The Ethics of Parenthood argues for original views about the right to raise one's biological children, about paternalism, about reacting differently to bad behavior because the wrongdoer is "only a child," about what raising a child requires, and about the obligations that parents and children have after the children are grown.

Parents whose children will become adults are expected to help them do so, as opposed to only keeping them alive while they manage it on their own. The parental help must respect the child's standing as a separate individual: our children aren't ours to shape to our design, even if our aim is to help them flourish. But then how are we to raise our children with respect for their individuality? According to Matthew Clayton, doing so requires refraining from attempting (...) to provide our child with any values that reasonable persons would dispute. According to Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, it doesn't require that: parents have a right to try to instil values, including disputable ones, because they must have this right if families are to enjoy ‘family relationship goods’. I argue against Clayton's position, and against Brighouse and Swift's. I introduce a different approach, and flesh it out in light of a difficulty it faces. I then return to the initial problem, identifying some ways in which the approach I've offered explains how to raise one's child with respect. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive, integrated explanatory account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variation across languages. It makes an important contribution to the current debate over whether syntax should be understood derivationally, arguing that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The central problem it addresses is the nature of the difference between languages in which all (...) wh-words move overtly to a clause-initial position ; languages in which one wh-phrase moves per clause but all others remain in situ ; and languages in which there is no overt movement at all. Professor Richards focuses on the nature of syntactic movement in order to see what this reveals about the syntactic derivation. He considers the nature of interactions between movement operations and investigates the behaviour of multiple overt wh-movement, scrambling, cliticization, and object shift. His general conclusions about the relationship between movement and multiple specifiers follow straightforwardly from basic principles of Shortest Move and Shortest Attract. He develops a PF-imposed well-formedness condition on movement chains, which allows for the development of theories of anti-agreement, the that-trace effect, and the conditions on participial agreement in Romance, among other phenomena. He defends the claim that well-formed dependencies can improve the status of ill-formed dependencies created later in the derivation, illustrating the explanatory power, under certain structural conditions, of his Principle of Minimal Compliance. He uses data on the locality of wh-movement to argue that the Principle of Minimal Compliance is responsible for a number of the apparent distinctions between overt and covert movement. This book will interest syntacticians at graduate level and above as well as linguistic theorists concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)

This paper offers a way to construe personality as the relatively stable hierarchy of one's desires: the fact that one prefers solitude to competition , finds dishonesty more aversive than arrogance , and so on. Several measures of the intensity of a desire are discussed: the alacrity with which one seeks to satisfy it, the persistence in one's efforts to do so, and other displays of one's willingness to sacrifice for its satisfaction. A method is offered for distinguishing preferences which (...) are features of personality from others which are insufficiently stable or otherwise to be explained. Finally the usefulness of this conception for moral theory is explored. Specifically, I argue that those attracted to utilitarianism have here an unusually congenial way of thinking about moral character, and a way to meet certain leading objections to their view. (shrink)

What would make it the right time for you to die, or the wrong one? In particular, could it be the right time for you to die even if your loved ones want to make the sacrifices needed to prolong your life, because that would cost them too dearly? The worry is that it would be selfish to permit these sacrifies, and wrong for that reason. I think it matters that the sacrifies would occur within a relationship of mutual devotion, (...) and I try to say how it matters. In particular, I argue against some fairly simple views of what constitutes impermissible selfishness in this context, and in favor of approaching such decisions in a different way. (shrink)

Prospective parents centainly ought to avoid creating a child whose life would be so terrible that no one should have to live it. However, those who sought to avoid it would risk making a serious moral error, if their reasoning did follow a certain pattern.The error would be failure to respect autonomy, which includes a claim to judge for oneself whether one's life is worth living. I explain how this applies to a decision about whether someone is to exist at (...) all, and what difference it would make if prospective parents paid autonomy the respect it merits. (shrink)