for sustaining human life indefinitely at an adequate level of wellbeing.

Philosophers working on animal ethics have focused, with good reason, on the wrongness of cruelty toward animals and of devaluing their lives. I argue that the theoretical resources of animal ethics are far from exhausted. Moreover, reflection on what makes animals ethically significant is relevant for thinking about the roots of morality and therefore about ethical relationships between human beings. I rely on a normative approach to animal ethics grounded in the importance of meeting needs in general and, in particular, needs for affection and companionship. I draw on testimonies of shared love between people and animals, and on Raimond Gaita's work on the importance of emotional connections between creatures who are similarly needy. The ethics of care, which attaches special importance to meeting needs, provides an integrative theoretical framework

Drawing upon feminist work on partiality and on the philosophy of Raimond Gaita, I argue that love for particular people can serve as a basis for including strangers in the sphere of ethically relevant individuals. While partiality for some can hinder proper treatment of others, it is also constitutive of our ability to determine the scope of morality. My line of reasoning invites the worry that hatred is as powerful in hindering moral recognition as love is in creating it. I address this worry and indicate the limits of philosophy in this enterprise.

Care drain brings the traditional problem of carers' choice between paid work and family at a new level. Taking care drain from Romania as a case study, I analyse the consequences of parents' migration within a normative framework committed to meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals. The temporary migration of parents who cannot take their children with them involves moral harm, particularly the frustration of children's developmental and emotional needs. I use recent feminist work on justice and care in the economy to address the question whose responsibility it is to fill the void of care created by temporary migration. I argue that the moral issues raised by care drain are also issues of social justice and therefore call for rectification by the states involved.

Birth mothers usually have a moral right to parent their newborns in virtue of a mutual attachment formed, during gestation, between the gestational mother and the fetus. The attachment is formed, in part, thanks to the burdens of pregnancy, and it serves the interest of the newborn; the gestational mother, too, has a powerful interest in the protection of this attachment. Given its justification, the right to parent one's gestated baby cannot be transferred at will to other people who would wish to function as social parents of the child in question. This indicates that surrogacy contracts are illegitimate, and therefore should be void.

Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the content of legitimate authority over them. My interest is in the so-far little-discussed goods of engaging in world discovery, artistic creation, philosophical pursuits and experimentation with one's self. I call these ‘special goods of childhood’ because individuals, in general, only have full access to them during childhood and they make a distinctive and weighty contribution to wellbeing. Therefore, they are part of the metric of justice towards children. The overall conclusion is that we ought to make good institutional care part of every child's upbringing.

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: ¿ Being a child ¿ Childhood and moral status ¿ Parents and children ¿ Children in society ¿ Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults¿ rights? What gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disabilility in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children, and what values should inform such practices? What is a good school? How are children¿s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.

Many instances of parental enhancement are objectionable on egalitarian grounds because they unnecessarily amplify one kind of asymmetry of power between parents and children. Because children have full moral status, we ought to seek egalitarian relationships with them. Such relationships are compatible with asymmetries of power only to the extent to which the asymmetry is necessary for (1) advancing the child's level of advantage up to what justice requires or (2) instilling in the child morally required features. This is a ground to oppose parental enhancements whose purpose is either to merely satisfy parents' preferences or to confer on the child advantages above and beyond what the child is owed by justice.