ABSTRACT
Russell DiSilvestro is concerned with how it is that a child is someone's child, that is, a distinct individual who is the proper object of a given parent's attention and care, as opposed to the attention and care of others. The 20th-century British philosopher C. D. Broad once wrote that he have sometimes caught himself wondering what he should have been like if his father had not married his mother but had married some other woman. But he always ended by thinking that the question was meaningless. Broad assumed then what many today call "origin essentialism" or "the necessity of origin". The general idea is that, in some way, an individual's origin is essential to that individual. But this general idea is open to interpretation: in particular, it leaves open precisely which aspects of an individual's origin are essential to that individual. Origin essentialism is an interesting and controversial philosophical thesis in its own right.
