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Parents resemble trustees, conservators, and other fiduciaries; they exercise broad discretion while making choices for vulnerable people. Like other fiduciaries, parents can be tempted to neglect their duties or pursue self-interest at the expense of those they should protect. This article argues against treating parents as fiduciaries for three reasons. First, the scope of parental fiduciary duties cannot be narrowed enough to make them tolerable. Arguments limiting fiduciary duties to cases where parents exercise delegated powers or act within parenting roles fail. Most parental decisions involve dual powers or roles. Efforts to address these dual-role cases produce principles that are unduly demanding, complex, arbitrary, and morally unappealing. Second, we could limit parental fiduciary duties by designing parental roles to benefit children. Since children need devoted, happy, well-rounded parents, the principle of designing parental roles to benefit children would produce rules that leave room for parents to flourish. However, this principle does not justify specific legal or moral fiduciary norms. Third, we could redefine fiduciary duties so parents can balance their interests against children's interests, making fiduciary duties less burdensome. However, expanding the definition of fiduciary threatens to encompass many duties within the fiduciary category, rendering the description almost meaningless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reinterprets a child’s right to an open future as justified by authenticity rather than autonomy. It argues that authenticity can be recognized as valuable by people whose conceptions of the good do not value autonomy. As a running example, the paper considers ultra-Orthodox Jews who lead separatist lives and who deny their sons secular education beyond an elementary school level. If their adult sons want to have careers and participate in life outside the religious enclave, they cannot easily do so. The parents see no reason to protect their child’s autonomy (which they do not value) or to prepare their child for a life that conflicts with their values. This paper provides one response to their concerns. Following a political-liberal project of seeking overlapping consensus, it tries to base demands that children be prepared for varied futures on values that reasonable religious people can embrace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests a means of distinguishing threats from offers that explains why it is sometimes coercive to insist on one's rights in negotiations. Disagreements starts with how to describe the alternative situation. Possibilities include the statistically likely outcome for a person in this position; the outcome to which the recipient is entitled or that the proposer is obligated to provide or not to prevent; and the outcome the recipient expects. Threats and offers differ not in the number of options available before and after but in the availability of particular important options before and after the proposal. Of course, one could define coercion and threat to include all limits on another person's options. However, it is more useful to restrict these words to those interferences that are prima facie wrongs. Because the inquiry is made in order to determine blame, the option must be something that the proposer knew would be important to the recipient. To capture corrupt proposals, a moral baseline should identify options the proposer is obligated to provide or not withdraw rather than options to which the recipient is entitled. Exploitation is benefitting at someone's expense from certain characteristics or circumstances of that person. A duty of charity differs from a prima facie duty not to make threats in its incentive effects.