As is obvious now to regular readers, I am not an academic philosopher.  Beyond a rather pedestrian background – the usual survey of Western political thought, some Rawls, a little Singer, a bit of Derrida and the like – I do not have a deep engagement with academic philosophy.  I do not keep up with the journals.  My recent foray into ancient Chinese philosophy is limited to only several classical texts and a fair amount of secondary sources.  There is always more for me to read (by the way, I have Bryan Van Norden’s new book, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy, on my reading desk…). 

     My project to bring ancient Chinese thought into modern American life, therefore, proceeds from those classical texts directly into familiar issues of contemporary life.  It is meant for a general readership; it is not a contribution to academic philosophy – I have too much respect for philosophers to imagine that I could ever make such a contribution.

     But, from time to time, I do read beyond the confines of my own limited project, and today I did so.

      I want to link to this piece because it is something I want to return to (blogs are good that way: they can serve as parking lots for useful links…).  But it also has a powerful Confucian resonance, though it does not directly engage Confucianism at all.  A warning: it is a PDF file:

      Harry Bridgehouse and Adam Swift, "Legitimate Parental Partiality,"  unpublished manuscript (that is, at least, what I have a link for. I am not sure if it has been published somewhere.).

      The paper considers how we can balance the morally legitimate need (desire?) to be partial to our family members, especially to our children, against the needs of egalitarianism in society at large.   Think of it this way: at what point, and under what conditions, should I take food that I would otherwise give to my children and provide it to other people, strangers, who have none?   I have never really thought of the tension of family obligations versus social obligations in quite this depth before, so the paper is really quite fascinating to me.

      As a part of what they do, the authors provide some examples of what they call "relationship-goods realized or produced by the family."  I was struck with how Confucian this all sounded:

* Parents oversee and contribute to the cognitive, emotional and moral development of their children, as well as guaranteeing their immediate needs for nutrition, shelter, and safety.

* Children are provided with a sense of continuity with (or belonging or attachment to) the past, mediated by acquaintance with her own family members.

* Children enjoy the security provided by the presence of someone with a special duty of care for them.

* Parents enjoy a distinctively valuable relationship with their children; one that can be intimate and mutually loving, but in which the parent acts as a fiduciary for her child’s material, emotional, and moral interests.

     These could be points adduced by a modern day Confucian in response to the question: why should we care about family obligations?

      Bridgehouse and Swift ultimately reach conclusions that might be more constrained than a Confucian would be comfortable with – they would limit family obligations to preserve social obligations to a greater extent than would a Confucian.  But the conversation they are engaged in is precisely what Confucius and Mencius would want us to be talking about.