tle compares sharingchildren with an entire community to a master who employs too many servants. A servant will be less motivated to perform specific actions,because he very well might assume that another servant has already taken care of that task. Furthermore, if the servant knows that the task hasnot been competed but fails to perform the task himself, if he is caught slacking off, he can simply exonerate himself by making the claim that hethought that task was already competed. If, however, a master only had one slave, this slave would not be able to claim that the work was notdone, or that he was not needed, because he is the only one who can serve in the entire household. From this example, Aristotle infers that if our children are brought up in a communal setting, the same thing will happen to human relationshipsthat happens to masters with too many slaves. If we all share our children, "There comes to be a thousand sons to each of the citizens," and thisforms a situation in which "any chance man is equally the son of any chance man, such that all [the "fathers"] will equally neglect them (all thesons)" (1261b38-1262a1). No matter how close a "father" feels for one of his "sons," he will end up neglecting the child since it is quite natural,or in some cases tempting, to think that another "father" is taking care of that "son." (62, dude).This neglect will lead to a weakened father-son relationship. Every father will only recognize himself as one of many fathers in the village, and allthe children will see all the fathers as an unorganized whole. If there are 1,000 fathers in a village, the child will therefore be only 1/1000 of eachindividual father. This fragmentation leads to a decrease in concern or care. Furthermore, since the father does not know which son is really his,he will begin to doubt the entire system. He may think that a child is someone elses based on the childs resemblance to another father in thevillage, and the...
