Is the family unit necessary?

· How should kinship relationships impact moral judgment?
· Does (and should) the nuclear family predicate our democracy?
· Is gay marriage immoral?
· Is polygamy immoral?
· Is incest immoral?

For the last Roundtable discussion of the semester, we addressed a question that strikes to the core of our society: the significance of the family to personal experience. We began by questioning whether the nuclear family structure is an ideal unit of social organization, or if other less familiar social structures could serve society better. Elah suggested that by gathering an extended family—aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.—in a single house, the extended family unit could take advantage of economies of scale both financially and with respect to child-raising. Nick added that a favorable feminist argument could be made, since distribution of household chores would likely be distributed on the basis of age more than gender.

If the intrafamily bonds forged in this type of cohabitation were tighter than those of a typical nuclear family, would our political structure need to adjust by allowing more autonomy for these units? In other words, would the consolidation of larger independent interpersonal groups justify a relaxing of government interference in private life?

Of course we can imagine many other forms of family organization, distinct in size and closeness of kinship. Beth suggested that gathering a number of different families in a single tribal-like coalition would provide the same benefits as an extended-family consolidation while decreasing the dangers of negligent parenting. By creating anonymity of blood relations, these units would provide an incentive for all parents to devote more equal attention to a larger number of children, thus reducing the effective standard deviation of parental attention across families. The final and most radical restructuring would entail the state redistributing children, perhaps sending them to boarding school from a young age—thus promoting uncompromising egalitarianism, but perhaps at the expense of more important considerations.

Though a final judgment about the relative merits of these various family structures may be impossible on an individual basis, much less on the scale of a nation, examining the relevant issues can and should still help inform our evaluation. The Roundtable settled on a number of essential contributions of the family unit which we would like to preserve: economic stability, emotional support, unconditional love, and role models, to name a few. A decision concerning the ideal family organization must account for these variables. A full account of the implications of each scenario for these variables would have been impossible in a short discussion, particularly since we have at best limited anecdotal evidence.

For the final part of our discussion we turned to the ethical dimension of kinship relationships. Is privileging family in moral judgments is justifiable? Is incest a reprehensible offense? The general consensus of the Roundtable was that ethical determinations contrary to biological tendencies, though they are often necessary, should be made with great caution. In the context of familial relationships, individual freedom to associate without interference should always remain the default position, although sufficient contemplation and research might justify a more proscriptive stance. When faced with unfamiliar or unprecedented circumstances, rash action should be forestalled until the consequences have been evaluated to the fullest extent possible.