U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter Biden. Covering all offenses committed between 2014 - 2024, the sweeping full and complete presidential pardon for federal crimes encompasses something more than his son’s recent gun and tax convictions. It neatly coincides with the younger Biden’s tenure with Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings Limited.

While the pardon was criticized by lawmakers from both parties as potentially harming the U.S. justice system, Biden, after repeatedly denying he’d invoke a presidential pardon, offered his blushes in the final hours. "I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.”

If or whether Americans understand or not is immaterial to a larger theoretical question: What role should the ideal parent play in their adult children’s lives, and when does their fundamental role as provider, caregiver and protector run afoul of the ideal city or state?

The fathers of western civilization are credited as the first to present logical arguments on the pater familias, though only Enlightenment philosophers sat at the crossroads of western religions and rationalism.

While a plethora of religious and academic maxims followed, it appears that each and all share a dotted line to a single premise. Something more than an expression of love, but rather love’s axiom and outcome combined.

Ways and Means

The United States Congress has been formally investigating Joe Biden’s family since January 2023. Key to the three-committee impeachment inquiry lies a perception: Joe Biden was complicit in his son’s global influence peddling scheme.

The committee produced evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden, and later President Joe Biden, had communicated with Hunter Biden via 327 private and encrypted email aliases regarding his consultancy with Barisma Holdings Limited: one of the largest natural gas producers in the Ukraine. The company was dissolved in 2023.

Trysts include Mexican billionaire Miguel Aleman visiting the White House in 2014. Three months on, Hunter Biden emails a Burisma Holdings board member (Devon Archer): “We need to get to Mexico City STAT and cement deal w/ Miguel.” Travel logs demonstrate that Vice President Joe Biden used taxpayer dollars to fly Hunter Biden and a business associate to Mexico City on Air Force Two. Archer testified under oath that Joe Biden frequently joined his son’s business meetings at Cafe Milano, including with oligarchs from Russia and Kazakhstan who funneled millions of dollars to Hunter Biden and his business associates.

Direct emails between Vice President Biden and Eric Schwerin, the architect of the Biden family’s shell companies, surge when Biden travels to Ukraine. Thirty, in particular, reveal that Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid for Ukraine if the prosecutor looking into Hunter Biden’s company was not fired. That prosecutor was fired, according to IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s emails, White House call notes, and official actions, for which his family was directly compensated, is chronicled in a nearly 300-page report that alleged "impeachable conduct" but found no evidence of wrong-doing, and did not recommend specific articles of impeachment. However, the nearly 2-year icy three-committee probe by the U.S. Congress left the younger Biden vulnerable to inevitable charges of bribery, influence peddling, and prison.

Pater Familias

According to Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, family is the foundation of society. For Aristotle, providing, caring and protecting the young is a “chosen occupation,” and an endeavor of intellectualism which produces a product of virtue. The First Teacher believed that parents and children can be friends, but cautioned that they’re unequal. “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents. For these only gave life, the latter the art of living well.”

Plato, however, held no real faith in parents at all, instead calling upon the state to educate children and society as a whole. Students would apply reason to all their thoughts and ideas, including geometry, politics, and love. The founder of the Platonic Academy often focused on ethics, and syllogisms about right and wrong.

But it was the realist, Socrates, who saw the natural state of children as “tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers,” the founder of western philosophy writes some 2,400 years ago.

Socratic parents acknowledged their children’s natural state; accepted that each child is unique; avoided sweeping cultural assumptions about parenting; encouraged teenagers natural challenge of authority; embraced their desire to learn; chose to believe that children never err voluntarily but from ignorance; and engaged their children in dialogue and a lifelong pursuit for Truth. In Ancient Greece, parents took full and complete responsibility for their children’s ethics.

The Blank Slate

In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” Enlightenment philosopher John Locke referred to the human mind at birth as a “white paper void of all characters, without any ideas.” For Locke, education is achieved not through formal schooling but through exposure with objects and people. He writes:

The young are at once the most vulnerable to moral influence, but also the most open to knowledge and experience. Creatures with distinct temperaments, only an active parent or tutor can develop a virtuous mind.

From a child’s earliest years, Locke advocated teaching children the virtue of self-denial. Just when most parents feel compelled to indulge their infants and toddlers, the Father of Liberalism presumed they cannot always have what they want. Restraint and will power are essential character traits for a growing child. Locke warns that a spoiled child will become a willful, selfish adult.

“Hunter Biden was not a victim of selective or vindictive prosecution,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi after ending the tax-related criminal proceedings against Hunter Biden in Los Angeles. “The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States … but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”

The history of law and politics of which Scarsi speaks began when Rome sent a delegation to Greek cities to learn about their laws and legislation. Subsequently, twelve men codify the first laws and customs of the Roman Republic on 12 bronze tablets (Twelve Tables). They are the foundation of the modern-day legal system.

What isn’t widely known is that the Twelve Tables coincides with the life of Plato: founder of the Platonic Academy and Father of Idealism. For Plato, the very purpose of The Republic is to ensure justice. If or whether father and son “Team Biden” has satisfied the same, we haven’t any 'reason' at present to make the claim.