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Parental Duty and the Shape of the Future

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Explains that the state-based approach to determining which values are passed on to succeeding generations resolves the difficulty of indiscriminate social reproduction (i.e., some values are reproduced and not others) but it is not self-evident that this is the right way to resolve the difficulty. Explores an alternative approach, “a dispersed model in which individuals and groups work independently to preserve what they most value in the society and to pass beliefs and moral commitments on to the next generation.” Argues that this approach “better fits the actual moral beliefs of parents and citizens; it is more likely to produce the outcomes parents want (or should want) for their own children and what adult citizens should want for all children.”

 

Charles Howell, Ph.D., Volume 16, No. 3, 2005, p. 1-14