ABSTRACT
Rawls claims that the family is one of the institutions that form the basic structure of society. But he does not provide any sustained discussion of the family, as he does in the case of the other institutions that form the basic structure. This is something of a disappointment, since the institution of the family raises a number of interesting methodological and normative issues for the theory of justice as fairness. Some of these issues have significant educational implications. One important point of this chapter will be to shed some light on these implications. But before turning to this topic there is a preliminary question that needs to be addressed: what, from the perspective of a Rawlsian account of justice, should we count as a family? Theorists of justice often assume that families take a particular limited form, and consequently, the policies they propose often turn out to be too limited to be adequate for the existing variety of family forms. In particular, discussions of the moral and political status of the family tend to presuppose that it is constituted by a heterosexual (married) couple and one or more children who have biological ties to the couple, or who have been legally adopted by the couple, all of whom live together in the same home. Sometimes a traditional division of labor is also assumed to hold between the adult members of the family, with the male’s primary responsibility being to provide for the family income and the female’s primary responsibility being to care for the children and do the housework. Thinking about families on the basis of these kinds of assumptions fails to take into account the existence of single-parent families, families whose adult members are gay or lesbian couples, families made up of couples who have divorced but who continue to share the legal custody and care of their children (and who may have remarried and may also live with the children of their new partners), as well as larger extended families, the members of which live together in the same household.1
