Rights and responsibilities

Joseph Millum is an ethicist at The Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the US. Millum received his undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the rights and responsibilities of parents, global justice and bioethics, and international research ethics. He is the author of The Moral Foundations of Parenthood and co-editor of Global Justice and Bioethics.

Zan Boag: In your book The Moral Foundations of Parenthood, you run through parental rights and responsibilities and put forward a theory of moral parenthood. In the book’s blurb it says that parental “rights and responsibilities undergird the nuclear family and are essential to the flourishing of its members”. Could you give a brief overview of your theory of moral parenthood - including to provide some examples of parental rights and responsibilities?

: The theory of moral parenthood tells us who has parental rights and what do those rights consist in, and who has parental responsibilities and what do those responsibilities consist in. To me, that’s the core of what we need to know in addressing ethical questions about being a parent. The view that I have about parental rights is that you acquire parental rights by putting in parental work. Parental rights are what you deserve in virtue of parenting well. And parental work is work that is aimed at the flourishing of the child – you deserve parental rights because you put in the sort of work that leads a child successfully through the child’s development.Then you want to know, if you have those rights, what do those rights consist in? Well, here we can separate out – and I’m borrowing this vocabulary from Adam Swift and Harry Brig-house – fundamental parental rights and