Here is how I put this to students: Frankenstein is not a good story. You don’t read about Dr. Frankenstein just creating a monster and think “Oh, that seems brilliant.” If I were to, say, experience a very strong interest in experiencing marriage and then set out to grow a spouse to satisfy that interest, people would reasonably be alarmed. If I want to be a parent, however? This seems only natural. Somehow, the family occupies a quasi-sacred space among social institutions. Education? Reform it. The government? Reform big time. Workplaces? All reform, all day long. The family, though? HANDS OFF.
Since working with Harry Brighouse in graduate school, it is perhaps unsurprising that I remain terribly interested in the philosophical weirdness of the family. This class is my way of saying to students, “Hey, this is really weird. Come sit with the weirdness for a bit and let’s see what we think.” For example, we no longer view children as property, but we send them home with people who created them without much thought about whether that’s a reasonable default setting for society to have. We have good reason to question marriage as an institution, but it is almost inconceivable to imagine a world without it. What, then, do we do with the question of whether to get married? Even if we have a right to procreate (do we, though?), and even if we have a right to rear a child we created (but why?), how in the world would that translate into a right to choose that child’s education in ways that might expand rather than mitigate the control we exert over our non-property-status children? All of this is before we even consider the strangeness of filial obligations: you’re telling me that I – a non-voluntary participant in a relationship – might have non-voluntarily incurred associative duties to the person for whom the relationship was voluntary, and that I might have those duties in response to things the person who voluntarily entered the relationship was morally obligated to do for me? What?!
The goal of the class is to structure the topics over the life of a “traditional” family: marriage, procreation, rights to rear, rights to confer advantage, rights to shape values, rights to determine education, and then what the child owes later. Obviously, this does not cover all questions related to the family. We do not spend much time on adoption, for instance, or questions of legal emancipation for children. The goal, though, is to get students thinking about their most deeply held assumptions, their starting points. Marriage, biological normativity, rights to confer advantage, and other similar practices seem almost “natural” to students, and questioning them as social institutions instead is often revolutionary for them. Can they tell a story that gives parents the freedom to create a child, rear that child, a pick that child’s school that does not amount to a property view of children? Maybe, but they suddenly see how much work it takes to establish each of those steps just to get to an apparently simple claim like “Parents can send their children to private school if they want.”
Ultimately, the students work together to evaluate some family-related policy. In the past, students have chosen things like the school day schedule, university family-friendly policies like tuition remission or discounts, conditional cash transfer programs for poorer families, and national parental leave policies. For this project, I have two objectives, one stated and the other a bit more secretive. The stated objective is for students to explore the ways families shape and are shaped by various policies. They do this well and seem to enjoy doing it. The more secretive objective is that students have to generate their own group contract determining how grades will be allocated. For example, some students choose “sink or swim” grades, in which every member gets graded on the overall project regardless of their individual contribution. Most students, however, have a strong preference to allocate grades based on effort. Then, the challenge becomes setting up systems of self- and peer-evaluation that are honest and meaningful. Here’s the best (to me) part: they’re doing this while our class discussion is about distribution of unpaid domestic labor. That is, they’re having these awkward conversations about who does what and what’s a fair distribution of work, and if someone doesn’t do their part, do you just do it for them anyway and be frustrated or do you impose some sort of consequence, etc. But they’re doing all of that while they’re reading about how these decisions impact individuals within the context of the family. I do eventually point this out to them, but it is a useful object lesson in why these decisions are so difficult. Why you can’t just say “Let’s divide this evenly.” Because if yesterday’s dishes aren’t done when it’s time to cook tonight’s dinner, a decision has to be made about how to proceed. Following the group contract negotiations – which generally go quite well and I give feedback on draft comments to push them to be as precise as possible – students are generally much more sensitive to the ways that labor “just happens” to fall onto one member of the family (usually the woman).
The best part of teaching a class like this is that very few students have ever considered the family as a social institution, or a system that operates within other systems. They might have reflected on their own families, or the families of their friends. But they’ve very rarely viewed the family as a social institution that both shapes and is shaped by other social institutions. Is the family subject to reform? What would it mean to reform it? What would a world after that reformation look like? Is it one we find preferable to our own, or some kind of dystopian nightmare with the largest government we can imagine. Additionally, I always enjoy classes in which there’s virtually no additional burden to justify philosophy. In Introduction to Philosophy, for instance, if I’m covering Gettier cases, students might understandably want to know why the university felt this was a reasonable general education requirement. I’m happy to explain that connection to them, of course, but there is something freeing about being able to teach the material without also having to explain why we teach the material. Why do we consider Okin’s worries about equal obligations of mothers and fathers? Because, as it turns out, who should load the dishwasher is a political, economic, and moral question. Who knew? Or, put another way: this kind of philosophy is everywhere, so we might as well put some real, careful thought into it in a class.
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Brynn Welch
Dr. Brynn Welch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches courses in applied ethics and social/political philosophy. In 2021, she received the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is also co-author of the children's book, Bennie Goes Up! Up! Up! You can view her TEDx talk on children's literature here.
One response to thin Kantian ideas of moral rationality was the Lebensphilosophie of the early romantic movement and its later revivals. What cannot be deduced from pure reason makes sense when consider the practicalities of life. Karen Ng wrote a recent book on the role of Life in post-Kantian German philosophy.