Against Stealing Children

Parents needn't be the "best available"

Anca Gheaus defends the “best available parent” (BAP) principle:

The moral right to parent should be understood as a liberty right held by the person, or persons, who, of all those who express a commitment to parent a child, would make the best parent for that child—i.e., would benefit the child most through the exercise of parental authority.

On its face, this seems kinda nuts. For example, it would apparently justify industrial-scale kidnapping of newborn babies from the global poor to be given to wealthy adoptive families with the resources to provide them with an (expectably) better life. Seems bad! (One of my more controversial takes, I know.)

The final page (459) of Gheaus’s paper briefly acknowledges a problem along these lines:

Adults who are unjustly deprived of the material and social resources needed for optimal parenting are owed compensation that may well put them in the position to be optimal parents for their offspring. In this context, the best available parent view gives additional support to their general grievance, because it shows how unjust deprivation of material and social resources entails a further deprivation: that of the right to parent.

If your view entails that the global poor have (in their current condition) no right to parent their children, I’m not sure how reassuring it is to say that your view “gives additional support to their general grievance”. I think they’d rather have their kids than an extra grievance!

As a result, I can’t imagine BAP being a welcome proposition to most of humanity. That’s a problem: good moral principles should be endorsable (as in everyone’s expected interest) from behind a veil of ignorance, and BAP isn’t. It too much neglects the interests of procreating parents. I think there are a couple of interestingly different ways of further developing this charge…