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4131The Right to Parent One's Biological BabyJournal of Political Philosophy 20 (4): 432-455. 2011.This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing t…Read more
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3186GenderIn Serena Olsaretti (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, Oxford University Press. pp. 389-414. 2018.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…Read more
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3186The Goods of Work (Other Than Money!)Journal of Social Philosophy 47 (1): 70-89. 2016.The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of excellence; 2) making a social cont…Read more
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2534Feminism without "gender identity"Politics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (1). 2023.Talk of gender identity is at the core of heated current philosophical and political debates. Yet, it is unclear what it means to have one. I examine several ways of understanding this concept in light of core aims of trans writers and activists. Most importantly, the concept should make good trans people’s understanding of their own gender identities and help understand why misgendering is a serious harm and why it is permissible to require information about people’s gender identities in public…Read more
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2110The 'intrinsic goods of childhood' and the just societyIn Alexander Bagattini & Colin Macleod (eds.), The Nature of Children's Well-being: Theory and Practice, Springer. 2014.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 …Read more
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1964Feminism and GenderIn Andrew Fiala (ed.), Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 167-183. 2015.
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1918Basic Income, Gender Justice and the Costs of Gender-Symmetrical LifestylesBasic Income Studies 3 (3). 2008.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 woul…Read more
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1313Gender JusticeJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2): 1-24. 2012.I propose, defend and illustrate a principle of gender justice meant to capture the nature of a variety of injustices based on gender: A society is gender just only if the costs of a gender-neutral lifestyle are, all other things being equal, lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles. The principle is meant to account for the entire range of gender injustice: violence against women, economic and legal discrimination, domestic exploitation, the gendered division of labor a…Read more
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1197The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (edited book)Routledge. 2018.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…Read more
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1147“Let them be children”? Age limits in voting and conceptions of childhoodIn Greg Bognar & Axel Gosseries (eds.), Ageing Without Ageism: Conceptual Puzzles and Policy Proposals, Oxford University Press. 2023.This paper explains alternative views about the nature and value of childhood, and how particular conceptions of childhood matter to a practical issue relevant to the topic of the book: children's voting rights. I don't defend any particular view on this matter; rather, I explain how recent accounts of what is uniquely good or bad about being a child bear on arguments for and against enfranchising children. I also explain why children who live in a society in which many adults fail to comply wi…Read more
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1079Care drain as an issue of global gender justiceEthical Perspectives 20 (1). 2013.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 …Read more
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956Biological Parenthood: Gestational, Not GeneticAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2): 225-240. 2018.Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational lin…Read more
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930The Right to Parent and Duties Concerning Future GenerationsJournal of Political Philosophy 24 (1): 487-508. 2016.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 t…Read more
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916The Feasibility Constraint on The Concept of JusticePhilosophical Quarterly 63 (252): 445-464. 2013.There is a widespread belief that, conceptually, justice cannot require what we cannot achieve. This belief is sometimes used by defenders of so-called ‘non-ideal theories of justice’ to criticise so-called ‘ideal theories of justice’. I refer to this claim as ‘the feasibility constraint on the concept of justice’ and argue against it. I point to its various implausible implications and contend that a willingness to apply the label ‘unjust’ to some regrettable situations that we cannot fix is go…Read more
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892The Best Available ParentEthics 131 (3): 431-459. 2021.There is a broad philosophical consensus that both children’s and prospective parents’ interests are relevant to the justification of a right to parent. Against this view, I argue that it is impermissible to sacrifice children’s interests for the sake of advancing adults’ interest in childrearing. Therefore, the allocation of the moral right to parent should track the child’s, and not the potential parent’s, interest. This revisionary thesis is moderated by two additional qualifications. First, …Read more
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885Unrequited Love, Self-victimisation and the Target of Appropriate ResentmentThe Journal of Ethics 25 (4): 487-499. 2021.In “Tragedy and Resentment” Ulrika Carlsson claims that there are cases when we are justified in feeling non-moral resentment against someone who harms us without wronging us, when the harm either consists in their attitude towards us or in the emotional suffering triggered by their attitudes. Since they had no duty to protect us from harm, the objectionable attitude is not disrespect but a failure to show love, admiration, or appreciation for us. I explain why unrequited love is the wrong examp…Read more
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863Arguments for Nonparental Care for ChildrenSocial Theory and Practice 37 (3): 483-509. 2011.I review three existing arguments in favor of having some childcare done by nonparents and then I advance five arguments, most of them original, to the same conclusion. My arguments rely on the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. I discuss the importance of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children's structural vulnerability to their careg…Read more
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841Hikers in Flip‐Flops: Luck Egalitarianism, Democratic Equality and the Distribuenda of JusticeJournal of Applied Philosophy 35 (1): 54-69. 2016.The article has two aims. First, to show that a version of luck egalitarianism that includes relational goods amongst its distribuenda can, as a matter of internal logic, account for one of the core beliefs of relational egalitarianism. Therefore, there will be important extensional overlap, at the level of domestic justice, between luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. This is an important consideration in assessing the merits of and relationship between the two rival views. Second…Read more
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808Children's rights, parental agency and the case for non-coercive responses to care drainIn Diana Meyers (ed.), Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights, Oxford University Press. 2014.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. …Read more
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788Is there a right to parent?Law, Ethics and Philosophy. 2015.A short paper discussing the question of whether adults' interest in parenting can play a role in justifying the right to rear children.
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770The feminist argument against supporting careJournal of Practical Ethics 8 (1): 1-27. 2020.Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benef…Read more
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741Gender justice and the welfare state in post-communismFeminist Theory 9 (2): 185-206. 2008.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 welfar…Read more
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698Unfinished Adults and Defective Children: On the Nature and Value of ChildhoodJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1): 1-21. 2015.Traditionally, most philosophers saw childhood as a state of deficiency and thought that its value was entirely dependent on how successfully it prepares individuals for adulthood. Yet, there are good reasons to think that childhood also has intrinsic value. Children possess certain intrinsically valuable abilities to a higher degree than adults. Moreover, going through a phase when one does not yet have a “self of one’s own,” and experimenting one’s way to a stable self, seems intrinsically val…Read more
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691Children's Vulnerability and Legitimate Authority Over ChildrenJournal of Applied Philosophy 60-75. 2018.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 conten…Read more
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662Parental genetic shaping and parental environmental shapingPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (267): 20-31. 2017.Analytic philosophers tend to agree that intentional parental genetic shaping and intentional parental environmental shaping for the same feature are, normatively, on a par. I challenge this view by advancing a novel argument, grounded in the value of fair relationships between parents and children: Parental genetic shaping is morally objectionable because it unjustifiably exacerbates the asymmetry between parent and child with respect to the voluntariness of their entrance into the parent–child…Read more
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619Against private surrogacy: a child-centred viewOxford University Press. forthcoming.Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.
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555Parental enhancement and symmetry of power in the parent–child relationshipJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (6): 70-89. 2016.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 morall…Read more
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548The normative importance of pregnancy challenges surrogacy contractsAnalize. Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies 6 (20): 20-31. 2016.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 wis…Read more
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524Could There Ever Be a Duty to Have Children?In Sarah Hannan, Samantha Brennan & Richard Vernon (eds.), Permissible Progeny?: The Morality of Procreation and Parenting, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 87-106. 2015.This chapter argues that there is a collective responsibility to have enough children in order to ensure that people will not, in the future, suffer great harm due to depopulation. Moreover, if people stopped having children voluntarily, it could be legitimate for states to incentivize and maybe even coerce individuals to bear and rear children. Various arguments against the enforceability of an individual duty to bear and rear children are examined. Coercing people to have children would come a…Read more
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444More Co-parents, Fewer Children: Multiparenting and Sustainable PopulationEssays in Philosophy 20 (1): 3-23. 2019.Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation – for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple – in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in each family, we could also cr…Read more