Nicholas Hadsell

How do adults get the right to parent a child? In this paper, I argue for a broadly Kantian account called “Parental Independence.” In short, Parental Independence says that when citizens set out to raise their offspring, they exercise their equal freedom to set and pursue their ends. Insofar as their pursuit of the end of parenthood avoids the domination of others, they are entitled to raise their offspring. The distinctive feature of Parental Independence is that it is neither a dual-interest nor a child-centered account of the right to parent, but is instead grounded in a commitment to Independence.

I give a broadly Kantian argument that families in the state of nature are necessarily dominative of children, and that the only solution to this predicament is a legitimate state that can authoritatively enforce children’s rights. I then argue that, because the state has this relationship to the family, it is responsible for enforcing many of the rights children have by using various child welfare policies. From here, I consider the permissibility of the state’s enforcing two policies: licensing and monitoring. I conclude that either policy is only permissible if it can protect children without dominating others. While I gesture toward some ways mild versions of either policy could help solve the objectionable laxness of status quo family law, I ultimately leave the empirical question of whether each policy can, in fact, protect children without domination open for others to investigate.

How do adults acquire the right to parent a child? In Parenting and the Goods of Childhood, Luara Ferracioli proposes a moral commitment account of parenthood: “The parental role is best undertaken by those who morally commit to pursuing a parent-child relationship with a particular child.” In Ferracioli’s defense of the moral commitment account, she claims it can accommodate worries about whether ambivalent gestating parents count as moral parents (they should) and whether it licenses parental proliferation (it should not). Here, I argue these worries are more worrisome than Ferracioli lets on.

If AI can write an excellent philosophy paper, we argue that philosophy journals should strongly consider publishing that paper. After all, AI stands to make significant contributions to ongoing projects in some subfields, and it benefits the world of philosophy for those contributions to be published in journals, the primary purpose of which is to disseminate significant contributions to philosophy. We also propose the Sponsorship Model of AI journal refereeing to mitigate any costs associated with our view. This model requires at least one human to sponsor any AI manuscript submitted to a journal. After making this case, we evaluate a variety of objections—that our proposal will crash the academic job market, disincentivize humans from doing philosophy, and violate a variety of justified publishing norms—and conclude that they are all wanting.

In this article, I argue that God is authoritative over us because he is our divine, causal parent. As our causal parent, God has duties to relate to us, but he can only fulfill those duties if he has the practical authority to give us commands aimed at our sanctification. From ought-implies-can reasoning, I conclude that God has that authority. After I make this argument, I show how the view has significant advantages over extant arguments for divine authority and can help solve other significant problems in philosophy of religion.