ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an institutional theory of parental obligation. It discusses the justifiability of social arrangements that assign responsibility for the care and upbringing of children in specific ways. The chapter provides an explanation for how particular individuals acquire parental duties under a justifiable set of childrearing practices. Parental duties might still be incurred either because persons have undertaken to rear a child or, alternatively, because they have caused a needy being to exist. The chapter examines some vignettes which describe various conditions under which reproduction takes place and asking what the causal and the voluntarist views would say about the responsibility of the procreators in each case. Playing a causal role in the creation of a child can give rise to parental obligations. But playing a causal role is only part of the explanation, and it is only when this is joined with other conditions that causation becomes morally relevant.
