The Romance of the Family

Abstract

Freud called it the of the family--the fantasy that the grown-ups passing themselves off as your mother and father are impostors, and your real family is not only much more loving, but rich, or titled, or preferably both. What it boils down to, of course, is the thought that, however good families are, they're never quite good enough. Bioethicists and health care professionals seem especially prone to this fantasy. Some of the prenatal testing literature, to take just one example, insists that parents ought to be held to the standard of unconditional welcome --which is to say that if people contemplating parenthood are worried about whether they have the resources to raise a child with disabilities, then they are doing something wrong. In the literature on feeding, it crops up in the idea that because breast is best, then if mothers ever bottle feed for their own convenience, they are doing something wrong. In the literature on children as subjects of research, it rears its head in the idea that if parents enroll their children in nontherapeutic research that poses more than minimal risk, then they are doing something wrong. And in the case of Ashley X, the romance of the family expresses itself in the demand that her parents may justify medical interventions only by appealing to Ashley's best interests. Neither the parents' own needs nor their worries about the burden of care that Ashley's siblings might one day have to assume are allowed to be voiced, much less taken seriously. The trouble with these ideas is that they are, exactly, fantastic: they are seriously at odds with how we actually live our lives in families, and the thought that we should live that way is seldom subject to any even halfway rigorous defense. Here, we will do some arguing to show that the romance of the family, bioethics style, is more than a little bizarre and far from benign. As we see it, the genealogy of the bioethical variant on the family romance can be traced to the notion of the self that was popular with philosophers of the Enlightenment. What is fundamentally true about people, as many of those thinkers and their progeny have taught, is that, when it comes right down to it, our interests are all self-interests, where the self is understood to be essentially and completely separate from other selves. Children have never fit very well into this sort of picture, but when they are shoehorned into it, the classification that they tend to take on is of a group of persons who are intrinsically vulnerable--not because of unfortunate circumstances, or idiosyncratic weaknesses, but simply because of their inability to defend effectively those fundamentally separate, individual interests of theirs when thrust into a world composed of other, fundamentally separate selves. Children are, on this view, at risk. They need constant protection, ideally provided by people who will fully accept unbounded responsibility for meeting all their needs. Oddly enough--or luckily enough--despite all this fundamental separateness, there is no limit to the love that naturally characterizes the sphere of home and family (there are, of course, unnatural families, but they don't disturb the contours of the general picture). In the public sphere, where individuals meet as equals, their competing self-interests are (in favorable circumstances) governed by some impartial form of morality, each to count for one and none for more than one, all indistinguishably ends-in-themselves, and that sort of thing. In the private sphere, however, nature fills the parental heart with a self-sacrificial love that counts the child as far more than one--as the object, indeed, of parental devotion. It might seem that, at least as an aspiration, there's nothing so wrong with the health care version of the romance of the family. Children are often, if not essentially, vulnerable in ways that many adults are not, and parents typically do love their progeny, even if they are not monomaniacal about it. …