Introduction

The question of ownership—property rights—is important in addressing many issues of public policy. The ownership of an object does not answer the question of how that object should, morally speaking, be used, but it often answers—or helps to answer—the question about who has the right to decide how the object will be used within rather wide limits. Answering this question does not settle all issues of public policy with respect to a thing. Even if an object is privately owned, there may be good grounds for encouraging or discouraging certain uses of it or for imposing limitations on its use. Obviously, however, issues of public policy are quite different with respect to privately owned objects than with respect to public or communally owned property.

What I will call “the property paradigm” (and describe more fully in Section II) is extremely useful with respect to many moral questions that we encounter and, in particular, with respect to moral questions concerning public policies. I will argue in Section III, however, that it exerts a distorting influence on debates about a variety of complex moral issues. More specifically, I will argue that the application of the property paradigm deformed discussion of the nature and basis of parental rights. The claim that parental rights are not best understood as property rights is not a novel one; it is now widely acknowledged.