BOURNE&CADDICKBOURNE
CRAIG
EMILY
Papers relating to adoption
Forthcoming
-
'The children I didn't raise (the possibility of)' in The Moral Psychology of Grief, edited by Mark Alfano (Bloomsbury) [Bourne and Caddick Bourne]
-
'Bionormativity and Imagining the Family (Through Thought Experiments and Fiction)' in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and the Family, edited by Teresa Baron (Routledge, 2026), 87-99 [Bourne and Caddick Bourne] doi: 10.4324/9781032615332-8
Bionormativity and Imagining the Family (Through Thought Experiments and Fiction)
By Bourne & Caddick Bourne
We use resources from the philosophy of fiction to examine representations of the family. We articulate how certain ways of forming families, such as through adoption, are made less imaginatively accessible owing to the general way in which engagement with fictions is structured. These considerations also have implications for how philosophical debates about family can profitably be conducted – in particular, for the use of narrative thought-experiments to test intuitions about procreation and adoption. We take as a case study Luara Ferracioli’s use of thought-experiments comparing procreative and adoptive parenting. We argue that these thought-experiments are an unsafe way of supporting conclusions about the value of competing ways of family-forming.