- Position‹4 of 6›
- Families are defined by what they do
Families are by design forces that preserve the status quo.
The argument
A family is the oldest and most resilient institution known to humankind. Families are the basic, foundational social units in all human communities around the world, and healthy individuals within healthy families are at the core of a healthy society. That an institution appears in every society, and outlasts the political and economic arrangements built around it, is taken here as evidence that it is doing something societies require rather than something a particular culture happens to favour. What it does can be described. Inheritance is a large part of a family system as it allows for familial ties to pass on. It functions on an economic level if wealth is available, as well as on a material level if a house, car, or any other material is available for inheritance. Inheritance is a stabilising mechanism in this account: it carries resources across the break that each death would otherwise represent, so that what one generation accumulates is not dispersed but held by the same continuing unit. Sociologists and anthropologists use two concepts about family: structure and function. The structure refers to the number of family members and familial positions such as mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother, etc. The function refers to how the family satisfies each other in maintaining their domestic structure, such as providing sustenance, building a home as a family, emotionally and physically supporting each other. The distinction is what supports the conclusion. Structures vary enormously between societies and across time, while the functions recur: someone is fed, housed and supported, and the arrangement persists after its members change. Defining the family by what it does rather than by who is in it therefore captures the thing that is actually constant — the set of tasks that keeps its members maintained and society in equilibrium.
Context
The family exists as a sub-system in the much larger societal system.
Premises
Counter-arguments
One must have to maintain a healthy relationship with all members of the family to preserve a state of equilibrium. Unhealthy or dysfunctional relationships can create terrible problems that may persist from one generation to the next. Unhealthy relationships may also affect inheritance and how family wealth might be distributed amongst the members, leading to animosity and jealousy between siblings, parents, etc.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] "The oldest and most resilient institution" is an assertion of universality that the sibling positions dispute, and the claim that healthy families are the core of a healthy society is the argument's conclusion appearing among its premises. [Rejecting P2] Inheritance is not a function all families perform. Most households have little or nothing to transmit, and the practice varies enormously between societies, so a definition built on it would exclude a large share of the families it is meant to cover. [Rejecting P3] Structure and function are the two concepts the argument names, and it then defines families by only one of them without saying why function should be decisive — which is exactly what the position requires. The equilibrium claim also meets the standard objection to functionalism, which the counter-argument makes: families transmit conflict, abuse and inequality across generations too, so describing what they do does not establish that what they do is stabilising.