In this short book, David Archard explores, with clarity and precision, the increasingly contentious area of political and philosophical debate concerning children and parents, and their relation to the state. His aim, as the book's title implies, is to provide a liberal defence of the family. It must be said, however, that this title could mislead, for Archard's argument depends on a radical reinterpretation of familiar terms like ‘family’, ‘parent’, and ‘liberal’. This is a defence of the family in which ‘family’ is to be understood as applying to almost any social grouping in which children are involved. In the author's words, ‘families are the sites in which children are brought up’ (xvii) and ‘a parent is someone who has a right to act as a parent.’(43) Nor does the term ‘liberal’ reflect its historical link to individual freedom, for this is a ‘liberal’ defence in which utilitarian or interest-based social considerations take precedence over individual rights: specifically, Archard believes there is no unqualified right to have children, nor are there parental rights that arise directly and immediately from the procreative relationship.

So while this book should be welcomed as a thought-provoking contribution to philosophical debate about the family, it should be approached with caution, and recognised as being not so much a defence of the family, as a defence of a new orthodoxy according to which the meaning of ‘family’ has been radically rewritten. It is an orthodoxy that is currently being widely promoted in the liberal democracies and is already built into legislation in some of them. Archard does diverge from it in one respect – its dominant focus on adult wishes – for he places children at the heart of the family. Nevertheless, he refuses to give priority to the arrangement that has been established by most empirical measures to be best for children: the ‘traditional’ family, which he defines as ‘two married heterosexual adults bringing up their own biological offspring’.(68) He objects to this as a prescriptive definition, and recommends instead that it should be open to any society collectively to determine the kinds of families that it wants.

However, like many other contemporary commentators, Archard fails to notice that this ‘traditional’ definition is more complex than it seems. In particular, it obscures the essential contrast between what is natural and what is determined by law or social convention. The reference to marriage is indeed prescriptive, involving as it does both ethics and law, but the biological references are descriptive and factual, in the sense that procreation, child-bearing and the genetic relationships it creates are independent of social or legal regulation. The ‘traditionalist’ view, then should not be equated with a biological account of the family.

The family has, however, seen many recent changes: changes in the roles of women, a widespread shift from care in the family to state provision, and path-breaking developments in reproductive medicine and technology that have made possible the separation of sex from procreation and procreation from parenthood. However, the bio-sciences have not been able to change the fundamental facts of human sexual reproduction. Apart from some limited experimental procedures in reproductive medicine, what they have achieved, through applications of fertility treatment involving the transfer of gametes and embryos, is the ability to separate people from their genetic roots. But while Archard does concede that biology may be important and that ‘on the whole it is a good thing if children are raised by their own parents’ (62), a substantial part of his argument depends upon minimising the importance of biological relationships. He cites with approval the social anthropological view that ‘genealogies are social and cultural constructs, and not biological pedigrees’ (104) and describes as ‘fanciful’ the deep human instinct to see children and grandchildren as one's own future. Hume's fact-value distinction is invoked as a reason for de-coupling biological relationships from their ethical implications, but it is worth noting that Hume himself, who was the child of a devoted widowed mother, said of the blood relationship that it ‘creates the strongest tie the mind is capable of in the love of parents for their children.’

Archard, however, emphasises a different aspect of the aspiration to parenthood, seeing the claim of a right to a child as a proprietorial wish for control over another human being – a bid for ownership to which he gives the name ‘proprietarianism’. (44) Of course, Archard is right, in his concern for children's welfare, to insist they should not be treated as property and that their future must be open to their own later choices. But it is a mistake to interpret the use of the possessive pronoun here in this way: parents who speak of ‘my’ or ‘our’ child are using these terms in a very particular sense. They are not usually ownership claims, any more than they are in the case of ‘our mother’, ‘my brother’, ‘my aunt’, ‘my uncle’, ‘our grandfather’, etc. The sense in which parents are entitled to use the ‘my’ word possessively is the sense that is needed to remind the state that it is not the owner of their children – their children are not the property of the state.

Nevertheless, as Archard points out, ‘family’ can be used informally to include a variety of household arrangements, not always involving biological relationships, and it is true, as he is particularly concerned to emphasise, that children may be well and happily raised in adoptive, fostering, alternative or restructured households. But Archard's social constructivist claim goes beyond these reasonable and generous concessions. His own key definition of family is: ‘a multigenerational group, normally stably co-habiting, whose adults take primary custodial responsibility for the dependent children’ (9, 26, 103) or, more briefly, ‘a social unit whose purpose is the care, control, and education of children.’(17) Later, he spells out the implications of this definition: that the adults involved may be single, or in a pair or multiple relationship, married or unmarried, of the same or different sex, and that the children involved need have no biological relationship to any of the adults.(103)

The radical nature of this claim, in setting aside what most societies and civilisations have seen as the essence of human family relationships, is hard to underestimate. Some of its consequences become clearer when Archard turns to issues of politics and equality. Here he follows Rawls in arguing that the family subverts equality of opportunity by transmitting advantage and disadvantage across generations. But while Rawls concluded that there is nothing to be done about this without stepping on the liberty of individuals, Archard is not deterred from offering a fundamental revision of rights in this area. The rights in respect of family life that are set out in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights were drafted at a time when it must be assumed that the reference was to biological relationships, but the rights proposed by Archard are based on social judgements in which the right to found a family becomes a watered-down ‘right to act as a parent’ and even that is to be subject to the approval of others. Summing up his position, he identifies the right to a family as an initial right to create or adopt children with a view to rearing or raising them; and a secondary right - a continuing entitlement to exercise exclusive and private custodial care of these children. In sum: ‘the right to parent, the right over a child one has created, and the right to act as a parent.’(35)

In adapting in this way the straightforward negative rights of earlier human rights declarations on the family, Archard has been obliged to provide a different account of rights, which he describes as an ‘interest-based’ account, the interests in question being those that an adult may have in being a parent, or that children or society may have for practical or welfare reasons. He adds that ‘the interest that is sufficiently important to ground a right may have instrumental and not, or as well as, intrinsic value.’(42) But while Archard is a well-known exponent of rights in this area, it is questionable whether he can reasonably leave them to rest on this transient justification, for the key role they play in human moral discourse is to provide an alternative ethical approach, a different court of appeal. To ignore this in the debate about the family is to fail to distinguish between the legal rights created by judges or politicians and the moral rights that the authors of various international declarations attempted to articulate in the wake of a war that exposed the reality of genocide – genocide achieved not only by direct killing of individuals but also by the compulsory sterilisation of women and girls, men and boys. This should prompt pause for reflection when considering any philosophical argument that might seem to trump international human rights law in this area, and provide a reason to resist, in particular, Archard's strong assertion that: ‘adults do not have a right to be parents; nor do adults have rights over children.’ (59)

Archard's book, however, should not be taken as an unsympathetic rejection of the close ties of affection and care that characterise human relationships at their best, and his own conclusion is perhaps better understood in the way he himself chooses to put it: that, while there is no direct right to found a family, the claim may have a basis in the obligations a society owes to children, and in society's duty to pursue its own ends. And, while basic human rights might have provided a stronger ground on which to stand, it is hard to disagree with Archard's argument from practical utility: ‘In favour of the family is the simple and undeniable fact that it is impossibly hard to think of any other social institution that could do as good a job of protecting children from their natural vulnerability and dependence on adults.’ (100)