How Do We Acquire Parental Responsibilities?

It is commonly believed that parents have special duties toward their children—weightier duties than they owe other children. How these duties are acquired, however, is not well understood. This is problematic when claims about parental responsibilities are challenged; for example, when people deny that they are morally responsible for their biological offspring. In this paper I present a theory of the origins of parental responsibilities that can resolve such cases of disputed moral parenthood. I begin by explaining the case of accidental fathers—men who took all the precautions they were expected to but still impregnated their partners. This case brings out a tension between certain general principles for assigning moral responsibility and the practice of assigning parental responsibilities equally to biological parents who conceive through voluntary intercourse. This practice makes the extent of responsibility disproportionate to the risk taken, and it implies that men and women have different moral powers without relevant differences. To deal with this problem we need an explanation of how parental responsibilities are acquired, in general. I consider two possible accounts of parental responsibilities that treat them as natural duties, that is, duties whose existence is independent of convention. Neither can explain paradigmatic cases of parenthood. Instead, I propose a conventional-acts account, according to which parental duties are taken on by individuals through acts whose meaning is determined by social convention. The artificiality of social conventions explains why the extent of parental responsibilities need not be proportional to the risks taken in sex. It also permits certain inequalities between the sexes with regard to how parental responsibilities are undertaken. We may criticize such inequalities, but such evaluations of parenting conventions should be distinguished from the question of whether people acting under the conventions have acquired parental responsibilities. Accidental fathers, for example, would have taken on responsibility for their children through the act of sexual intercourse, even if there were good reasons for changing the convention according to which sex has this significance.