Amirhossein Khodaparast - Assisted professor, Western Philosophy department, Iranian Institute of Philosophy

The definition of parenthood is widely challenged across last decades. A main part of this challenge is derived from the rapid development of assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Though parenthood has been traditionally characterized by genetic relations between the child and her genetic parent, given the various kinds of now established parenting all over the world, it seems that the traditional kind of defining the term is intuitively inappropriate and inacceptable. There are many philosophers who see defining a term like parenthood as a normative task, not a descriptive one. So, they reject genetic exclusivism in accounting for parenthood, and argue for a laborbased account, intentional and voluntarist account, and causal account of the phenomenon. In this paper, I will reject genetic exclusivism too on the basis of ART challenge, but inspired by Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblance, try to show that parenthood should be considered through a series of overlapping similarities, ratherthan one essential common feature. This kind of considering parenthood would be immune to challenges like ART challenge.