Is it ok to love your children?

A vexed political question

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

In 2003, the philosopher Adam Swift – founder of the Centre for the Study of Social Justice at the University of Oxford, now Professor of Political Theory at UCL – published a book titled How Not to be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent. I read it as a student, long before I had my own children, and at the time I found the thesis quite persuasive. 

In brief, Swift argues that parents should not pay to send their children to private schools because doing so entrenches socioeconomic inequality. It is usually moral, in his view, for parents to help their children in other ways, for instance by reading them bedtime stories. Both of these parenting behaviours might improve a child’s academic attainment (though not by much, actually – the correlation is mostly an effect of genetic confounding). But while any parent can read bedtime stories, only rich parents can buy private education, which means – says Swift – that the latter behaviour is immoral.

I recently came across a TikTok summarising Swift’s argument. One of the people in the comments section was not impressed, and expressed his displeasure in earthy terms, writing:

Adam Swift sits in the corner and watches his wife and her boyfriend I am absolutely sure of it.

A bit rude, yes. But I think this comment contains an important insight into the incompatibility of egalitarianism and good parenting. 

When I first read How Not to be a Hypocrite, my main complaint was with Swift’s claim that any parent could read bedtime stories, given that some parents will be illiterate, or too time poor, etc. That is a problem with his argument, and at the time I concluded that Swift was mistaken, if well intentioned. 

Now that I’ve had children myself, I think that he’s a psycho. And while of course I don’t endorse the comment from the anonymous TikTok user quoted above, I do understand what he means (I think it’s safe to assume that this anon is a ‘he’). 

Much like a fetish for cuckolding, a commitment to thwarting your children’s success is a sign of fundamentally disordered desires. It is unnatural for men to accept being cuckolded, let alone relish it. It is also unnatural for parents to accept harm being done to their children, let alone opt for it. A parent who is wealthy enough to pay for private schooling, but instead follows Swift’s directive and sends their child to a non-fee paying school, is choosing an option that they think will make their child worse off. Even if the academic advantages of private schooling are overhyped (which they are), a parent who agreed with Swift that private schools are engines of socioeconomic inequality would be choosing to put their own child at a long term disadvantage for the sake of the abstract goal of “social justice.”

I consider that to be monstrous, which says a lot about my political instincts. Some people – mostly Leftists – would take issue with my characterisation of both cuckolding and parental egalitarianism as “unnatural.” They might also suggest that I am misled by the naturalistic fallacy. Even if it is “natural” to want to promote the interests of your own children at the expense of others, are we morally justified in doing so? 

The answer is that I don’t care. Since giving birth to my first child, any interest I might have had in this question has vanished, to be replaced with a single moral certainty around which I structure my entire life: I love my children and I want the best for them. 

Which is an inescapably inegalitarian sentiment. I love my children in a way that I cannot love other people’s children. I love my children in a way that I cannot love an abstraction like “social justice.” I love my children more than I love life itself, since I would die for them without hesitation. 

To be fair to Adam Swift, he thinks that it’s probably ok to love your children. In a 2015 interview, Swift conceded that “simply abolishing the family” as a way of “solving the social justice problem” would be a mistake, since “it is in the child’s interest to be parented.” 

But other Leftists are far more suspicious of parental love. Sophie Lewis, author of the 2022 book Abolish the Family (and wife to the author of In Defence of Looting), blames the institution of the family for a long list of sins – including, but not limited to, “discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisement.” Like so many Communists before her, she sets “demolishing [the] essential structure” of the family as an explicit political goal, since it stands in the way of her higher egalitarian ideals. 

Lewis may be an extremist, but all that she’s doing is taking some widely accepted principles on the Left and running with them to a logical conclusion. If inequality is bad, and if parental behaviour – even parental love – contributes to inequality, should we not, indeed, “abolish the family”? 

Hey, let’s start with the family farm! That’s the task that the UK Labour Party has set itself, with the imposition of a new inheritance tax that seems designed to destroy a tradition of multi-generational farming that is as old as agriculture itself. The policy is just, says The Guardian’s Will Hutton, because we ought to impose “a life tax on undeserved good luck”, rather than accept that some people will live happier and more bounteous lives “just because [they] got lucky and came out of the right womb.” If farming families have to lose the land that their ancestors have tended for generations, then so be it. Meanwhile, the annual sum raised from this new tax will be almost exactly equal to the sum the British government sends overseas every year to assist foreign farmers. Does that revolt you? It does me. 

But then a preference for one’s own countrymen is a problem for Leftism. In fact, I would argue that love itself is a problem for Leftism. If a man loves his country, then he will give it preference over other countries. If a man loves his family, then he will give them preference over other people. If a man loves his wife, then he will love her more than other women, and – sorry, polyamorists! – he will feel distress at the idea of sharing her with other men. Love is unfair. 

But I’m afraid that only God is capable of truly loving every human being at once. We mortals must ration our love, and in doing so we embed inequality. Much to the displeasure of Sophie Lewis, my daily efforts to give my children the best lives possible mean, inevitably, that my children will be better off for having “come out of the right womb” – that is, mine. Not just because I give them my money, but also because I give them my attention, my care, and my love, and some mothers either can’t or won’t do the same for their children. Just as in Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment, this natural instinct to prefer our loved ones leads to relentless and compounding inequality. 

“Undeserved!” says Will Hutton. “Hypocrisy!” says Adam Swift. “Embourgeoisement!” says Sophie Lewis. 

I say that I don’t care. If achieving a political ideal demands that we thwart perhaps the most deep and powerful of human emotions – the instinct to love our children – then there must be something wrong with that political ideal.