1. The Parental Love Account

While it is commonly accepted that parents should treat their children as equals, even if many parents do not live up to this, the philosophical grounding for this belief has not been thoroughly examined. In their article “Parental Love and Filial Equality” (Floris & Spotorno, Reference Floris and Spotorno2023), Giacomo Floris and Riccardo Spotorno fill this gap by proposing that the nature of parental love offers a normative basis for such equal treatment.

Their account is based on two key premises. The first is that it is morally incumbent on parents to love their children in an attitudinal but not necessarily an emotional sense (p.264). The second premise is that loving one’s children requires disregarding differences in morally relevant properties that would otherwise confer different normative statuses, so long as children possess them to a sufficient degree (p. 265). In their words, “loving one’s child […] consists of being blind to the variations above the minimum threshold when deliberating about how they should be considered and treated,” meaning that how much concern a parent A shows to a child of theirs B should “not depend on the degree to which [say] B is intelligent or empathic, provided that B is intelligent and empathic to a sufficient level” (p.265). By ignoring such variations, which also apply to differences in relational properties like emotional closeness that might otherwise warrant unequal treatment of individuals, it follows that to discharge their moral duty to love their children (in an attitudinal sense), parents should treat their children as equals.

This article critiques Floris and Spotorno’s parental love account of filial equal treatment (henceforth the Parental Love Account or PLA). It argues that the PLA has significant weaknesses that should lead us to accept a rival account, which, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be defended. This alternative account, I call it the Child Welfare Account (CWA), grounds the moral imperative of equal treatment in the empirical harms caused by parental favoritism, both to disfavored and favored children. Specifically, CWA holds that parents should provide their children with an adequate, that is, good enough, upbringing and that in most cases, this will require treating them as equals.

The remainder of this contribution is structured as follows. Section 2 identifies several important problems with PLA. Section 3 explains how CWA avoids these issues. Finally, Section 4 addresses and responds to various objections to CWA.

2. Objections to the Parental Love Account

As mentioned, although Floris and Spotorno have given us a highly sophisticated justification of filial equal treatment (which is certainly the most promising one available today), I believe it is bedevilled by problems that, if not individually than collectively, should lead us to reject it in favor of an alternative account. One problem with their Parental Love Account or PLA is that it seems underinclusive. For we might ask: Given that it is generally thought to be acceptable for people to apportion their level of concern for their friends and romantic partners to degrees in relevant properties, such as the extent to which these individuals are empathetic and emotionally close to them, why is it not the same true in parent–child relationships?

As it happens, Floris and Spotorno anticipate this objection, writing that:

As far as I can see, this response begs the question. What we want is an explanation for why considering status-conferring properties is permissible in the case of friendships and romantic relationships but not in the case of parental relationships. Simply saying that it is “hard to see how it can be appropriate for parents to apportion their love for their children based on the latter’s status-conferring properties above a given threshold” does not constitute such an explanation. (A little earlier in the article, Floris and Spotorno do mention that “when we love someone, we refuse to take ‘perfection’ as an appropriate standard for our love” (p.265); however, even if they are right that loving someone is incompatible with making one’s concern for the beloved conditional on them being perfect, this does not rule out tailoring one’s level of concern based on how well the beloved meets morally relevant criteria.)

Another shortcoming of PLA is that it does not tell us why parental favoritism appears to be more problematic in some contexts than others. Consider the following two cases.

Even if Bert’s unequal displays of affection are problematic, which some might doubt, they seem much less concerning than if Betty and Christina were siblings who were living with each other, assuming all else to be equal.

Assuming everything else to be equal, it looks like even if Wang’s favoritism is problematic, it is much less problematic than if Wang showed greater affection to Li than to Zhao during the latter’s childhood.

What is pertinent for present purposes is that while Floris and Spotorno might accept these intuitions, their account of why children should be treated as equals by their parents—unlike the one I will propose shortly—does not explain them. All PLA tells us is that whenever children meet the threshold for meriting love from their parents, as they generally seem to on this account, it would be wrong for their parents to show them unequal concern.

A final weakness of PLA is that it seems to require parents to fix their absolute level of concern for their children from when, and as long as, their children meet the threshold for meriting love. To appreciate this, notice that if, as Floris and Spotorno argue, how much a parent A loves a child of theirs B in an attitudinal sense should “not depend on the degree to which [say] B is intelligent or empathic, provided that B is intelligent and empathic to a sufficient level” (p.265), then even if B were to become significantly more emphatic over the course of their life, it would be impermissible for A to start displaying more concern toward B, at least insofar they already show sufficient concern for B. (To avoid confusion, showing equal concern for a child over time does not necessarily mean that parents should invest equal amounts of resources—such as time, energy, or money—throughout the child’s life. A more plausible interpretation is that a given level of concern involves adjusting investments based on factors such as the changing magnitude of a child’s needs, meaning that young children typically require greater investment than older children, and older underage children more than adult children. On this view, demonstrating a concern level of, say, 6 out of 10 might require a parent to invest 15 units of resources during early infancy, 8 units during adolescence, and 2 units in adulthood, whereas showing a 9 out of 10 level of concern might require investing 23 units in early infancy, 12 units during adolescence, and 3 units in adulthood, all else being equal.)Footnote ¹

There are at least two problems with expecting parents to maintain a fixed absolute level of concern for their children. First, if parents already show sufficient concern for their children, it is unclear why it would be objectionable for them to increase that concern when their children demonstrate improvements in morally relevant dimensions, such as empathy. Even if one believes that this should be avoided to prevent unequal distributions of parental concern among siblings, many parents have only one child, and even those with multiple children could increase their concern for all while maintaining equality. Second, sustaining the same absolute level of love for one’s children throughout their lives—whatever that level should be (a question left unaddressed by Floris and Spotorno)—seems highly demanding. This is because parents will need to continually ensure that the resources they devote to their children remain aligned with the (sufficient) level of concern they initially demonstrated at the beginning of their children’s lives, meaning that they may not go below or above a specific, predetermined life stage-adjusted level of investment.

3. The Child Welfare Account

My next aim is to put forward an alternative, and I believe overall more plausible, account of filial equal treatment that does not fall prey to PLA’s shortcomings. This account, the Child Welfare Account or CWA, is more outcome-oriented in that it locates the problem with parental favoritism in the consequences of such unequal treatment for children. To explain further, it should be noted that empirical studies have found that being the disfavored child in the family has a proclivity to undermine children’s well-being comparted to both favored children and to children who are shown equal concern by their parents (Jensen et al., Reference Jensen, Whiteman, Fingerman and Birditt2013; Suitor et al., Reference Suitor, Sechrist, Plikuhn, Pardo and Pillemer2008; Tamrouti-Makkink et al., Reference Tamrouti-Makkink, Dubas, Gerris and Aken2004). Additionally, having this status tends to harm children’s development by causing them to develop low self-worth (Feinberg & Hetherington, Reference Feinberg and Hetherington2001; Jensen et al., Reference Jensen, Whiteman, Fingerman and Birditt2013; Shebloski et al., Reference Shebloski, Conger and Widaman2005). But that is not all. Perhaps surprisingly, even being the favored child has been shown to undermine people’s well-being and to lead to higher rates of depression (Suitor et al., Reference Suitor, Sechrist, Plikuhn, Pardo and Pillemer2008; Tamrouti-Makkink et al., Reference Tamrouti-Makkink, Dubas, Gerris and Aken2004), which might due to the fact that such children feel guilt over their privileged position (Hill, Reference Hill2019) and/or the fact that, as the preferred child, they take themselves to have a special responsibility to look after the welfare of one or both parents (Paul, Reference Paul2020).

I suspect these detrimental effects of parental favoritism can, on their own, explain why parents should generally treat their children as equals, and that this allows us to avoid the problems plaguing PLA. Specifically, unlike PLA:

• • CWA can explain why loving one’s children—or, if one does not believe in parental duty to love one’s children, showing them adequate concern—requires that, above a certain threshold, differences between children that would otherwise warrant unequal treatment, such as differences in their level of empathy or the emotional closeness of one’s relationship with them, be ignored. Its explanation is that such unequal treatment is likely to harm children’s well-being and development and thereby militates against the parent’s responsibility to ensure that their children receive an adequate or sufficiently good upbringing.

• • CWA can explain why people often—but perhaps not always—do not seem morally required to treat their friends as equals, or simply appear to have weaker moral reasons to do so, even if they love their friends. For one thing, people are generally less negatively affected by unequal treatment by shared friends than children are by parental favoritism, which is true especially—but not exclusively—when those sharing a friend are not friends themselves.Footnote ² One plausible reason for this is that friends tend to be less dependent on each other than minor children are on their parents. Another is that favoritism among friends is frequently less visible. While minor children typically spend a significant amount of time with their siblings in the presence of their parents, those who share a friend generally spend less time together in the presence of that shared friend, making inter-friend favoritism less conspicuous (this is true despite the existence of club-like friendships where friends engage in many activities as a group (cf. Dunbar, Reference Dunbar2018) and of situations where friendship hierarchies can become highly salient, as when one friend is chosen as a best man at a wedding, selected to be a godparent, given the status of a “Best Friend Forever” or bromantic partner, or simply favored to join on a vacation (De Vries, Reference De Vries2024).) For another, we do not usually bear the same level of responsibility for our friends’ well-being and development as we do for our minor, and arguably even our adult, children.

• • CWA can account for the difference that Floris and Spotorno posit between the two types of love. Whereas these authors believe that romantic love is sometimes, if not always, appropriately influenced by the extent to which the beloved possesses valuable qualities, they do not apply the same view to parental love, at least not insofar as factoring in such gradations leads to parental favoritism. The explanation CWFA offers for this difference—assuming arguendo it exists—is that favoritism and, by implication, any harmful consequences stemming from it, are not possible in monogamous relationships, although it might be in polygamous ones. For example, women in a harem might suffer severe distress and insecurity if, and when, their partner shows greater concern for his other wives, which might impose a comparable duty of equal treatment.

• • CWA does not rule out that adjusting one’s level of concern for one’s children to fluctuations in children’s possession of morally relevant traits, such as benevolence, is permissible under certain conditions. This speaks in favor of this account, as we saw it is far from obvious that such tailored responses are always inappropriate. For example, when there is no risk of parental favoritism—suppose a parent only has one child—and the level of parental concern exhibited does not drop so low that duties to show adequate love or concern to one’s children are violated, it might well be innocent. The same could potentially apply once children become adults, as people’s well-being and development seem generally less affected by parental favoritism at this stage than in childhood, and they generally bear greater responsibility for their actions (I leave this for the reader to decide).

• • CWA can explain why unequal parental concern is more problematic in some situations than others, such as when the unequally treated children are underaged; when they are living together; and/or when they involve allocations of relatively important resources, whether in an objective sense (e.g., medical resources, nutritious food) or simply in the eyes of the children. Its explanation is that these are all circumstances where children’s well-being and development are at an elevated risk of being harmed or of being severely harmed.Footnote ^3, Footnote ⁴ While there is nothing in Floris and Spotorno’s account that prevents them from accepting that the wrongness of unequal treatment depends on how much the children’s welfare is likely to be adversely affected, doing so requires their account to be complemented by a consequentialist principle like CWA, suggesting that CWA is preferable by virtue of being more parsimonious, that is by explaining more considered judgements with fewer principles.

• • CWA does not require parents to maintain the same absolute level of concern for their children throughout the latter’s lives. As was argued, not only does such uniformity appear unnecessary in certain contexts, even if we accept that the same level of concern calls for different levels of parental investment based on factors like a child’s evolving needs, exhibiting it would still be highly burdensome for parents, as it would imply that they may not go above or below certain predetermined amounts of parental investment.

4. Objections to the Child Welfare Account

At this point, it is important to turn our attention to several scenarios where PLA but not CWA might be thought to capture our normative intuitions.