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Journal of Bioethical Inquiry

Open Access 26-03-2024 | Original Research

What Is A Family? A Constitutive-Affirmative Account

Authors: J. Y. Lee, R. Bentzon, E. Di Nucci

Published in: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry

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Abstract

Bio-heteronormative conceptions of the family have long reinforced a nuclear ideal of the family as a heterosexual marriage, with children who are the genetic progeny of that union. This ideal, however, has also long been resisted in light of recent social developments, exhibited through the increased incidence and acceptance of step-families, donor-conceived families, and so forth. Although to this end some might claim that the bio-heteronormative ideal is not necessary for a social unit to count as a family, a more systematic conceptualization of the family—the kind of family that matters morally—is relatively underexplored in the philosophical literature. This paper makes a start at developing and defending an account of the family that is normatively attractive and in line with the growing prevalence of non-conventional families and methods of family-formation. Our account, which we call a constitutive-affirmative model of the family, takes the family to be constituted by an ongoing process of relevant affective and affirmative relations between the putative family members.
Footnotes
1
By biology we mean to cover all the possible ways to be biologically related to someone. Therefore, this covers both genetic donors and parents as well as gestational parents (see, for example, Di Nucci 2016).
 
2
There is a recent example on this, from Denmark: two men cannot both be formally recognized as fathers.
 
3
While others may argue that genetic relatedness or something of the sort is what connects family members in this sense, we would argue that the narrative history does not necessitate ties beyond the relationship itself. Here, we see that our theory can provide an answer to some of the considerations from the bio-heteronormative theorists: identity-forming is an important part of a flourishing life, and this do and should happen in the family setting. However, the identity-forming might not have any necessary relations to the biological component of some families – as mentioned above, we see many routes to forming an identity.
 
4
See also Laura Wildemann Kane on collective intentionality (Kane 2021).
 
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Metadata
Title
What Is A Family? A Constitutive-Affirmative Account
Authors
J. Y. Lee
R. Bentzon
E. Di Nucci
Publication date
26-03-2024
Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore
Published in
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Print ISSN: 1176-7529
Electronic ISSN: 1872-4353
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-024-10339-x