Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 41, No.

5, November 2024
doi: 10.1111/japp.12660

A Project View of the Right to Parent

BENJAMIN LANGE

ABSTRACT The institution of the family and its importance have recently received considerable
attention from political theorists. Leading views maintain that the institution’s justification is
grounded, at least in part, in the non-instrumental value of the parent–child relationship itself.
Such views face the challenge of identifying a specific good in the parent–child relationship that
can account for how adults acquire parental rights over a particular child – as opposed to general
parental rights, which need not warrant a claim to parent one’s biological progeny. I develop a
view that meets this challenge. This Project View identifies the pursuit of a parental project as
a distinctive non-instrumentally valuable good that provides a justification for the family and
whose pursuit is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of parental rights. This view grounds
moral parenthood in a normative relation as opposed to a biological one, supports polyadic forms
of parenting, and provides plausible guidance in cases of assisted reproduction.

1. Introduction

The institution of the family has recently received considerable attention from political
theorists, with special attention to its role and structure in a just society. A central question
is how, if at all, parents’ rights over children can be justified.1
One approach that aims to answer this question justifies the family (or the ‘moral right
to parent’) by appeal to the non-instrumental value of the parent–child relationship itself.
This view is based on the following two core ideas:
Dual Interest: The parent–child relationship is justified by appeal to (i) the
interests of adults in playing a fiduciary role and (ii) the interests of children in
receiving adequate care.2

Familial Good: Standing in a parent–child relationship amounts to a distinctive,

non-instrumentally valuable good for both parents and children.3
This approach offers a promising defence of the value of the family and a general right to
parent, but it struggles to explain why people should have parent–child relationships with
particular children (typically their biological children). For brevity, the idea that people
should have such relationships will henceforth be called ‘the right to parent’.
Though it maintains that as long as parents fulfil a sufficiently high standard of parent-
ing competency, they should be allowed to raise children – as opposed to maintaining that
children always ought to be reallocated to the ‘best’ available parents – it does not offer a
justification for any particular distribution of children among competent parents at birth in
the first place, such as the one in our world whereby biological parents have the right to
keep and raise their biological offspring.4
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 805

The importance of filling this argumentative lacuna is reinforced by the challenge to

explain what would be wrong with baby redistribution among competent parents
(a challenge that will simply be called ‘Baby Redistribution’ below).5 We might think that
there are reasons of social justice to reshuffle newborns at birth between all recent compe-
tent birth parents.6 For example, in societies where baby girls have historically been less
highly valued than baby boys, the redistribution of babies at birth among all new adequate
parents could provide a disincentive for sexist practices of gender selection. Here the idea
is that if the inclusion into the baby-redistribution lottery were conditional on being
expectant parents, then only those people who would rather remain childless than have
a baby girl would continue to abort based on the sex of their foetus.
For non-instrumental views to account for parent–child relationships with particular
children, including one’s biological children, and to be able to avoid Baby Redistribution,
the following two requirements must be satisfied. The first is what I call:
Robustness: The right to parent must be grounded in a robust connection between
parents and a particular child or children.
Meeting this requirement ensures that the proposed parent-centred interest identifies a
specific connection (be it causal, historical, emotional, or of another kind) between par-
ents and a token child, such as one’s biological progeny, as opposed to a connection to some
child.
The second requirement I refer to as:
Special Value: The right to parent must be grounded in a non-instrumentally
valuable feature of the parent–child relationship.
Meeting this requirement ensures that the value of the proposed distinctive interest in
parenting a particular child is consistent with Familial Good.
For the more specific task of justifying the right to parent one’s biological child, the
conditions named in Robustness and Special Value must be met at or before the time of a
child’s birth. That is, a plausible account of the right to parent one’s biological child must
show that there typically exists a sufficiently weighty, non-instrumentally valuable, de re
connection between birth parents and their newborn at birth. This will then answer Baby
Redistribution by showing that the reallocation of children at birth between competent
parents would destroy non-trivial, normatively significant value.
My aim in this article is to develop a non-instrumental account of the right to parent that
meets both these requirements. I adopt a project-based approach, which is a well-known
contender in the ethics of partiality, and spell out in detail how it can ground the right to
parent. This Project View maintains that parents have a weighty interest in pursuing and
continuing parental projects, which are a special kind of creative project aimed at success-
fully rearing a child. Appeal to the value of engaging in parental projects can complement
existing non-instrumental defences of the view that children should be raised in families,
since only the institution of the family makes possible the pursuit of a parental project, and
it justifies parents’ acquisition of a right to this good, since, at the time of a child’s birth, cer-
tain adults typically have a weighty interest in continuing to pursue their parental project
with respect to that particular child, typically their biological child – though, as we shall
see, the Project View can equally account for adoptive parenthood. By spelling out the
resources of the Project View in the context of parenthood, this article also aims to rein-
force the credibility of project-based approaches in the ethics of partiality more generally.
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
806 Benjamin Lange

I proceed as follows. Section 2 begins with a contrastive backdrop to the view that I shall
develop. I illustrate how one of the most influential non-instrumental accounts, the
Relationship View developed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, and a modification
to it proposed by Anca Gheaus, each fail to fulfil either the Robustness or the Special Value
desideratum. Section 3 then develops the Project View. I characterise the constitutive ele-
ments of parental projects and what makes them valuable, discuss their complementary
relation to the intimate-relationship good identified by the Relationship View, and show
how my project-based approach can meet the two desiderata outlined above. Section 4
explores some of the implications of the Project View in more depth. I discuss its ability
to capture biological parenthood without appeal to the value of biological ties, its support
for polyadic forms of parenting, and its demandingness. Section 5 illustrates these impli-
cations by considering how the Project View applies to the practice of surrogacy. I show
how it entails that commissioning parents typically acquire parental rights, whereas anon-
ymous donors or gestational surrogates do not. I conclude in Section 6.
A complete theory of parenthood must answer many more questions than I am able to
tackle here. Hence, a few caveats: my aim in what follows is to provide a non-instrumental
account of the right to parent that includes a justification for the acquisition of this right.
I understand this task to be distinct from the issue of determining the rights of parents,
which concerns the substantive rights that parents may exercise in relation to their chil-
dren, as well as from the issue of determining the ground of parental obligations or
responsibilities.7 Nor will I say anything about the permissibility of procreation.8

2. The Relationship View

According to the
Relationship View, an agent A has a right to parent a child C when and because
(i) A is a sufficiently competent parent;
(ii) A enjoys a distinctively valuable personal relationship through being a
parent to C;
(iii) C derives sufficient value from the relationship from being parented by A.

The Relationship View identifies a special interest that the family facilitates and protects
and argues that this interest is the reason it is better for children to be raised in families
by parents than to be raised in state-run orphanages or other institutions that do not
closely mimic the family. This interest is:
Intimate Relationship: A special kind of intimate and mutually loving relationship
between children and their parents.9
The Relationship View argues that since only the family can make this special, relationship-
based good available, the right to parent is effectively a right to enjoy this special kind of
good – conditional on the parents’ serving the children’s interests in being adequately parented.
Both parents and children have an interest in Intimate Relationship.10
Children, so the argument goes, have an interest in securing continuous attachments to
specific adults who will provide them with the loving attention necessary to develop

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 807

physically, emotionally, cognitively, and morally, as well as to flourish in both childhood

and adulthood. The family makes the realisation of these goods possible for children by
allowing them to enjoy the love of their parents and affording them a sense of belonging
and security provided by one or more persons with a special duty of care for them.
In addition to the relationship-based goods that accrue exclusively to children, the Rela-
tionship View further argues that Intimate Relationship is distinctively valuable for parents.
It allows parents to enjoy an intimate and mutually loving relationship in which they each
act ‘as a fiduciary for [their] child’s nondevelopmental interests and for her interests in
physical, cognitive, emotional, and moral development, which include, usually, the inter-
est in becoming an adult who is independent of her parents, capable of taking over respon-
sibility for her own judgement and for her own welfare’.11
I think that the Relationship View gets many things right. Its argumentative strategy
strikes me as correct, and it offers a convincing argument for Intimate Relationship as a dis-
tinctive non-instrumental familial good.
However, as Brighouse and Swift themselves recognise, their account cannot meet
Robustness in a way that grounds a right to parent a particular child and rules out the
reshuffling, at birth, of newborns between recent competent birth parents. This is because
their argumentative ambition is only to show that appeal to Intimate Relationship can pro-
vide a defence for parent–child relationships or a right to parent in general, not to show that
it can justify a right to parent a particular (that is, one’s biological) child. According to
them, the realisation of Intimate Relationship is independent of a prenatal connection
between adults and a child, allowing adults to enjoy this good by parenting children to
whom they are entirely genetically unrelated.12 This leaves open the issue whether, at
birth, a child’s biological parents or other available, competent adoptive parents should
have the right to parent the newborn.
Dissatisfied by this implication, some theorists have attempted to build on the
Relationship View. They appeal to:
Prenatal Relationship: Gestation typically gives rise to an intimate emotional
relationship between a gestational procreator and her foetus.13
The Gestationalist View agrees with the Relationship View that children and parents have
an interest in establishing and maintaining a valuable emotional relationship. It adds the
novel suggestion that the enjoyment of Intimate Relationship already begins in utero and
that ‘children come into the world being already in an intimate caring relationship with
their gestational procreator’.14
Expectant parents are usually highly emotionally invested in their pregnancy.15 This
investment is facilitated in part through the costs that pregnancy incurs and in part
through the many ways of interacting with the foetus, such as seeing it on ultrasound
images, hearing its heartbeat, and feeling its movements. Unborn children can recognise
their gestational procreator’s voice and smell at birth, which seems to provide further
evidence of their attachment to their birth parent.
Appeal to Prenatal Relationship thereby provides a potential answer to Baby
Redistribution by satisfying Robustness at birth, since the redistribution of children at birth
would rupture a valuable emotional bond between parents and their birth child.
The Gestationalist View’s proposal is interesting, but I am sceptical that the appeal to
Prenatal Relationship can meet Special Value. The reason for this is that the alleged value

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
808 Benjamin Lange

of the in-utero connection seems to rely on too loose a conception of what a

non-instrumentally valuable personal relationship is.
By way of making this point more explicit, let us clear up some ambiguity concerning
the nature of the relationship between a gestational procreator and her foetus. There are
two respects in which the two can be said to enjoy a relationship. The first is a biological
connection based on the gestation of the foetus within the woman’s womb. This is a kind
of relationship, but not one that the Relationship View would consider normatively signif-
icant (though one might think that this relationship can indeed be the basis of an account
of parenthood). So, to offer an extension of the Relationship View, the Gestationalist View
must claim that beyond this biological connection, a gestational procreator and her foetus
share a non-instrumentally valuable relationship akin to Intimate Relationship.
I’m unconvinced that the relationship between a foetus and her gestational procreator is
a relationship of this sort. This is, primarily, because it lacks crucial elements that charac-
terise the value of Intimate Relationship as it manifests between (born) children and their
parents.
From the parents’ perspective, though the experience of pregnancy is extremely rich
and valuable, it does not include much knowledge of the unborn participant in the rela-
tionship; impressions of that participant are based on personal projection, fantasy, and
limited forms of interaction.16 These forms of investment, as I shall argue later, are indeed
valuable, but their value should be understood not as reflecting a sufficiently strong inti-
mate and emotional relationship but rather as reflective of the parents’ investment in a
parental project.
From the unborn child’s perspective, the existence by the time of birth of an already par-
tially formed relationship akin to Intimate Relationship with the gestational procreator
seems implausible. Despite the ability of newborns to recognise their gestational procre-
ator’s voice and odour, it seems a stretch too far to maintain that this kind of valuable
relationship-based good begins to be realised during gestation.17
This is not to deny that the Prenatal Relationship could be instrumentally valuable for a
foetus or expectant parents. Perhaps infants are developmentally harmed by being sepa-
rated from their gestational procreators at birth, though this is hardly a given.18 Regardless
of whether there is some instrumental value to the in-utero bond for a child, the important
point for my purposes here is that as soon as this possibility is entertained, the
Gestationalist View must give up its aspiration to offer a non-instrumental account that is
a consistent extension of the Relationship View. I submit that the Gestationalist View
can meet Robustness only at the cost of failing to meet Special Value at birth.

3. The Project View

3.1. What Is a Parental Project?

Though the Relationship View explains why adults have a right to parent in general, the
appeal to the special value of Intimate Relationship reaches its limits when applied to the
issue of how the rights to this good are acquired. But if not an appeal to the special value
of an intimate parent–child relationship, what could fare better?
The kind of view that I propose in this section is traditionally considered a competitor to
the Relationship View. It belongs to a tradition of normative views that try to justify
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 809

partiality by appeal to the special value of projects rather than that of personal
relationships.19 Though within the ethics of partiality, the project- and relationship-based
approaches are often seen as rivals that each lay claim to being the single correct frame-
work for justifying partiality, I think their incompatibility, at least in the case of parent-
hood, is overstated.20 Just as personal relationships can give rise to shared projects,
projects can give rise to and contain valuable relationships – the family here being a case
in point, or so I shall argue.
My guiding idea in what follows is to show how the Robustness and Special Value desid-
erata can be fulfilled by conceiving of the good of parenting holistically in terms of its
connected and intertwined physical and psychological dimensions. For want of an
established label, I shall refer to such a related and connected set of commitments oriented
towards rearing a child as a parental project.21
Unsurprisingly, I will call my preferred view the

Project View: An agent A acquires a right to parent a child C when and because

(i) A is a sufficiently competent parent, and

(ii) A pursues a distinctively valuable parental project with respect to C.

This view aims to capture the significance of parenting by means of the multidimensional
notion of a parental project, understood as a distinctively valuable, volitional, ongoing,
creative undertaking that involves the planning and rearing of another human life.
But parental projects have a larger significance than that: the Project View identifies the
pursuit of parental projects as an irreplaceable familial good that can serve as a distinctive
source of flourishing and meaning for many adults. Engagement in a parental project is a
source of satisfaction and fulfilment that is, by virtue of the project’s pervasiveness in one’s
life and its special content of rearing another human being, unavailable through the pur-
suit of any other project – be it writing a book, building a house, or being a teacher.
Parents’ interests in parental projects thus provide an explanation of how particular paren-
tal rights are acquired at birth and an additional justification for the institution of the
family.
The family should therefore be understood as realising two familial goods: a project-
based good that concerns the creative and successful planning, pursuing, and completion
of a child’s upbringing, and a relationship-based good, as identified by the Relationship
View, that develops as part of, and is realised alongside, the pursuit of a parental project.
This, I believe, is the correct normative picture of moral parenthood.22
The claim that the family encompasses these two intertwining and overlapping familial
goods is a tricky one to defend. For one thing, the notion of a parental project can seem
elusive – and that of its relation to Intimate Relationship perhaps even more so. I therefore
want to put this approach into sharper focus, first describing the constitutive elements of
parental projects and what makes such projects a distinctively valuable component of
parents’ wellbeing, then considering their relation to Intimate Relationship.
To this end, I propose the following general characterisation of parental projects:

Parental Project: A special kind of creative project aimed at successfully rearing a

child.

And a more technical one:

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
810 Benjamin Lange

Parental Project*: An agent A’s connected set S of commitments with respect to

rearing a particular child C such that S has central subjective importance to A’s
life and such that S is objectively worthwhile.

(i) S is constituted, more specifically, by certain actions and by forms of intel-

lectual and emotional investments in the rearing of C.
(ii) The subjective importance of S is a function of the magnitude of the invest-
ments that constitute S over some time period T.23
(iii) S is objectively worthwhile iff it realises A’s interest in creatively rearing
C and C’s interests in Intimate Relationship.

Parental projects are a threshold construct. A parental project manifests just if, and
because, a relevant set of parental commitments concerning the rearing of a child has been
sustained over a sufficient period of time. Such projects require a certain amount and con-
tinuity of goal-oriented agency, since they would not otherwise be distinguishable from
mere preferences, desires, or wants. Thus, for a parental project to have central impor-
tance for an agent’s life, a certain set of that project’s constitutive elements must necessar-
ily be sufficiently pervasive within that life – that is just what a parental project is.
Parental projects have a temporal longevity that distinguishes them from Intimate Relationship.
Whereas the special parent–child relationship develops only after a child is born, the time before
and during a pregnancy can be part of what constitutes a parental project. The formation of a
parental project is therefore not restricted to the moment of conception. Typically, a couple
may plan to become parents and deliberately pursue a pregnancy before the conception of what
will later become their child. Once the couple knows that they are expecting a child, they begin
to adapt their lives accordingly and prepare themselves for their future role as parents. This pro-
cess then continues after the child is born, throughout infancy, early childhood, and adoles-
cence, until the completion of the parental project, which, for many parents, is marked by the
point at which a child is capable of being independent from them and their care.24
Hence, there are two stages where the familial goods of Parental Project and Intimate Rela-
tionship are non-overlapping: before the birth of a child and after a child leaves their parents’
care, when the special personal parent–child relationship may and often does persist.
Parental projects are characterised by distinctive kinds and forms of investments, all of
which are necessary and jointly constitutive of a parental project. This classifies the Project
View as a type of combined view as opposed to a pluralist one, which would consider several
features as sufficient but none as necessary for moral parenthood.25
All investments constitutive of a parental project require certain forms of agency
directed toward the rearing of a child. Though listing the full range of these commitments
would amount to determining the Project View’s account of the content of parental
rights – an important but rather extensive task that must wait for another occasion –
child-oriented actions typically include, at a specific level, such things as the buying of a
crib and nappies or playing with and feeding a newborn, and at a more general level, inter-
action with and care for a child throughout day-to-day activity. These elements can be
categorised more granularly along three dimensions.
First, a parental project has an intellectual dimension, which typically takes the form of a
deliberate process to become a custodian for a child. The Project View can thus be classi-
fied as at least partly intentionalist insofar as it requires certain intentional undertakings
with respect to a child. This process typically encompasses expectant adults’ learning
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 811

about and preparing themselves for their future role as caregivers in anticipation of the
infant’s birth and then, once the child is born, fulfilling this role by planning and following
through on decisions that pertain to the child’s life and promote its wellbeing.
A second dimension of a parental project is emotional. It encompasses an array of emo-
tions and vulnerabilities related to the rearing of a child both during and following preg-
nancy, resulting partly from the emotional bonding with a child that features in the
project and partly from continuous and prolonged investment in other ways through fan-
tasy, anticipation, and projection. Since the existence of emotional investment in a child is
a constitutive element of a parental project, the Project View thereby preserves part of the
appeal of the Gestationalist View – that is, both views acknowledge the normative signifi-
cance of emotional investment as one of several constitutive elements of a parental project.
The Project View, however, attributes this investment not to the existence of an intimate
relationship but rather to the pursuit of the project.
Thirdly, a parental project can, but need not, involve a social dimension, which cuts
across the previous two psychological dimensions. I here foreshadow the possibility of a
social dimension of parental projects because, as we shall see in the next section, a parental
project can be, and often is, a shared or joint pursuit between several parties that arises in
the context of an already existing romantic relationship.
So far, I have claimed that parental projects necessarily involve an intellectual and an
emotional dimension and optionally involve a social one. This taxonomy is meant to bet-
ter flesh out how the multidimensional construct of a parental project is supposed to be
understood. But to what extent are certain procreative biological acts constitutive of
parental projects?
It does not seem to me that the creation of a child, in the form of the fusion of the pro-
creators’ gametes or the embodied gestation of a foetus, is a necessary element of a paren-
tal project. I therefore deny that the initiation of parental projects is restricted to biological
procreators. Either physical interaction with or a certain physical proximity to the womb in
which a foetus gestates is necessary, I think, insofar as it facilitates other salient psycholog-
ical investments – as a condition for some of these other specific de re commitments to
arise in a relevant way – but it is only important for this subsidiary function, and gestation
has no independent constitutive significance for a parental project.
The reason is that, when relevant considerations are held equal, there is no intuitive dif-
ference in magnitude between the parental project of procreative biological parents in a typ-
ical planned pregnancy and that of commissioning adoptive parents who accompany the
surrogate pregnancy of a child entirely genetically unrelated to them. The same intuitive
comparison holds in the case of prospective grandparents actively supporting their child’s
pregnancy. Adoptive parents and non-gestating family members who relevantly invest in a
pregnancy can acquire suitable parental projects and rights with respect to a particular child.
The Project View consequently maintains that parenthood is a normative relation grounded
in the existence of parental projects, rather than a natural relation grounded in biology.

3.2. The Project View and Special Value

I have described parental projects and their constitutive dimensions. But why are they
valuable? The non-instrumental normative significance of pursuing parental projects lies
in their importance as a distinctive constituent of flourishing and meaning for many
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
812 Benjamin Lange

adults, assuming that one accepts this as an ethical category of objective value.26 This
meets the Special Value condition.
Parental projects are inherently linked to what is subjectively meaningful to an
agent. Engagement in the project of rearing a child to a state of being fully indepen-
dent, with the capacity to take responsibility for her own actions, gives an agent’s life
a sense of direction and opportunity for personal growth that provides that agent with
a distinctive kind of satisfaction. Note that although this action-guiding centrality is a
characteristic feature of parental projects, agents need not be consciously aware of the
role that parental projects play in their lives, let alone be able to articulate that role as I
do here. As Williams aptly observes: ‘One good testimony to one’s existence having a
point [through pursuing one’s projects] is that the question of its point does not
arise’.27
While the subjective importance of pursuing a parental project is often a good indication
of that project’s objective value, it is not a guarantee. Some parental projects can be mis-
guided or worthless, just as some ‘loving’ relationships that parents purport to have with
their children can be abusive, twisted, and harmful for a child. An overly ambitious couple
whose sole investment in their parental project stems from their desire to rear their future
child as a musical prodigy may indeed consider this pursuit a central part of their lives, but
it does not follow that the pursuit of this parental project warrants the ascription of paren-
tal rights, since it may not be objectively worthwhile.
Whether a parental project is worthwhile is conditional on its realisation of Intimate
Relationship for the child who features in the project, since children, at least for most of
their childhood, do not have an interest in parental projects. The parent-centred interest
in Parental Project is a kind of creativity in rearing a child that promotes that child’s
wellbeing as part of that very creative process.
This puts the project-based approach in a very appealing position to explain why the
parent–child relationship is valuable to parents. It sees the source of the non-
instrumental familial good as the pursuit of the parental project itself as opposed to
merely its completion. Put differently, the engagement in the parental project is what
realises the creative expression that the Project View identifies as an extremely valuable
parent-centred interest.28 The value structure of parental projects thereby explains
exactly why it matters to adults to be parents themselves despite their knowledge that
there may be better parents: they want to experience the distinctive satisfaction of
engaging in a parental project.

3.3. The Project View and Robustness

The Project View understands the right to parent as a normatively significant relation as
opposed to a natural biological one. But even though it does not consider biological ties
as necessary for moral parenthood, it offers a de facto justification for the right to parent
one’s biological child – the difference being that this justification does not consider the
biological parent–child connection (be it genetic, causal, or gestational) to be in and of
itself valuable. The Project View, in this sense, allows us to capture biological parenting
without appeal to biology.
To see how the Project View meets Robustness at birth and justifies suboptimal parent-
ing, consider the following vignette:
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 813

Innocent Mistake:29 Ann and Beth are in hospital, each due to deliver a baby girl.
Unfortunately, a midwife accidentally swaps their newborns just after birth with-
out anyone noticing. Consequently, Ann and Beth take home children who are
not their actual offspring.
Suppose that both Ann and Beth were fully invested in their pregnancies. Can the
midwife’s actions, innocent as they were, be characterised as violating a right to continue
the pursuit of a parental project? Yes. The Project View explains the violation of Ann’s and
Beth’s parental rights by appeal to the fact that each had pursued a particular parental pro-
ject with respect to their particular biological offspring, on whom specific project-relevant
investments will have de facto centred.30
Could the Gestationalist View invoke a parallel argument to account for Innocent
Mistake? By the same token, we might think that Ann and Beth each love a particular baby,
namely the one to whom each gave birth. Since each one’s love is directed to a particular
token baby, the value each derives from her loving relationship with that particular baby
will be disrupted if their babies are swapped. To clarify, I am arguing not that the
Gestationalist View fails to meet Robustness at birth but that it fails to satisfy Special Value,
which – assuming that the Gestationalist View is an extension of the Relationship
View – means that it cannot be a view of the sort that is committed to grounding the
acquisition of parental rights in a non-instrumentally valuable feature of the parent–child
relationship. Most expectant parents are, of course, attached to their unborn child, but I
deny that this is ‘love’ proper, that is, the manifestation of a non-instrumentally valuable
personal good. This is the reason that the Relationship View cannot be extended to deal
with parental rights acquisition.
Already at birth, the pursuit of a parental project represents a weighty
parent-centred interest valuable enough to resist Baby Redistribution. Recall that Baby
Redistribution challenges us to identify a parent-centred interest sufficiently weighty
to justify suboptimal parenting for one’s birth child when optimal parenting through
redistribution among all competent parents is an option. Since it is the engagement
in a parental project, and not only its achievement, that is valuable to parents, the
process of investing in the planning as well as the carrying through of a
pregnancy – and not only the child-rearing postpartum – can be immensely rich
and valuable to them, including various forms of physical, intellectual, emotional,
social, and financial investments that fundamentally transform their lives even before
the child’s birth.
The weight and specificity of adults’ interest in Parental Project can be recognised by
imagining Ann and Beth’s reaction upon learning that their babies had been swapped:
as in the case of unexpected late-stage pregnancy termination, Ann and Beth would expe-
rience tremendous grief and suffering. Similar considerations hold in a modified version
of Innocent Mistake, where the midwife’s mistake is not discovered until some 20 years
later, after Ann and Beth have already successfully raised the swapped children under their
care. Though upon the discovery of the mistake, both might not think that their opportu-
nity to pursue a valuable parental project had been compromised. They might still feel
regret about the accidental swap that occurred in the past. The Project View explains
the reactions in each of these cases as appropriate responses to the frustration of a valuable
parental project.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
814 Benjamin Lange

3.4. Other Project-Based Approaches

I have argued for a project-based account of the right to parent one’s biological child and
offered a particular version of this approach, the Project View. To clarify this view further,
it is instructive to contrast it with other project-inspired approaches to justifying parent-
hood. These approaches often invoke similar project-based notions, but they nonetheless
differ in their implementation from the account that I have given here. (Despite these dif-
ferences, I think these alternative approaches will also benefit from the general arguments
for the project-based strategy that I have pursued so far.)
Edgar Page appeals to a notion of creative self-extension and argues that ‘the parental
aim is not simply the creation of a person, but rather the creation of a person in the par-
ents’ own image’.31 Page thinks that ‘the propensity to determine the development of
the child, far from being aimed simply or primarily at the child’s good, is the manifestation
of a fundamental and unique interest which lies at the heart of human parenthood’.32
Though it recognises the importance of creative expression, this view fails to pay
sufficient due to children’s interests. My claim, in contrast to Page, is that although the
distinctive creative satisfaction derived from parenting matters and reflects a weighty
parent-centred interest, it must be (and generally is) compatible with the realisation of
the primary interest of children in securing the continuous attachments and loving atten-
tion necessary to flourish. This is reflected in the fact that parental projects are objectively
valuable only when they realise children’s interests in Intimate Relationship.
Colin Macleod argues that some of the intrinsic value of the family is grounded in
‘creative self-extension’, which arises out of the ‘the special opportunity … parents have
to express their own commitments to ideals and ground-projects by passing them on to
children’.33 For him, seeing ‘that valued features of one’s own sense of self have been
extended to one’s children and form part of their sense of self can be a profound source
of satisfaction’, though, in contrast to Page, he claims that the prerogatives parents have
to share ideals or favoured projects with their children are constrained by respect for chil-
dren as independent beings and a concern to facilitate meaningful autonomy in
children.34
Macleod’s dual-interest approach is more closely aligned with the kind of view that I am
exploring here, but it is not identical. What the Project View identifies as an important
relationship-based good justifying the right to parent is not the passing on to their children
of parents’ commitments to their own ground projects – which, to some extent, does seem
to treat children as mere vessels for the realisation of parents’ ideals – but the engagement in
the parental project itself, a distinctive kind of ground project in its own right.35 Macleod’s
outcome-oriented approach therefore differs from the process-oriented one that I
defend here.
Another class of intriguing project-inspired approaches to parenthood comes from
Norvin Richards and Tim Fowler.36 Richards’ account is grounded in the Millian princi-
ple of liberty to do anything we choose as long as it is not morally wrong, and he under-
stands the right to parent as ‘an instance of [a] general right to continue with whatever
we have underway [project of parenthood]’ so long as this project is morally innocent
and harmless to others.37 Similarly, Fowler’s project view rests on the general moral prin-
ciple that we have a right to initiate projects using our own powers and abilities so long as
these projects do not harm others38 and argues that this general freedom can also account
for particular parental rights.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 815

On closer inspection, both Richards’ and Fowler’s account, too, differ from the
Project View. First, the starting points of the views are different: Richards’ and
Fowler’s views maintain that the right to parent is an instance of a more general project
right, which in turn follows from a Millian principle of liberty, whereas the Project
View maintains that the right to parent is a right to enjoy a special kind of non-
instrumentally valuable good, the engagement in a parental project. But this right is
not just an instance of another more general right. Second, though both accounts
appeal to the significance of ‘projects’, their respective notions of the project are spelt
out differently compared to the view that I am proposing here. Richards and Fowler
characterise projects primarily in terms of forming of an intention,39 whereas the
notion of a parental project that I have attempted to articulate here is more
encompassing: it refers to a set of connected and intertwined physical and psycholog-
ical dimensions with respect to rearing a child.

4. Neutrality, Polyadic Parenthood, and Ambivalent Procreators

4.1. Biological versus Adoptive Parenthood?

Though the Project View provides a de facto justification for biological parenthood, it does
not draw a distinction between biological and adoptive parenthood – just as a child’s bio-
logical procreators can acquire parental rights, so can the parents or close friends of a ges-
tational procreator. This kind of neutrality and ability to account for both biological and
adoptive parenthood within a unified framework gives the Project View an advantage over
rival accounts that cannot explain how and why adoptive parents can also acquire full
parental rights, often rendering their account of parenthood incomplete.
Consider the Gestationalist View. Recall that it maintains that Prenatal Relationship
grounds the right to parent. Since a gestational procreator shares an intimate in-utero bond
with her foetus that any non-gestating supporting party necessarily lacks, the view privi-
leges gestational procreators as moral parents and therefore cannot explain how adoptive
parents or, on some views, men can acquire parental rights.40
One downside of biological theories’ inability to provide a unified account that includes
both biological and adoptive parenthood is illustrated by cases such as:
Mixed Family: Chloe and Dave have two newborn daughters; one of them is their
biological child, the other is their adoptive daughter. Suppose that both daugh-
ters are equally sick and in need of vital flu medicine. However, there’s only
enough medicine to treat one of them and foreseeably cure her disease.
Do Chloe and Dave have stronger reason to treat their biological daughter than their
adoptive daughter?
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that a proposed ground of the right to parent serves
as a ground for parental partiality, it seems clearly wrong that, in mixed families, parents
have stronger agent-relative reasons to be partial to their biological children than they
do to be partial to their adoptive ones – parents should treat all their children equally,
whether they are their biological offspring or not.41 However, certain geneticist or
gestationalist views seem hard-pressed to explain how they can avoid this implication if
their proposed biological feature in fact has the value that they claim it does.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
816 Benjamin Lange

Of course, one might think that, in Mixed Family, Chloe and Dave do not have
all-things-considered reason to be more partial to their biological daughter than to their
adoptive one. Perhaps parents have additional reasons of partiality based on other non-
biological grounds to treat their children equally. Perhaps this makes it less implausible
that a theory of parenthood may endorse a biological ground for parenthood as well as
an additional ground for adoptive parenthood.
My aim is not to assess this kind of response to Mixed Family here, but only to present
the Project View’s alternative explanation. Since the Project View maintains that parental
partiality is justified by the pursuit of parental projects, parents have the same pro tanto rea-
son to be partial to their adoptive children as to their biological ones. This explanation
strikes me as the most intuitive, and in this respect preferable to that of rival accounts.

4.2. Parental Projects as Joint Commitments

Parental projects can be joint commitments shared between several people. The Project
View is therefore consistent with a polyadic conception of moral parenthood, according
to which children can have more than two moral parents. It thereby captures alternative
parental setups, such as communal forms of child-rearing, as legitimate forms of
parenting.42
We can recognise that parental projects can be joint pursuits by reflecting on their con-
stitutive structural features. Many commitments that give rise to parental projects are par-
adigmatically capable of being shared and constituted by collaborative agential
investments: a pregnancy can involve the joint plan and pursuit of becoming parents, shar-
ing of financial and physical costs, and mutual emotional support, as well as making sense
of the pregnancy-related changes together.
To reinforce the plausibility of these claims, consider the following comparison.
Undertaking a pregnancy all by oneself in isolation from supporting parties is extremely
taxing. But it seems that a person doing so would acquire a particularly strong parental
project, given the magnitude of the commitments that the pregnancy entails.43
By contrast, it seems that the magnitude of a given parental project that arises in less
extreme conditions, as in the case of two supportive partners who pursue the pregnancy
together, is less strong. The explanation for this judgement, I submit, is that commitments
that would normally be shared and constitutively intertwined manifest themselves in the
life of a single individual in the first case.
Of course, it does not follow from this that all parental projects are necessarily joint.
A gestating procreator can possess a parental project and acquire a right to parent her child
even if there are no other individuals who accompanied the pregnancy. Similarly, an indi-
vidually undertaken parental project can become a shared project if it is still in a suffi-
ciently incipient stage that relevant constitutive interdependencies can arise.
Neither does it follow that parental projects can be shared only by two people – though I
think there is a limit. Several parties can share the same parental project so long as the dis-
tribution of its constitutive elements among these parties ensures that the project still
amounts to an important source of flourishing for all of them and so long as the child’s
interest in Intimate Relationship can be ensured.
If these remarks are correct and parental projects can take the form of joint commit-
ments, then this helps us to make sense of parental custody disputes. When the pursuit
of a parental project is shared between several people, all of them have a claim to
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 817

continued participation.44 This explains why it is impermissible, without justified cause,

for a parent spontaneously to move away with their child, preventing the other parent’s
continued engagement in the project.

4.3. The Stringency of the Project View

The pursuit of a parental project is a centrally important good for many adults. However,
its enjoyment requires a significant amount of worthwhile child-rearing-oriented commit-
ment. Overall, the Project View imposes a higher burden for the acquisition of parental
rights than other biological accounts and rules out as moral parents people who are not
significantly invested in a pregnancy or cannot pursue parental projects.
This latter implication is problematic. The Project View implies that adults who are
unable to pursue parental projects at all through no choice or fault of their own cannot
acquire a right to parent a particular child. That fully cognitively impaired people cannot
acquire parental rights is a regrettable but unavoidable implication for the kind of non-
instrumental approach defended here, and I accept it.45 Nonetheless, since these cases
are typically the exception as opposed to the rule, we might think that people who are
unable to engage in parental projects should still have a legal right to parent despite their
lack of a moral right. Indeed, some adults may be able to play an active role in nurturing
children and derive special value from their parental project despite their cognitive impair-
ment. If they can, with assistance from others, play a significant role in the project of par-
enting, we might think that they should be assigned a right to assisted parenting or partial
rights to parent.46
In cases in which an individual is not sufficiently committed to the rearing of a child, the
stringency of the Project View is a plausible feature rather than an implausible bug.
Consider the following case:
Cryptic Pregnancy: On her way to work, Emily suddenly experiences severe
cramps. Upon medical examination, Emily is made aware that she is going into
labour. It is decided that a caesarean section should be performed, and Emily
gives birth to a healthy daughter.
Some might be sympathetic to the idea that Emily has a right to parent her newborn. For
example, according to Richards’ project-inspired view, a gestational procreator always
acquires parental rights (insofar as she would do no harm through parenting) even in
unintentional pregnancies, since ‘she is entitled to be a parent to the child she has con-
ceived just by virtue of being pregnant with that child [and] [w]hat brought her these
parental rights would be the actions that resulted in her being pregnant’.47 However, this
judgement seems misguided to me.
Of course, Emily might have parental obligations or responsibilities toward her daugh-
ter. Emily might have also begun to form a parental project to rear her daughter after she
learned about her pregnancy, and this would grant her a claim to be given a chance to par-
ent her newborn. But the fact that she gestated another human being in complete igno-
rance of doing so up until birth should not grant her the power to control that human
being’s life in the form of a parental right at that moment. The acquisition of a right to par-
ent requires sustained investment; it is not something to which one is entitled based on
natural facts. The Project View can help us appreciate this better.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
818 Benjamin Lange

In fact, the Project View’s more demanding requirements vis-à-vis the acquisition of
parental rights avoid the pitfalls of other accounts that are not exclusively biological. For
example, consider:
Ambivalent Procreator: Ann is in her second trimester and only slowly becoming
invested in her pregnancy. Indeed, she has not decided yet whether she wants
to rear the child with whom she is pregnant. By contrast, her friend Frank emo-
tionally invests in and supports Ann’s pregnancy and, without Ann’s knowledge,
forms the intention to parent the child himself.
Matters depend on the specific contextual details of Ann’s and Frank’s respective invest-
ments, but I assume that – the investments being otherwise equal – Frank’s forming of an
intention to parent is insufficient to give him the right to parent the child.
This means that an intentionalist account of parenthood, according to which an agent
has a right to parent a child when and because that agent intends to parent the child, faces
challenges in avoiding the implication that Frank acquires a parental stake to parent his
friend’s baby.48 This seems correct.
A related worry befalls more sophisticated non-biological accounts such as Joseph
Millum’s Investment View.49 According to this view, parental rights are generated by
the performance of morally deserving parental work. More specifically, the Investment
View is based on the principle that ‘ceteris paribus, the extent of an agent’s stake in an
entity is proportional to the amount of appropriate work he or she has put into that
entity’.50 A relevant entity is a given child in relation to whom an agent can acquire paren-
tal rights. An agent’s stake constitutes the basis for a claim to some set of rights over a par-
ticular child. The relevant work is to be understood as appropriate and morally
permissible effort that promotes the flourishing of the child. The Investment View thereby
presents a straightforward way to apply the principle of justice that ‘reward’ (understood
here as decision-making rights over the child’s upbringing, etc.) should be proportional
to work.
To illustrate the worry, imagine that we fill out the case a bit more. Suppose that
although Ann has become emotionally invested in her pregnancy, Frank goes farther
and spends a lot of time educating himself about parenting so he can be a good carer for
the child. Meanwhile, Ann makes no such investment in her own ‘parental education’.
Since Frank’s investment foreseeably promotes the flourishing of his friend’s baby, it
seems that he may also acquire a weighty parental stake in the child, which seems
implausible.51
By contrast, the Project View sets a much higher threshold for Frank to acquire a paren-
tal stake. This is because – in contrast to the Investment View, which aims to individuate
and compare different forms of investments in order to determine parental rights – the
acquisition of parental rights according to the Project View requires weighty and continu-
ous multidimensional investments in order to make the connection between parents and a
child sufficiently robust. Most intuitively objectionable scenarios of ‘foetus hijacking’ for
the realisation of one’s own parenting ambitions are thereby ruled out; in cases where
someone other than the gestational procreator forms a parental project, the Project View
accordingly submits that there is nothing objectionable about that individual conse-
quently acquiring parental rights.52 In the modified version of Ambivalent Procreator,
unless either Ann or Frank is committed to the child in a way that can be rendered to have
risen to a commitment to a parental project, neither will have acquired parental rights.
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 819

And whoever, if anyone, is first to be so committed is the appropriate moral parent of the
child at birth.

5. An Illustration: Surrogacies

The implications highlighted in the previous section can be illustrated by considering how
the Project View applies to surrogacies. These practices are ripe for disagreement and
instructive insofar as they make possible the separation of genetic, gestational, and non-
biological parents. Consequently, cases involving conflicting claims to custody by
involved parties are settled differently in different jurisdictions around the world.53 The
Project View can provide normative guidance on these issues and a consistent basis for
legal regulation.
Let us first distinguish more precisely between different types and forms of surrogacies.
There are two types of surrogacies:

Full Surrogacy: In a full surrogacy, a surrogate mother provides her womb to ges-
tate a child who will be genetically unrelated to her. There are three different
forms of full surrogacies: those whereby (1) the commissioning parents both pro-
vide their respective gametes (mother’s egg and father’s sperm); those whereby
(2) only one gamete comes from a commissioning parent, the other coming from
an anonymous donor (mother’s egg and donor’s sperm or father’s sperm and
donor’s egg); and those whereby (3) both gametes come from anonymous
donors.
Partial Surrogacy: In a partial surrogacy, the surrogate mother who gestates a
commissioned child is also genetically related to it. In these cases, the surrogate
mother provides not only her womb but also her egg, which is inseminated by the
commissioning father’s or an anonymous donor’s sperm.

The Project View implies that, in all these types and forms of surrogacies, the right to
parent a surrogate child typically accrues to the commissioning (called ‘intended’) parents
as opposed to anonymous gamete donors or gestational surrogates. Having no knowledge
of whether their gametes end up being used for fertility treatments, anonymous donors
cannot form parental projects even when their gametes are being so used. In the case of
gestational surrogates, the formation of a parental project on the part of the intended par-
ents as opposed to the surrogate can be explained by the fact that a surrogate’s investment
in her pregnancy does not amount to a parental project. Since a surrogacy is agreed upon
with the expectation of the surrogate’s ultimately relinquishing the child, in most cases a
surrogate has only the project of bringing a pregnancy to completion without an intention
to rear the child.
Not all surrogacy arrangements are equal. The Project View implies the acquisition of
parental rights on the part of intended parents under the assumption that they suitably
invest in the pregnancy throughout and that the surrogate does not (and nor does anyone
else). Intended parents whose surrogacy arrangements include no personal interaction
with the surrogate during the pregnancy and who meet their surrogate only at the hand-
over of their commissioned child (or not at all) therefore have not acquired a right to par-
ent said child at that particular point in time.54 Even if such intended parents are otherwise
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
820 Benjamin Lange

emotionally invested in their surrogacy from afar, it seems to me that their lack of physical
proximity to and interaction with the person in whom their commissioned child is
gestating causes their investment to lack a sufficient de re connection to the particular
token child to give rise to a parental project in relation to that child.
On the other hand, the Project View supports parental rights acquisition on the part of
intended parents in commercial surrogacy practices such as those in North America,
which typically involve the facilitation of close emotional interpersonal relationships
between all involved parties: intended parents accompany the surrogate, partake in social
events and pregnancy-related activities together, and form near-familial bonds.55 That the
acquisition of parental rights by intended parents in surrogacies is context-dependent is
not a disappointing result. It is an accurate reflection of normative reality. It renders the
Project View appropriately sensitive to the extant moral complexities of cases of assisted
reproduction in a commercial context.56
Moreover, it correctly tracks how most surrogates perceive their own claims in relation
to the children they have gestated as surrogates. Though the literature often focuses on
surrogacy disputes involving a surrogate who refuses to relinquish her gestated child, such
cases are the exception rather than the norm; for example, most surrogates in the US do
not perceive the children they have gestated as ‘their own’ – though many maintain some
form of personal relationship with them.57
This gives the Project View an explanatory advantage over rival accounts that categori-
cally ascribe parental rights to genetic procreators and gestational surrogates or that oppose
the practice of surrogacy altogether.58 One example of such opposition to surrogacy is
Gheaus’s Gestationalist View. Since it maintains that a gestational procreator has a right
to parent, at least in part, by virtue of the in-utero relationship, the view opposes the practice
of surrogacies, as one of the very conditions for the incipience of the right to parent is the
interest of a foetus in the Prenatal Relationship with its gestational procreator.59

6. Conclusion

This article has spelt out in detail the resources of a project-based theory of the value of the
parent–child relationship. Unlike alternative proposals, such a theory can also account for
how parents acquire the rights to parent their biological children.
The Project View provides an account of parenthood by appeal to the non-instrumental
value of a parental project whose pursuit is a distinctive constituent of flourishing and mean-
ing for many adults. This account can reinforce extant non-instrumental defences such as
the one offered by the Relationship View. We have seen that conceiving of the right to parent
in terms of valuable parental projects has several important advantages, such as capturing
biological parenthood without appeal to biological ties, making possible polyadic concep-
tions of parenthood, and offering normative guidance in cases of assisted reproduction.
More generally, the Project View’s approach to justifying the value of the parent–child
relationship represents a tradition of normative views that try to justify instances of partial-
ity by appeal to the special value of projects. Thus, insofar as the Project View is the correct
view of moral parenthood, it also reinforces the credibility of project-based approaches in
the ethics of partiality.

Benjamin Lange, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany. benjamin.

lange@lmu.de
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 821

Acknowledgements

For their comments on various aspects of this work, I thank David Archard, Monika Betzler,
Susanne Burri, Ruth Chang, Tom Douglas, Cécile Fabre, Tomi Francis, David Healey,
Todd Karhu, Simon Keller, Kacper Kowalczyk, Jörg Löschke, Jeff McMahan, Michal
Masny, Joseph Millum, Amy Mullin, Serena Olsaretti, Mike Otsuka, Stefan Riedener,
Bastian Stern, Adam Swift, Alex Voorhoeve, Jay Wallace, as well as two anonymous referees
and the editors from this journal. I also thank audiences and workshop participants at the
Ockham Society, the Oxford Ethics Reading Group, the British Society for Ethical Theory,
the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference, the German Society for Analytic
Philosophy, the Bern-Zurich Workshop in Moral Theory, and the LMU Research Group
on Practical Philosophy. Special thanks to Roger Crisp and Ralf Bader for continuous sup-
port and encouragement. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Conflict of interest

No conflict of interest.

NOTES

1 The notion of a parent is ambiguous in multiple ways and therefore worth clarifying: a moral parent, who holds
a parental right, should be distinguished from a social or legal parent. A moral parent has a warranted claim to
care for a child based on some normatively significant property P. By contrast, a social parent is the person
who, by convention, is given the role of looking after a child, and a legal parent is the person who has the legally
protected rights of a parent as determined by law. This distinction is from Archard, “Obligations.”
2 According to the interest-based approach I adopt here, for an agent A to have a right to p, an interest of A’s
must be of sufficient weight for another agent, B, to be under a duty owed to A with respect to p – where a rel-
evant ‘interest’ is understood as contributing to A’s objective, as opposed to subjective, wellbeing. For an over-
view of different accounts of wellbeing, see Fletcher, Handbook.
3 For purely parent-centred views, see Narveson, Libertarian Idea; Hall, “The Origin of Parental Rights”;
Steiner, Essay; Brake, “Creation Theory.” The two best-known dual-interest views developed in a liberal egal-
itarian framework are proposed by Macleod (1997); Macleod, “Parental Responsibilities”; and Brighouse and
Swift, “Partiality”; “Parents’ Rights”; Family Values.
4 I assume, in line with other dual-interest theorists, that children are entitled to care above a certain, possibly
high, threshold, but not to care by the ‘best’ available parents. I here leave open what a ‘sufficiently competent’
parenting standard amounts to. For a discussion of standards of parenting competency, see Shields, “How Bad
Can a Good Enough Parent Be?”
5 See Velleman, “Family History”; Brighouse and Swift, “Partiality”; Family Values; Macleod (2010); Olsaretti,
“Liberal Equality”; Shields, “How Bad Can a Good Enough Parent Be?”; Gheaus, “Right”; “Biological Parent-
hood”; Ferracioli, “Procreative-Parenting.” For views that are more sympathetic to the redistribution of babies
at birth, see Archard, “Blood”; Children; Brennan and Noggle, “Moral Status”; Goodin, “Responsibilities”;
Vallentyne, “Equality”; “Rights.”
6 See Gheaus, “Right,” 445–6, for arguments showing how baby redistribution at birth between recent, compe-
tent birth parents may mitigate social injustices. See also Gheaus, “Best Available Parent.”
7 See Archard, “Obligations,” for the distinction between parental obligations and parental responsibilities. For views
that assume that parental responsibilities and rights go together as part of a ‘parental package’, see Kolers and
Bayne, “Genetic Basis,” 223; Olsaretti, “Liberal Equality.” See also Vallentyne, “Equality”; Goodin,
“Responsibilties”; Austin, Conceptions of Parenthood.
8 On the ethics of procreation, see Friedrich, “A Duty to Adopt?”; Brake, “Creation Theory”; Rulli, “Preferring”;
Ferracioli, “Procreative Parenting.” For a survey of the literature on the ethics of procreation and adoption, see
Rulli, “Ethics.”

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
822 Benjamin Lange

9 I am here generalising the Relationship View’s account of the distinctive features of this relationship. See
Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, chap. 4, for a detailed description of the features that make the personal
relationship between parents and children special.
10 Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 87–93.
11 Brighouse and Swift, “Partiality,” 53.
12 Brighouse and Swift, “Parents’ Rights,” 97; Family Values, chap. 4.
13 Gheaus (“Right”; “Biological Parenthood”; “Best Available Parent”) proposes the Gestationalist View as an
extension of the Relationship View. Other independent gestationalist accounts are developed by Narayan,
“Family Ties”; Rothman, Recreating Motherhood; and Feldman, “Multiple Biological Mothers.” For an
account of the phenomenology of pregnancy, see Mullin, Reconceiving.
14 Gheaus, “Biological Parenthood,” 235.
15 Gheaus, “Right,” 446–51; “Biological Parenthood,” 234–7.
16 See Ferracioli, “Procreative-Parenting,” 18–19, for a development of this criticism. See also Little, “Abortion,”
94–5, and Porter, “Gestation.”
17 For literature that is critical of the significance of prenatal attachment, see Eyer, Bonding; Goldberg,
“Bonding.” For a dissenting view, see Agnafors, “Harm Argument.”
18 See Golombok et al., “Study,” 1973–4: ‘Despite the concern that children born through reproductive donation
would be at risk for psychological difficulties at adolescence, the findings of the present phase of this longitu-
dinal study of families formed through egg donation, donor insemination, and surrogacy showed that these
families did not differ from natural conception families when the children reached age 14’.
19 Keller, Partiality, chap. 1, surveys the three main contenders in the ethics of partiality. See Lange, “Ethics,” for
a recent overview of the debate. For defences of project-based approaches, see Williams, Moral Luck; Wolf,
“Meaning”; Variety; Stroud, “Partiality”. Discussions of projects in the context of parenting can also be found
in Page, “Parental Rights”; Macleod, “Conceptions”; Taylor, “Children”; Richards, Ethics; “Parental
Rights” – I discuss how these approaches differ from my approach later in this section. For defences of
relationship-based approaches, in addition to Brighouse and Swift (“Parents’ Rights”; Family Values), see
Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities”; Kolodny, “Love.” For individual-based approaches, see
Keller, Partiality; Lord, “Justifying Partiality.”
20 Scheffler, “Projects,” 259, makes a similar observation about the intertwining of relationship-based and
project-based reasons.
21 In the rest of this article, I use the terms ‘commitment’ and ‘investment’ interchangeably. I understand this
term to encompass actions as well as attitudes with respect to rearing a child.
22 If this is correct, this may provide a renewed defence of ‘Flourishing Views’ against the recent criticism by
Gheaus, “Best Available Parent,” 441–6.
23 Roughly, we might consider the relevant currency here as energy expended over time as opposed to mere
strength of preference; see Stroud, “Partiality,” n. 16.
24 This is not to deny that many parents, having successfully completed a parental project, may also have an inter-
est in being a good parent to their adult child for the rest of their lives. Whether this interest is also part of a
parental project is beyond my focus here.
25 Bayne and Kolers, “Pluralist Account,” 238–41, outline a pluralist view.
26 See Williams, Moral Luck; Wolf, “Meaning”; Variety.
27 Williams, Moral Luck, 12.
28 Wiggins, “Truth,” 132–4; Frankfurt, “On Caring,” 178; and Kolodny, “Love,” 186–7, make similar
observations about the value structure of projects.
29 A similar case is discussed by Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 109–10.
30 A special thanks to an anonymous referee who helped clarify this point.
31 See Page, “Parental Rights.”
32 Ibid., 196 (my emphasis).
33 Macleod, “Parental Responsibilities,” 142.
34 Ibid.
35 See also Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 102–3, for a similar point.
36 See Richards, Ethics; “Parental Rights”; Fowler, Liberalism. Fowler notes in ibid., chap. 9, n. 3, that his account
is based on that of Richards.
37 Richards, Ethics, 22.
38 Fowler, Liberalism, 107–8.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 823

39 See, for example, ibid., 109: men acquire parental rights by virtue of their ‘freedom to decide to be a parent, [and
choosing] to exercise that freedom [as] a necessary component of the causal story that relate[s] to [a] child’.
40 Gheaus’ account (“Biological Parenthood,” 237) allows that partners of gestational procreators can form
emotional relationships with a foetus. Rothman’s more restrictive monistic gestationalism (Recreating
Motherhood) faces a more general – namely, the paternity – problem: if the gestational relation is necessary
for parenthood, how do men acquire parental rights? See Bayne and Kolers, “Pluralist Account,” 226.
41 Kolodny’s geneticist account (“Love,” 68, n. 41) struggles to avoid this implication; for a discussion of the
argument, see Rulli, “Preferring.” See also Ferracioli, “Procreative-Parenting,” for a recent attempt to solve
the tension posed by Mixed Family.
42 See Millum, Moral Foundations, 36–8, for a compelling argument that it is arbitrary to regard a binary concep-
tion of parenthood as the optimal parental setup. See also Gheaus, “Best Available Parent”; hooks, Feminist
Theory; Goldfeder and Sheff, “Children.”
43 This does not entail that the strength of the corresponding parental right will be a function of the investment
into the parental project. For example, one might hold a view according to which a certain threshold of invest-
ment suffices to give rise to the right, without the strength of the associated claim being a function of the invest-
ment made by the parent.
44 See Gilbert, Joint Commitment, chaps. 1 and 2, on joint action, as well as Stroud, “Partiality,” for some remarks
on ground projects and joint agency.
45 Brighouse and Swift, Family Values, 100–1, similarly acknowledge that some people may be unable to enjoy
the relationship-based good that they identify as justifying the family.
46 The extent to which the state should support individuals in being able to enjoy the familial goods that justify the
family, be the grounds for that support relationship- or project-based, is an open issue. For example,
McTernan, “Fertility Treatment,” argues that the project of parenting should not be disproportionately funded
over other important projects.
47 Richards, “Parental Rights,” 273. Fowler’s view seems to imply the same conclusion; cf. Fowler, Liberalism,
chap. 9, 108–9.
48 Perhaps the best-known intentionalist accounts are proposed by Hill, “Claims of Biology”; Shultz, “Reproduc-
tive Technology”; Stumpf, “Redefining Mother.”
49 Millum, Moral Foundations, chap. 2.
50 Ibid., 25.
51 See Lange, “Moral Desert.”
52 This does not imply that whoever decides first to parent a newborn, or begins forming some of the relevant
commitments of a parental project first, will acquire parental rights. What matters is the engagement in a suf-
ficiently valuable parental project. I thank an anonymous referee for prompting me to make this point more
explicit.
53 See Bayne and Kolers, “Pluralist Account,” 223–5, for a survey of legal rulings concerning custody disputes in
cases of assisted reproduction.
54 This applies to surrogacy practices in India. See Mitra and Schicktanz (2016), n. 14; Pande, “Commercial
Surrogacy.”
55 For a study of the motivations of surrogates in the United States, see Ragone, Surrogate Motherhood, 51–86.
See also Bromfield, “Surrogacy,” sect. 6.
56 Other complexities concern the validity of surrogacy contracts. See Anderson, “Women’s Labor”; Arneson,
“Commodification”; and Fabre, Whose Body Is It Anyway?, for discussions of this issue.
57 See Ragone, Surrogate Motherhood, and Bromfield, “Surrogacy.” For a critical discussion of genderist assump-
tions in psychosocial empirical surrogacy research, see Teman, “Social Construction.”
58 See Tong, “Overdue Death.”
59 Gheaus, “Biological Parenthood,” 237–8.

References
Agnafors, M. J. “The Harm Argument Against Surrogacy Revisited: Two Versions Not to
Forget.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17, no. 3 (2014): 357–63.
Anderson, E. S. “Is Women’s Labor a Commodity?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 19, no. 1
(1990): 71–92.
Archard, D. Children, Family and the State. London: Ashgate, 2003.
© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
824 Benjamin Lange

Archard, D. “The Obligations and Responsibilities of Parenthood.” In Procreation and

Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children, edited by D. Archard and D.
Benatar, 103–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Archard, D. “What’s Blood Got to Do with It?” Res Publica 1, no. 1 (1995): 91–106.
Arneson, R. J. “Commodification and Commercial Surrogacy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 21,
no. 2 (1992): 132–64.
Austin, M. W. Conceptions of Parenthood: Ethics and the Family. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Bayne, T., and A. Kolers. “Towards a Pluralist Account of Parenthood.” Bioethics 17, no. 3
(2003): 221–42.
Brake, E. “Creation Theory: Do Genetic Ties Matter.” In Permissible Progeny, edited by
S. Brennan, S. Hannan, and R. Vernon, 129–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Brazier, M., S. Golombok, and A. Campbell. “Surrogacy: Review for the UK Health Ministers
of Current Arrangements for Payments and Regulation.” Human Reproduction Update 3
(1997): 623–8.
Brennan, S., and R. Noggle. “The Moral Status of Children: Children’s Rights, Parents’
Rights, and Family Justice.” Social Theory and Practice 23, no. 1 (1997): 1–26.
Brighouse, H., and A. Swift. Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014.
Brighouse, H., and A. Swift. “Legitimate Parental Partiality.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37,
no. 1 (2009): 43–80.
Brighouse, H., and A. Swift. “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family.” Ethics 117, no. 1
(2006): 80–108.
Bromfield, N. F. “Surrogacy Has Been One of the Most Rewarding Experiences in My Life:
A Content Analysis of Blogs by U.S. Commercial Gestational Surrogates.” IJFAB:
International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9, no. 1 (2016): 192–217.
Eyer, D. E. Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992.
Fabre, C. Whose Body is it Anyway?: Justice and the Integrity of the Person. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Feldman, S. “Multiple Biological Mothers: The Case for Gestation.” Journal of Social
Philosophy 23 (1992): 98–104.
Ferracioli, L. “Procreative-Parenting, Love’s Reasons and the Demands of Morality.”
Philosophical Quarterly 68 (2018): 77–97.
Fletcher, G., ed. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. Abingdon: Routledge,
2016.
Fowler, T. Liberalism, Childhood and Justice: Ethical Issues in Upbringing. Bristol: Bristol
University Press, 2020.
Frankfurt, H. “On Caring.” In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 155–80. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Friedrich, D. “A Duty to Adopt?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2013): 25–39.
Gheaus, A. “Arguments for Nonparental Care for Children.” Social Theory and Practice 37,
no. 3 (2011): 483–509.
Gheaus, A. “The Best Available Parent.” Ethics 131, no. 3 (2021): 431–59.
Gheaus, A. “Biological Parenthood: Gestational, Not Genetic.” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 96, no. 2 (2018): 225–40.
Gheaus, A. “The Right to Parent One’s Biological Baby.” Journal of Political Philosophy 20, no. 4
(2012): 432–55.
Gilbert, M. Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Goldberg, S. “Parent–Infant Bonding: Another Look.” Child Development 54 (1983): 1355–82.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
 A Project View of the Right to Parent 825

Goldfeder, M., and E. Sheff. “Children of Polyamorous Families: A First Empirical Look.”
Journal of Law and Social Deviance 5 (2013): 150–243.
Golombok, S., E. Ilioi, L. Blake, G. Roman, and V. Jadva. “A Longitudinal Study of Families
Formed through Reproductive Donation: Parent-Adolescent Relationships and
Adolescent Adjustment at Age 14.” Developmental Psychology 53, no. 10 (2017): 1966–77.
Goodin, R. “Responsibilities for Children’s Well-Being.” In No Time to Lose: The Well-Being of
Australia’s Children, edited by S. Richardson and M. Prior, 60–82. Victoria: Melbourne
University Press, 2005.
Hall, B. “The Origin of Parental Rights.” Public Affairs Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1999): 73–82.
Hill, J. L. “What Does it Mean to Be a ‘Parent’? The Claims of Biology as the Basis for Parental
Rights.” New York University Law Review 66, no. 4 (1991): 353–420.
Hooks, b. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
Keller, S. Partiality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Kolers, A., and T. Bayne. “Are You My Mommy? On the Genetic Basis of Parenthood.”
Journal of Applied Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2001): 273–85.
Kolodny, N. “Love as Valuing a Relationship.” Philosophical Review 112, no. 2 (2003): 135–89.
Lange, B. “The Ethics of Partiality.” Philosophy Compass 17, no. 8 (2022): 1–15.
Lange, B. “Moral Desert and Parental Rights.” Philosophy & Economics 35, no. 2 (2019):
339–47.
Little, M. O. “Abortion, Intimacy and the Duty to Gestate.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2
(1999): 295–312.
Lord, E. “Justifying Partiality.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19, no. 3 (2016): 569–90.
Macleod, C. “Conceptions of Parental Autonomy.” Politics & Society 25, no. 1 (1997): 117–40.
Macleod, C. “Parental Responsibilities in an Unjust World.” In Procreation and Parenthood: The
Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children, edited by D. Archard and D. Benatar, 128–50.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
McTernan, E. “Should Fertility Treatment Be State Funded?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32,
no. 3 (2014): 227–40.
Millum, J. The Moral Foundations of Parenthood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Mitra, S., and S. Schicktanz. “Failed Surrogate Conceptions: Social and Ethical Aspects of
Preconception Disruptions During Commercial Surrogacy in India.” Philosophy, Ethics,
and Humanities in Medicine 11 (2016): 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-016-0040-6.
Mullin, A. Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience and Reproductive Labor.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Narayan, U. “Family Ties: Rethinking Parental Claims in the Light of Surrogacy and
Custody.” In Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard Choices, and the
Social Good, edited by U. Narayan and J. J. Bartkowiak, 65–86. University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1999.
Narveson, J. The Libertarian Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
Olsaretti, S. “Liberal Equality and the Moral Status of Parent–Child Relationships.” In Oxford
Studies in Political Philosophy, edited by D. Sobel, P. Vallentyne, and S. Wall, 58–83.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Page, E. “Parental Rights.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 1, no. 2 (1984): 187–203.
Pande, A. “Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker.” Signs
35, no. 4 (2010): 969–92.
Porter, L. “Gestation and Parental Rights: Why is Good Enough Good Enough?” Feminist
Philosophy Quarterly 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–27.
Ragone, H. Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder: Westwind Press, 1994.
Richards, N. The Ethics of Parenthood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Richards, N. “How We Acquire Parental Rights.” In The Oxford Handbook of Reproductive
Ethics, edited by L. Francis, 265–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
826 Benjamin Lange

Rothman, B. K. Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society.

New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.
Rulli, T. “The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption.” Philosophy Compass 11 (2016a): 305–15.
Rulli, T. “Preferring a Genetically-Related Child.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 13 (2016b):
669–98.
Scheffler, S. “Projects, Relationships, and Reasons.” In Reason and Value: Themes from the
Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by R. J. Wallace, 247–69. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Scheffler, S. “Relationships and Responsibilities.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, no. 3 (1997):
189–209.
Shields, L. “How Bad Can a Good Enough Parent Be?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 2
(2016): 163–82.
Shultz, M. “Reproductive Technology and Intent-Based Parenthood: An Opportunity for
Gender Neutrality.” Wisconsin Law Review 1990 (1990): 297–398.
Steiner, H. An Essay on Rights. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Stroud, S. “Permissible Partiality, Projects, and Plural Agency.” In Partiality and Impartiality:
Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, edited by B. Feltham and
J. Cottingham, 131–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Stumpf, A. E. “Redefining Mother: A Legal Matrix for New Reproductive Technologies.” Yale
Law Journal 96, no. 1 (1986): 187–208.
Taylor, R. S. “Children as Projects and Persons: A Liberal Antinomy.” Social Theory and
Practice 35, no. 4 (2009): 555–76.
Teman, E. “The Social Construction of Surrogacy Research: An Anthropological Critique of
the Psychosocial Scholarship on Surrogate Motherhood.” Social Science & Medicine 67,
no. 7 (2008): 1104–12.
Tong, R. “The Overdue Death of a Feminist Chameleon: Taking a Stand on Surrogacy
Arrangements.” Journal of Social Philosophy 21 (1990): 40–56.
Vallentyne, P. “The Rights and Duties of Childrearing.” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal
11, no. 3 (2003): 991–1009.
Vallentyne, P. “Equality and the Duties of Procreators.” In The Moral and Political Status of
Children, edited by D. Archard and C. Macleod, 195–211. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Velleman, D. “Family History.” Philosophical Papers 34 (2005): 357–78.
Wiggins, D. “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life.” In Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd ed.
87–137. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Williams, B. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Wolf, S. “Meaning in Life and Why It Matters: Lectures 1 & 2 (Delivered at Princeton
University).” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by S. M. McMurrin,
71–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Wolf, S. The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2015.

© 2023 The Author. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy