Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2015.11.28 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Erin M. Cline, Families of Virtue: Confucian and Western Views on Childhood Development, Columbia University Press, 2015, 342pp., $30.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780231171557 .

Reviewed by David B. Wong, Duke University

This book attributes to early Confucianism the view that the parent-child relationship has a “unique and irreplaceable” role in early moral development (xi) and goes on to argue that this view is right. In the course of making this argument Erin M. Cline provides careful and perceptive comparative readings of early Confucian texts and a very wide range of texts in the Western tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau to contemporary feminists, to show how unusual and in-depth the insights of Confucian thinkers were. She draws from a wide range of empirical studies to support the Confucian view. There is much in this book that will be of value to anyone with interests in the fields of the philosophy and psychology of moral development, feminist care ethics, and comparative ethics. Cline’s comparison of Confucian and feminist views, which have the most to say about parent-child relationships, is informative and balanced. It is not clear that she has fully established the unique and irreplaceable role of the parent-child relationship, but Cline surely has given enough argument to establish that the relationship is one of the most important factors, perhaps the most important single factor, in moral development, and she raises good questions as to why U.S. society largely neglects its importance in its public policies.

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