[Presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics. A developed version of this paper was printed in the Journal of Religious Ethics. Information about that article is available here.]
Abstract
Our world is only made possible by cooperation. We drive on the right side of the road. We pay for our groceries before taking them home. We pay our taxes.[*] As I argue, politics is concerned with maintaining those kinds of cooperation that are indispensable to human society. Politics is about how power is implemented to enforce cooperation when individuals might otherwise be inclined to defect.
Indeed, we owe our very selves to the cooperation of others. Whether through sexual intercourse, or with the aid of assisted reproductive technology, all of us have come into being on account of cooperative acts.
As such, it follows that the bearing and rearing of human beings belongs to the domain of politics. Societies need future generations in order to endure, and so have an interest in the cooperative work of reproduction. Thus, it is imperative that governments make accommodations for parents, sponsoring family leave policies and mandating lactation spaces.
Yet it is also the case that the choice—both whether and how—to bear and rear children is profoundly personal. Indeed, parenting is often undermined when it is conscripted by state forces. And some of the most odious violations of rights in human history involve the intrusion of political power in reproduction.
The proposed paper considers motherhood, while drawing on contemporary feminist theory, to rethink ongoing discourses about the relationship between ethics and politics. The paper both affirms the need for politics and underscores its limits.
[*] At least some of us do.