Anarchists don’t believe in violence except in self-defense, and therefore despise any encroachment on personal freedom so long as one is not hamring another.
Is it then the case that anarchists believe children should be allowed to do drugs? I agree that adults should be allowed to do drugs, but even 5 year olds?
I often hear arguements that people shouldn’t be told what to do with their own children (forced mental screenings, vaccinations), so if you believe this, then doesn’t it follow that parents should be allowed to give their children extra “sugar” in their cereal?
Ah, but giving a child drugs would be a violent act perhaps, because the child doesn’t know what it is. Well, what if they are 8, or 9, or 10, and they do know it’s bad for you, and they ask for it? Then they would have knowledge of it properties, and the exchange would be voluntary. Would you just sit by while a parent does that? If you don’t, then you are violating our own principle of allowing all voluntary exchanges/relationiships.
Ah, but giving your child food of low nutritional value and making them fat is bad for them too. So if I think that you shouldn’t be allowed to give drugs, then shouldn’t I also forbid giving poor food? I really can’t find a way out of that conclusion, but I don’t like drugs for kids, and I don’t think parents should not be allowed to give their children Oreo’s. I’m inconsistant. While were at it, would you allow a parent to let their child starve to death because forcing them to feed their kid would be violent? After all, such an exchange should be voluntary.
So, I’m inconsistant and violent. Anarchists are heartless and non-violent.
Anarchists are heartless albeit non-violent. They are heartless because it seems they must stand by while parents feed their children blow and meth. If they do not, then they violate their own principles of non-violence.
Children are not self-owners. The parents have a trustee guardianship property right in their children. Therefore parents can tell their children what to do and what not to do until the child reaches the age when he can in fact consider himself a self-owner by demonstrating this fact in nature.
I can relate to this worry. This is no doubt the trickiest area in libertarian theory. Before I jumped ship and became and became an anarchist, I emailed Bob Murphy a very similar problem involving sex. He forwarded the question to some others, and I found Roderick Long’s answer somewhat compelling at the time and even moreso now:
"'I’m not sure whether this is a normative question (what in libertarian rights theory forbids …?) or a pragmatic question (what mechanisms under anarchy would prevent …?). I suspect it’s a little of each.
Rothbard’s phrasing that parents/guardians “own” their children can encourage the impression that you are within your rights to do anything you want to a child (until they claim self-ownership, etc.); since Rothbard doesn’t in fact mean that, perhaps “own” was the wrong word. I’d say that a guardian’s right to make decisions for a temporarily incapacitated person (which applies to children as well as to the comatose, etc.) is conditional on their making those decisions on the basis, as far as they can tell, of what the person if not incapacitated would consent to.
As for the pragmatic question, many worry that no one would have the economic incentive to defend helpless victims (e.g. children) who weren’t signed up with a protection agency. To this I say that there are countless voluntary non-profit public-interest groups operating today, and there would be far more and they would have far more resources without government intervention.
I say a bit about both these matters (guardianship rights and the defense of nonclients) in “The Irrelevance of Responsibility,” Social Philosophy and Policy 16, no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 118-145 (unfortunately not yet online).
Roderick"
As far as your point concerning inconsistency versus heartlessness, I obviously think that’s a false dichotomy. If I think that an ethical theory when applied consistently seems to lead to obviously unethical results, then one of the following must be true:
I made a mistake, and the unethical result does not actually follow from the theory when properly applied
The ethical theory needs to be revised in order to consistently provide for such cases
Contradictions can’t exist. Ethical theory is like any other area in academic study. Difficult cases can force us to revise our theory or try to find explanations, but it’s silly to throw out the notion of consistency just because you have a difficult time.
Jeff, thanks for the answer. Could you give me a specific answer as to whether or not a parent should be allowed to give their child meth, at say 9 years of age? Let’s assume that the child has learned about drugs in school, and has asked the parent for it.
Also, you forgot a third option for when an ethical theory is applied consistantly:
What we thought was unethical actually isn’t
This is why I border on sketicism in the realm of ethics; because we try to make ethical theories that when applied correctly conform to our intuitive presuppositions as to what is/isn’t ethical, so what happens when we get a result that contradicts those intuitions? Is the theory wrong or our intuitions? How do you know? And if you don’t know, then on what basis can you reject any ethical theory?
Ah sorry, I misread. Parents do have obligations to children, one of which is not to harm them. A much harder question is the one you posed re the child asking for the drugs. Right now I don’t really have an answer for that one.
I’ll let Jeff answer the questions you posed, but I will just say that I am not an intuitionist. Just because something seems unethical does not mean it is; an argument must be supplied to establish such a thing. Nevertheless, ethical theories are governed by the laws of logic, and thus must be self-consistent.
Inquisitor, while we wait for Jeff to chime in, do you have any thoughts on the following:
If a parent has an obligation to not harm their child does this apply only to acts of commision or to acts of ommission as well?
If only commission, then do you believe a parent doesn’t have an obligation to feed their child? If not, then you concede that some acts of ommision should not be permissible. On what basis then would you argue that forced vaccinations and mental screenings are wrong, if in fact you do argue that? We could go even further and add things like seat belt/car seat laws for children/infants.
Anarchists do not believe there is a right to disallow anything. In so far as they will give good food to children who have only Oreos at home, they have a good heart. What they won’t do is use violence and disrupt the social peace by invading the parents’ property in order to appropriate the children for themselves, which is socialism and like all forms of socialism will not achieve its stated ends.
I think the answer is no, parents should not be allowed to give their children meth. The parent’s guardian right’s is conditional on what the person would consent to if not incapacitated. There obviously remains a continuum problem. That is, at which point is the child no longer no longer incapacitated? They obviously are at one month, but it’s less clear at 12 years old. Continuum problems are interesting and sometimes very difficult, but they can’t the basis for rejecting a theory.
You’re right, I did forget that third option. This is a very interesting and fundamental problem you’ve brought up about accepting or rejecting ethical theory. I’ll try to provide a brief answer (but I’m not always good at being brief).
FIrst off, I would point out that this isn’t just a problem for ethical theory but every other belief that one holds. It cannot be the case that in order for a belief to be justified, it must be formed on the basis of other justified beliefs. If that was true, then the train of justification would either lead to an infinited regress (ie. A is justified by B is justified by C is justified by D…ad infinitum) or in a circle (ie. A is justified by B is justified by C is justified by A). In both of those cases, it is obvious that there is no real justification at all (In the first case, there is nothing at the end of infinity, and in the second, saying that A is justified by A is simply an assertion not a justification). Therefore there must be such things as “properly basic beliefs”, beliefs that provide justification to other beliefs, but are not in themselves justified by other beliefs. Beliefs in rules of mathmatics and logic are the most obvious properly basic beliefs. We believe them not on the basis of other beliefs, but because they are so obvious (that is, they are confirmed by our intuitions).
Properly basic beliefs, of course, are accompanied by varying degrees of intuitive certainty. Consider my currently held belief that there is a computer screen in front of me. It is partly based on the undeniable fact that I see what looks like a computer screen, but it does not follow from that belief because it is possible that I am dreaming , brain in a vat, matrix, etc. And yet my intuitions step in, and I cannot deny that there is a computer screen in front of me. All empirical observations are far from certain, and yet it’s foolish to therefore categorically disbelieve all empirical observations.
But what about when there is a disagreement between such observations? Consider a case where S is in the desert and he forms a belief that there is an oasis in the distance because he sees what looks like water. And yet when he examines it up close, he sees that no such oasis exists. S cannot conclude that both beliefs are true and therefore the oasis exists and doesn’t exist. No, he must adandon one of the beliefs, but he cannot choose arbitrarily or randomly between them. The belief based on closer observation is more certain, and he should therefore keep that one. Afterwards he might seek an explanation for why his cognitive faculties deceived him in the one instance, but that is not necessary in order to know that he should abandon the first belief.
So it is with ethics. Like empirical observations, moral intuitions are far from certain, and some are more certain than others. With emprical observations we can formulate theories about how the world works that seek to explain all such observations. When there is inconsistency between theory and observation we must go with what is more certain. If it seems plausible that we made a mistake in our observation, then we set aside the obseration as anomolous and continue believing the theory. If however an observation is undeniable, then we must alter our theory. Similarily it is helpful to formulate ethical theories. These theories are tested against our moral intuitions. We deal with inconsistancies in the same way as empirical theories. If it seems plausible that my moral intuition is mistaken (perhaps I notice a bias in my culture that isn’t shared by all humanity), then I disregard that intuition and continue beliefing what follows from the theory. If on the other hand, the intuition in question is undeniable (it is impossible for me to deny, for instance, that it is wrong to violently agress against an innocent person), then the theory must be modified.
I admit that arguments for skepticism seem to have a lot of force, but I would point out that whatever success they have against ethics, they would also have against science.
The critical issue here is that parents don’t own their children. No human being can own another. They do however own the property right of being parents to their children. They obtain this right, by virtue of the fact that they caused the child to exist. In effect they homestead theproperty of parenthood when the child is born. They own the property of parenthood for the child, not the child itself. However, in order to retain ownership, parents must maintain their property ownership by acting as proper parents. Quite apart from physically abusing a child (which is a direct violation of the child’s rights), if parents neglect a child they have abdicated their resposibility as parents. They have ceased to exercise their property ownership in parenthood of their child, and others must be allowed to homestead the right. If the parents prevent others from homesteading the right, then the parents are violating the rights of those who do wish to act as parents to the child. Note, by neglecting the child, they are not violating the rights of the child, they are simply relinquishing their ownership of parenthood, and must therefore allow others to assume the responsibility.
Questions of whether a parent is neglecting a child if they a give a child drugs or unhealthy food, for example, are essentially subjective. Drugs, probably yes; Unhealthy food, probably no. The issue is not whether the child asks for them, beacuse a child isn’t old enough to make those decisions. But if enough people feel that such actions by the parents are tantamount to neglect, and that thereby the parents have relinquished ownership of parenthood, then others must be allowed to take over the ownership, by force if necessary.
How are you going to even know that the children are taking drugs without invading the property of their parents? You cannot do this without a surveillance state of some kind.
Anarchy isn’t Utopia. Will children be neglected, and nobody know about it? Yes. Undoubtedly this will happen. It happens today. Without a state, parents would be solely resposnsible for raising their children, but other family members, the local community and private child protection organizations could all step in where there’s obvious neglect. That was the way it was done for thousands of years before the state started meddling in family affairs.
What are parents who risk losing their children logically going to do with regards to people who have the power to take their children away? Keep them away as far as possible.
What you propose is only going to cause children to come to greater harm.
Well, you could use that same argument to say that neglectful parents do the same thing today (i.e. conceal the neglect) because the state certainly has the power to take their children away. Historically, it’s reponsible adults that have interceded to stop irresponsible adults from abusing or neglecting children. Tragically, this doesn’t happen today because everyone assumes the state will. The state absolves extended families and other concerned citizens of that responsibility. In fact, it grants itself a virtual monopoly on dealing with such situations, but unfortunately it usually does a lousy job.