Abstract
In American popular culture, the reigning myth is one in which the individual is a cowboy, alone in the wild and capable of sustaining his own life without assistance from others. One thinks of Western movie classics, such as “Shane,” or “The Man with No Name” as quintessentially American. In fact, the good life is the solitary life, one lived alone on the frontier without interference from others. This solitary life as the paradigmatic life can be found even in contemporary American popular culture, for example in movies like “Spiderman” or the Batman series. The hero is solitary, alone in the world, and he alone can protect the society from those who would destroy it. These quintessential American heroes cannot have a family. They can neither love others, nor can they be loved by others; for to be loved and to love leaves them vulnerable to their enemies, who might exploit them and weaken them from the task of creating and protecting the polis.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that John Rawls, in his Theory of Justice, thought that families created and sustained inequality of opportunity (Rawls 1999). He falls short of calling for the full-scale removal of families from the polis; his hard-nosed realism seemed to keep him from calling for the dissolution of the family as seen in the city in speech (Plato 1991). Whereas Plato seems to be speaking about impossibilities in the city in speech and seems know that because of realities of families there is no real possibility for perfect justice, I read Rawls as realizing that one cannot simply call for the dissolution of all intermediary institutions. In other words, I read Rawls as being more cunning, suggesting but not calling for the dissolution of the family, and thereby initiating the dissolution of the family by stealth through subtle state action. This essay is not the place to argue for this point.
- 2.
I have elsewhere reflected on the lacunae of the family in Western philosophical reflection (Bishop 2012).
- 3.
The Doctrine of parens patriae gives the state authority to act as the parent of any member of the state who is unable to make decisions in the best interests of the individual. This doctrine permits the state to remove children from the family and allows the state to act as the child’s parent. There is a fascinating, and oddly inconsistent aspect to the application of this doctrine. When organ transplant teams decide that a child in need of a transplant does not have the familial and social structure in place to justify the use of the scarce resource, the doctrine of parens patriae is not deployed. In other words, organ transplant teams, acting as decisional authorities can make life and death decisions based on familial contexts, but families cannot.
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Bishop, J. (2015). Dependency, Decisions, and a Family of Care. In: Fan, R. (eds) Family-Oriented Informed Consent. Philosophy and Medicine(), vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12120-8_2
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