CHILDREN'S RIGHTS, STATE INTERVENTION, MARRIAGE, CUSTODY AND DIVORCE

CONTRADICTIONS IN ETHICS AND FAMILY LAW

By: Laurence Houlgate

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

By the end of the 20th century there had been a veritable deluge of philosophical essays and books about children’s rights, adultery, family violence, the ethics of divorce, the limits of state intervention in the family, gay marriage, filial duties, and the right to have and raise children. There is now a substantial body of writing on these and other related topics for interested readers and scholars.
While sorting through the past 45 years of my own research and writing about family law and family ethics, I discovered that most of it fits into one of four thematic areas: children’s rights under the United States Constitution, issues in state intervention in family life, the resolution of parental disputes involving custody, and problems arising from the theory and application of family ethics. Many of my articles have appeared in diverse, out of print or otherwise hard to obtain philosophical and law journals, anthologies, or were delivered as unpublished conference papers. Hence, I thought that it would be of interest and perhaps useful to scholars of family law and ethics to bring these together into a single volume.
Chapters 1 - 3 are about the status of children in United States constitutional law, raising questions about the consistency of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in cases involving children.
Chapters 4 - 6 are about the debate over the distinction between the public and the private as this pertains to the problem of state intervention in the family.
Chapters 7 - 9 are about the ethical issues that arise in making policy decisions regarding the proper resolution of disputes over the custody of children when parents divorce.
Chapters 10 - 12 shift from questions about family law to questions about the ethics of family relationships.

In the Afterword section of the book I have made a list of the most important federal and state statutes that were passed by legislators in the first quarter of the twenty first century (2000 - 2025), and the most important decisions made by state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. I think you will find that although the facts are often different now than they were in the period discussed in this book (1960 - 1999), the moral principles used are the same. This explains why we continue to read Plato, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and other great philosophers. Their debates are about moral principles, after the facts are agreed upon. The debated principles do not go away from one century to another. Debates about allowing men marrying men and women marrying women is about the morality of these marriages not about the fact that their sexual preferences are different than the preferences of marriages between one man and one woman. Debates about the abortion of a fetus is about the morality of the abortion not how a fetus is killed. The facts are agreed upon, but the morality of the killing is a debate that is still going on.