5.4: Families and the Saying of “Mine” and “Not Mine”

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See 461c-466c. Socrates recommends arranging things so that no guardian knows any child as his or her own, but rather as a child of this generation or that generation, with the child looking to the older generations, collectively, as his or her parents or grandparents according to their age. Socrates figures that, by breaking up the nuclear families in this way and integrating the guardians into a single family, they will be less likely to have interests in competition with one another. They will “feel more or less the same joy or pain at the same gains or losses.” The greatest good for a city, he thinks, is to be unified. To this end, the guardians should be a single, unified family, and “apply ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ to the same things on the basis of the same principle.”

Suppose someone were to object, as Aristotle did in the Politics, that Socrates’ proposal to break up nuclear families “results in each citizen's having a thousand sons, and these do not belong to them as individuals but any child is equally the son of anyone, so that all alike will regard them with indifference” (II.3.1261b-1262a). How might Socrates reply?
How important for the happiness of a child is it to grow up in a two parent family?
It is remarkable how much love and attention parents direct toward their own children and how little they really seem to care about children living just a few doors down the street. Socrates’ proposal recognizes this as a problem and attempts to address it. Is it a problem? If so, can you think of a better way to address it? Consider the idea of sending one’s own child off to live for a year with another set of parents in one’s community, while taking a child from the other family into one’s care. Would this sort of thing be beneficial?