Reproductive Work and Productive Fairness

In academic and public debates, defenders of the case for sharing the costs of children often claim that by having and rearing children parents produce public goods for the rest of society, or perform socially valuable or necessary labour, and that it would be unfair to parents for others to not share the costs of children, for example through publicly funded parental leave and schools for this reason. Critics of the public goods argument have claimed that it fails because there is no defensible principle that can serve to buttress the claims of parents. Furthermore, these same critics, as well as others, have argued that a certain view of liberal equality militates against sharing the costs of children.This paper challenges both the contention that there is no defensible principle of fairness that can buttress the public goods argument and the contention that liberal equality militates against socialisation. It accomplishes these two tasks together, arguing that the ideal of equality of resources, rather than militating against socialisation, in fact grounds a principle of productive fairness that can serve as the normative premise of the public goods argument for sharing the costs of children.