I’m giving up on this thread. There are so many issues that it brings up it is impossible to answer them all in one post. Further, Spidey has taken up the strategy of asking for an answer to one question, and then insisting your answer is wrong because you didn’t answer all his arguments. When you answer those, he comes back and claims you never answered the first one.
I can say this discussion had made me think a lot. I have always held the attitude that if I find a position untenable at its logical extremes, it should be discarded, or at least modified. Given this, I can no longer hold to the statement, “It is always immoral to violate someone’s rights.” If I did, in my unconscious diver example I would have to let my neighbor drown - it would be the right thing to do. This, of course, leaves the question of when, and for what reason, it is okay to violate someone’s rights, because as Spidey noted you can’t lock people up to get them to quit smoking.
I guess it is purely arbitrary that I make a distinction between raping and feeding children.
Two year olds can’t dress themselves, go to work, and buy their own houses with bath tubs. Once they grow up and can, they can decide to bathe or not. Until then, the parent chooses.
That much was obvious. At least you admit it. Why not? Too busy sexually abusing your children?
Haha, ok.. that was too far. Or was it? Did you listen to any of the podcasts on parenting? I don’t have kids, and I found them helpful for when dealing with them. I’m sure if you actually do (listen to them), the benefits would be more than ten fold in comparison to what I got out of it.
What say someone else, another adult - had sex with your child. Your legal response would be, what? They used your property without permission? So you would file for damages, instead of assault?
Red herrings.
It’s the Libertarian solution, 3rd alternative - pro property rights approach you’ve never heard of, nor taken the time to understand.
It resolves the abortion debate imo, yes.
Do me the courtesy of pointing out what is wrong with what I wrote & actually offer a response.
“For those of you that think adults / animals / children have rights, could you please outline how an individual knows if he is violating the adults / animals / children’s supposed rights? (assuming they have them)”
The use of reason.
In natural-law philosophy, then, reason is not bound, as it is in modern post-Humean philosophy, to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends. For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason; and “right reason” dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment. For the Thomist or natural-law theorist, the general law of morality for man is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each with its own nature and its own ends. “For him the moral law … is a special case of the general principles that all finite things move toward their ends by the development of their potentialities.”[14] And here we come to a vital difference between inanimate or even non-human living creatures, and man himself; for the former are compelled to proceed in accordance with the ends dictated by their natures, whereas man, “the rational animal,” possesses reason to discover such ends and the free will to choose.[15]
Inanimate bodies act in certain ways precisely because they are what they are, and they cannot act otherwise; they cannot perform actions which are contrary to their nature. And animals are governed by instinct. In fine, all creatures below man participate unconsciously in the eternal law, which is reflected in their natural tendencies, and they do not possess the freedom which is required in order to be able to act in a manner incompatible with this law. It is therefore essential that he [man] should know the eternal law in so far as it concerns himself. Yet, how can he know it? He cannot read, as it were, the mind of God… [but] he can discern the fundamental tendencies and needs of his nature, and by reflecting on them he can come to a knowledge of the natural moral law… Every man possesses … the light of reason whereby he can reflect … and promulgate to himself the natural law, which is the totality of the universal precepts or dictates of right reason concerning the good which is to be pursued and the evil which is to be shunned (Ibid., pp. 213–14).
What does killing or having sex with a child, have to do with guarding / protecting them? If you answer “nothing”, you’d be correct.
The initiation of physical aggression, i.e invasion, is wrong. Murder is not justified (though self defense is), rape is not justified (though consensual voluntary actions between two individuals are). It is wrong however to compare a potential self owner, with a full self owner.
Feeding a child is over seeing the duty of “trustee” / “guardianship”.
There is however, not positive obligation on parents to feed, bath, whatever their children:
Even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a “trustee” or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult. It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child’s rights for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering him, etc. On the other hand, the very concept of “rights” is a “negative” one, demarcating the areas of a person’s action that no man may properly interfere with. No man can therefore have a “right” to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced. Thus, we may say that a man has a right to his property (i.e., a right not to have his property invaded), but we cannot say that anyone has a “right” to a “living wage,” for that would mean that someone would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate the property rights of the people being coerced. As a corollary this means that, in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former’s rights; the only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man’s rights.
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.[2] The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.[3]
Where Block comes in, is that when the guardians no longer wish to “guard” the child, or be it’s “trustee”, the “right” to raise / guard the child should be transferred. That is if they are going to abandon the child.
In answer we may point out that their [natural law] view identifies value not with existence but rather with the fulfillment of tendencies determined by the structure of the existent entity. Furthermore, it identifies evil not with non-existence but rather with a mode of existence in which natural tendencies are thwarted and deprived of realization… The young plant whose leaves are withering for lack of light is not nonexistent. It exists, but in an unhealthy or privative mode. The lame man is not nonexistent. He exists, but with a natural power partially unrealized. … This metaphysical objection is based upon the common assumption that existence is fully finished or complete. … [But] what is good is the fulfillment of being.[30]
[30] Wild, “Natural Law,” pp. 4–5. Wild continues on p.11:
Existence is … not a property but a structuralized activity. Such activities are a kind of fact. They can be observed and described by judgments that are true or false: human life needs material artifacts; technological endeavors need rational guidance; the child has cognitive faculties that need education. Value statements are founded on the directly verifiable fact of tendency or need. The value or realization is required not merely by us but by the existent tendency for its completion. From a sound description and analysis of the given tendency we can infer the value founded upon it. This is why we do not say that moral principles are mere statements of fact, but rather that they are “founded” on facts.
On pp. 2–4, Wild says:
The ethics of natural law … recognizes prescriptive moral laws but asserts that these are founded on tendential facts which may be described… Goodness … must … be conceived dynamically as an existential mode, the realization of natural tendency. In this view, the world is not made up of determinate structures alone, but of determinate structures in an act of existing which they determine toward further appropriate acts of existing… No determinate structure can be given existence without determining active tendencies. When such a tendency is fulfilled in accordance with natural law, the entity is said to be in a stable, healthy, or sound condition – adjectives of value. When it is obstructed or distorted, the entity is said to be in an unstable, diseased or unsound condition – adjectives of disvalue. Goodness and badness in their ontological sense are not phases of abstract structure, but rather modes of existence, ways in which the existential tendencies determined by such structures are either fulfilled or barely sustained in a deprived, distorted state.
The child’s ability to consent and reason exists, but it is in a primitive state.
The property owner (parents) set the rules for the household (their property), that which adults must obey as well.
“Anyone who lives on this property must be clean & not smell”. If the child doesn’t like it, they can leave - i.e be free to run away, thereby displaying their full rights.
If they are to be evicted, it must be by the gentlest means possible. Just like the trespasser in real life, and the fetus in the mothers womb.
So far we have easily agreed on that. What isn’t settled is why other property owners should have the power to come and seize the child from the property. This is what the “children have rights” crowd claims.
I addressed it a long time ago. I will go over it again though for you.
The problem stems from the assumption that for some reason, the market for justice will result in majority rule and creation of entities such as “Friends of Babies”. It goes against all Austrian Economic theory. It also goes against all just theory of law. I would assume most, if not all libertarians, would understand that one is innocent until proven guilty. To suggest some agency could have the power to go into someone’s home, and take their most valuable possession, their own children, and then require them to prove their innocence to get the child back is just ludicrous. This is why I have no interest in reading Block. Lastly, Friends of Babies has no standing to take the child as opposed to anyone else in the world.
The word ‘guardianship’ has come about to describe this subset of ‘ownership’ because children are special cases. They are not mere res, but potential actor-producers.
If most people are able to determine that senseless murder is wrong and choose to uphold that value, will you call that “majority rule”?
I think you have some sort of deeply rooted misconception about what libertarianism is. It is not “free-will for the masses”. It is not Austrian economics, despite the compatibility. It is a system of punishment, nothing more and nothing less.
Your economic reasoning is horrid if you can’t see why FoB would come about.
We ignored it because it’s ridiculous, there’s no such thing as “continual homesteading”. Either someone starts using fallow land and no one objects, or someone does object and that means they continue their ownership of it.
If you try to take someone’s children away because in your view they aren’t being raised as proper moral agents, the parents are going to object violently. Then a court has to decide who, between the parents and you, has the property right over the child.
It’s pretty obvious who does to anyone but a few radical ideologues.
We aren’t talking about “parents not raising children up to our standards of being proper moral agents”. Isn’t that much clear? I guess your parents didn’t teach you to have the courage to admit you’ve made a mistake.
We are talking about actions which are clearly evil like rape, murder, and leaving permanent damage to children. Libertarian law has no say on what foods a child eats (unless it is poisoned), what church a child is taken to (unless it is some child rape cult), or what language a child learns (unless it is cut off from the outside world completely and can’t learn language).
The fact is brutalizing small children is seen as barbaric by almost anyone. I see no substantial change happening in the opposite direction anytime soon. Hence such practices will be punished, totalitarian or limited government or none at all in existence, conservative whining to the contrary about about parental authority and the sanctity of the family unit notwithstanding.
Who will pay for this punishment? Remember that in a state-less justice system, people have to provide for their own justice. They can’t externalize it on the taxpayers.
How much will you pay to fight families and take their children away?
You did not answer the question. Anyone willing to fight the family will be able to take them away, but would you fight to the death to take children away from their family?