The Project View of Parenting

Here, I consider what morally connects adults to children so that they have a presumptive right to parent the child. I argue against the still widely held genetic view and suggest that blood connections, in themselves, do not matter very much morally. I also suggest that while relationships between parents and children are highly significant, they do not define parenting or exhaust the set of considerations relevant to the distribution of parental rights. Instead, I defend the ‘project view’ of parenting, according to which parenting should be respected as part of an important project that most people have a right to pursue.