Motherhood and Defeasible Duties to Benefit
[Note: This page is mostly aimed at professional philosophers. If you are interested in my work on infant feeding but this page makes no sense to you, you may wish to go here.]
A recurring mistake influences discussion of the behaviour of pregnant women and mothers. The mistake in question is the assumption that a mother who fails to do something that might benefit her child must be able to provide over-riding countervailing considerations to justify her decision. It is assumed that in the absence of such a justification the mother is liable for moral criticism. We see this assumption operating in academic literature, medical advice given to mothers, mainstream media and social media.
I argue that this mistaken assumption involves attributing to the mother a defeasible duty to perform each action that might benefit her child. This attribution is supported by implicit appeal to two arguments, both of which are initially appealing but ultimately unsound.
My first paper on this topic, which lays out the general philosophical issues is called 'Motherhood and Mistakes about Defeasible Duties to Benefit'. It has been published at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. If you don't have access to PPR, you can download a author's draft of the paper at Publications and Works in Progress.
My second paper, 'Breastfeeding and Defeasible Duties to Benefit', argues that mistakes about defeasible duties play an important role in the guilt and shame associated with decisions not to breastfeed. This paper is co-authored with Lindsey Porter and published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Again, you can find an author's draft at the Publications and Works in Progress page. Drafts of this paper were presented at the Centre For Parenting Culture Studies Symposium on Feeding Children: Inside and Outside the Home and at our Breastfeeding Dilemma Workshop.
I have also written quite a few blogs and other pieces about how mistakes about defeasible duties link to guilt and shame surrounding infant feeding decisions. For links, see my page on Philosophy and How Babies Are Fed.
This is part of a series of projects on Philosophy of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood at the University of Southampton, run by Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard.
A recurring mistake influences discussion of the behaviour of pregnant women and mothers. The mistake in question is the assumption that a mother who fails to do something that might benefit her child must be able to provide over-riding countervailing considerations to justify her decision. It is assumed that in the absence of such a justification the mother is liable for moral criticism. We see this assumption operating in academic literature, medical advice given to mothers, mainstream media and social media.
I argue that this mistaken assumption involves attributing to the mother a defeasible duty to perform each action that might benefit her child. This attribution is supported by implicit appeal to two arguments, both of which are initially appealing but ultimately unsound.
My first paper on this topic, which lays out the general philosophical issues is called 'Motherhood and Mistakes about Defeasible Duties to Benefit'. It has been published at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. If you don't have access to PPR, you can download a author's draft of the paper at Publications and Works in Progress.
My second paper, 'Breastfeeding and Defeasible Duties to Benefit', argues that mistakes about defeasible duties play an important role in the guilt and shame associated with decisions not to breastfeed. This paper is co-authored with Lindsey Porter and published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Again, you can find an author's draft at the Publications and Works in Progress page. Drafts of this paper were presented at the Centre For Parenting Culture Studies Symposium on Feeding Children: Inside and Outside the Home and at our Breastfeeding Dilemma Workshop.
I have also written quite a few blogs and other pieces about how mistakes about defeasible duties link to guilt and shame surrounding infant feeding decisions. For links, see my page on Philosophy and How Babies Are Fed.
This is part of a series of projects on Philosophy of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood at the University of Southampton, run by Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard.