A good post over at Crooked Timber: Harry Brighouse summarizes and critiques a paper by David Vellman (PDF!) on the genetic basis of parenthood and children’s identity.  Vellman, according to Brighouse (I have only started the ful 22 page paper but wanted to quickly post on it now), argues that adopted children need to know their biological parents  because the biological-genetic tie is fundamental to identity formation.   A modern Confucian would, I believe, have to reject this idea.

     Parenthood, and thus that portion of a child’s identity drawn from parental and ancestral connections and relationships, is predominantly social, not genetic.  Genetic information is important for medical reasons, but has little to do with how a parent acts as a parent or how a child is integrated into a family unit.  A family is not simply an expression of genetic codes; indeed, genes are fairly unimportant in parenting and identity formation.  Yes, they determine if our eyes are blue or green, our hair brown or black, and whether we might be predisposed to one or another disease.  But they tell us almost nothing about the daily performance of parental duties, which are much more important in defining what kind of parent a person is and, by extension, how a child will relate to parents and family in general.

    Family matters are primarily performative.  Parents must exercise nuanced judgment in raising a child and responding to ever fluctuating social, cultural, economic and cultural conditions that surround child rearing.  Does a parent’s job provide him or he with sufficient time to respond to critical moment’s in a child’s life?  Does his or her personal experience – whether they have worked closely caring physically for others, etc. – provide any background that might help them in the difficult work of parenting?  Have they been exposed to good parenting themselves, not just from their own parents but from what they may have observed from other parents?

    For Vellman’s argument to carry weight, he would have to demonstrate that the actual performace of parenting is somehow rooted in genetic information.  I don’t believe he is doing that.  Instead he is relying on the desire of adopted children to know their biological parents.  But this strikes me not as a genetically driven impulse but simply another socially-induced preference.  It is only in the past few decades that the search for biological parents has gained any prominence.  For vast stretches of human history adoptions happened and, in many, many cases, "parents" were defined by their social behavior.    The child’s identity was shaped more by the actual nurturing and cultivation carried out by the social parents.  The biological parents were largely irrelevant.

    Or that is, however, how a modern Confucian would begin to respond to Vellman.   I will add more when I finish the paper.