Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January 2007 a ruling by Ontario's highest court allowed a young boy to legally have three parents. The Ontario Court of Appeal's unanimous decision to give legal parental status to the lesbian partner of a biological mother - essentially giving the five-year-old London, Ontario., boy three parents . The court also ruled that the Children's Law Reform Act does not reflect current society and does not provide for the best interests of the child, who is raised by his lesbian mothers and visited by his biological father twice a week. From a child welfare perspective, this decision appears to be on the right track, providing much needed reform to existing family law. All of the evidence on alternative families says that they are just as good, or better, than traditional families. What matters, from the child's perspective, are stable relationships with adults. However, before we open up the door to a wider, more diverse range of family forms we ought also to consider the parental perspective. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that there are important goods of parenting that can only be achieved in something like the traditional family. (I say 'something like' as nothing in Brighouse-Swift argument rules out parenting by same sex couples.) For example, Brighouse and Swift argue against well-run state orphanages on these grounds. Even if a state successfully used orphanages to foster diversity and fulfill children's needs excellently, there would be a serious loss of value and flourishing. Many adults would be unable to engage in activities and relationships that make an in eliminable and great contribution to their ability to flourish. They could not get access to the full package of these activities and relationships by becoming teachers at the orphanages, because, in the role of teacher, they could not enjoy the relevant kind of intimacy with, or exercise the relevant kind of legitimate partiality with respect to, a small number of particular children. Such a society would be unacceptably diminished even if children were well reared. In this paper I want to examine the child welfare argument for family reform which would open up the door to a much broader range of possible family structures in light of Brighouse and Swift's argument for parental rights. I'm interested in seeing how and where children's welfare and parental rights conflict and in seeing how we might settle the differences that exist between the two sets of considerations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".