Blood Without A Contract

When I read the political philosophers who originated modern liberal morality, Hobbes and Locke, I was struck by how they struggle to account for the family. Both of them, to oversimplify a little, advance a moral theory where the only admissible principles are (1) keeping explicit contracts (2) greatest good for the greatest number stuff and (3) self-preservation. A surface reading of these principles would suggest that it leaves no justification for family ties. But while neither of these philosophers ever had any children himself, they were not unfeeling lizard people, so they went to some lengths to justify the special bond between parent and child within their framework.

I don’t find their attempts convincing. Perhaps more tellingly, from very similar assumptions they reach for very different explanations of why the bond should exist. Hobbes argues for an implicit contract by which the child is perpetually “obliged to obey” whoever nurtures them, if anyone chooses to do so, because otherwise the helpless infant would simply die. Locke argues that parents have an obligation from God to nurture their children, and this comes with a duty to use reason on the child’s behalf and exercise command until the child attains reason, at which point their obligation ceases; and that even adult children are obliged by gratitude and by God to honor and assist, but not to obey, their parents.

Say what you will about whether these arguments are sound, it’s clear that neither of these is the actual reason that parents and children share a bond. Whether a family accepts Hobbes’s idea of contractual obedience or not, whether a family accepts Locke’s idea of divinely ordained stewardship or not, makes little difference to the bond between parents and children in that family. Parental relations are a fact about the human race (and many animals), and these attempts to morally justify the family are unrelated to that fact.

This becomes clearest when we look at siblings. The bond between siblings is one of the most fundamental and most important facts of human psychology. Neither Hobbes nor Locke attempts to justify it at all. It’s unlikely that the idea of explaining sibling bonds simply never occurred to them; probably, they tried to come up with explanations within the moral framework they were developing, and couldn’t come up with anything satisfying.

This is because their contractualist lens has no room for the family. Their attempts to tack on justifications for the child-parent bond are weak and incomplete, e.g. neither accounts for the fact that parents almost always feel obligations towards their adult children. Their explanations for the rest of family life are even worse, or lacking entirely.

This is fine so far as it goes. There are many valuable moral arguments which are not a 100% complete description of all possible moral issues. Their outlook towards natural law and liberty clearly captures some important truths about human morality. But over the last few centuries, the idea that their premises are the only legitimate moral principles to argue from has become gradually more common. Doing so leaves out a tremendous amount of what people actually care about—family is an especially clear example but far from the only one. We can imagine a coherent mind with a morality formed by these principles and nothing else. But it’s not a human mind.