Journal article
Feeding infants: choice-specific considerations, parental obligation, and pragmatic satisficing
- Abstract:
- Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents’ moral obligations in potentially harmful ways.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 735.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10677-023-10400-5
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Ethical Theory and Moral Practice More from this journal
- Volume:
- 27
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 167–183
- Publication date:
- 2023-06-15
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-05-25
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1572-8447
- ISSN:
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1386-2820
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1343538
- Local pid:
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pubs:1343538
- Deposit date:
-
2023-05-22
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Moriarty and Davies
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- ©2023 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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