Hauerwas (and Sandel) on Singer's Question

Stanley Hauerwas provided what I think is the best response to Peter Singer’s question in an article he wrote back in 1977, called “Having and Learning to Care for Retarded Children.”  [Which you can find in a great collection edited by John Swinton, Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability , Haworth Pastoral Press (2004).]   Hauerwas argues that viewing our children as choices, rather than gifts, is corrosive.  As Christians, he argues, we should understand that we have children because we are commanded to, and we follow that command because we accept that God’s creation is good.  He writes that children are our “promissory notes”, our sign to the present and to the future, that we trust God and his creation.  In his words:

[O]ur having children draws on our deepest convictions that God is the Lord of this world, that in spite of all the evidence of misery in this world, it is a world and existence that we can affirm as good as long as we have the assurance that He is its creator and redeemer . . . Children are thus our promissory note, our sign to present and future generations, that we Christians trust the Lord who has called us together to be his people. . . .

Once having children is put in the context of this story and the people formed by it we can see how inappropriate the language of choice is to describe our parenting.  For children are not beings created by our wills – we do not choose them – but rather they are called into the world as beings separate and independent from us.  They are not ours for they, like each of us, have a Father who wills them as his own prior to our choice of them.

Thus, children must be seen as a gift, for they are possible exactly because we do not determine their right to exist or not to exist . . . . [G]ifts come to us as a given they are not under our control.  Moreover, they are not always what we want or expect and thus they necessarily have an independence from us.

Insofar as gifts are independent they do not always bring joy and surprise, but they equally may bring pain and suffering. 

I think Hauerwas is right.  We have to understand our children as gifts, rather than choices.   Singer’s question is ultimately about whether or not we trust the goodness of creation and of our Creator.

Of course, Michael Sandel, in The Case against perfection , argues that it is possible to hold a vision of humanity based on this same notion of ‘giftedness’ that has nothing to do with God, that is based instead on the moral concepts of humility, responsibility, and solidarity.  I’m not so certain he succeeds, but I do think he’s on the right track.