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Robert Morgan, In Search of Just Families, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 448–450, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqaa044
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In recent years, philosophers have paid increasing attention to questions of justice within families, and of how legal regulation and social institutions should accommodate and respond to diverse family structures. In In Search of Just Families, Chhanda Gupta offers a novel, insightful, and important contribution to these discussions, although I was not always convinced by the theoretical approach that she adopts.
Gupta focuses on whether we should support the institution of the family itself, as opposed to some non-familial alternative. Rather than endorsing a particular conception of the family or specifying a set of reforms, she offers an analysis and defence of the family as a whole. She engages with this debate by arguing that we should pay attention to the historical and sociological context of the family. This gives rise to two important methodological considerations, which deserve the attention of scholars working on the family. First, following the work of Susan Moller Okin, Gupta argues that we should be attentive to families as they actually exist, avoiding the tendency of some writers to caricature or generalize about families. Secondly, this entails that we should recognize the diversity of institutions that fall within the category ‘family’. Many pro-family and anti-family arguments focus on a particular family structure, and the extent to which these arguments apply to families in general is therefore suspect (pp. 6–9, 97–98). For instance, Gupta proposes that criticism of the norm of a nuclear family headed exclusively by a heterosexual couple is not anti-family, as sometimes stated, but should instead be recognised as a critique of a particular norm or a single family structure amongst many alternatives (pp. 100–107).
