Wednesday, May 06, 2015

If Having a Loving Family is an Unfair Advantage...

There are some things that are so incredibly wrong-headed, it's bizarre that the thought ever crossed anyone's mind. Such is almost every premise underlying the article Is Having a Loving Family an Unfair Advantage?

The title should tell you everything. While I do think there are some advantages to asking truly fundamental questions such  as "are families really necessary?" at the same time, the reason for the reasoning is questionable at best. The philosophers think that having a good family provides you with unfair advantages in life. Of course, if you think that, I think you have a pretty perverse sense of both "unfair" and "advantage." While the authors do come to the conclusion that the dissolution of the family would do more social harm than good (thank goodness they're not complete morons!), they still make the basic argument that if you are doing things like reading to your children at bedtime, then you are conferring an unfair advantage to your children -- about which you should be concerned!

The assumption is that we ought to try to hobble ourselves and our children. If there weren't family dynamics benefits to reading at bedtime, they would welcome its abolition because of the social advantages it confers. They have read "Harrison Bergeron" and decided it was a how-to story rather than a criticism of their fundamentally evil motives.

The primary advantage to reading the article is to find out what we all ought to support. We all ought to be reading to our children every night, and we all ought to send our children to private schools. The common sense thing to do is to find out what these contemptible idiots think confer "unfair" advantages, and try to bring it to everyone. They would raze the forest rather than see a single tree rise above the canopy.

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