Surely you can’t mean to suggest that parents don’t have the right to dictate what’s good for their children. A new born baby has no option but to rely completely on someone else to know what’s good for them. Even an older child has to rely on a parent or guardian to some extent. Only when a child is of sufficient age to be able to declare that they wish to live outside the protection of their parents, and to be actually able to do it, can it be said that they have become an adult. It’s a this point, and not before, that a person cannot be told how to live their life.
Exactly.
“Surely you can’t mean to suggest that parents don’t have the right to dictate what’s good for their children”
That’s exactly what I’m saying. And no, I don’t have a solution or a prescription as to how libertarian parents should raise their children.
But, the fact that I don’t have solution does not mean that I’ll refrain from point out what I think are flaws in the system. I notice for instance that nobody is adressing the link between the authoritarian family and authoritarian government…
I’m not familiar with the treatises referenced above, so maybe what I’m suggesting is already refuted there, but I would think the immediate difference between arguing for an authoritarian family but against an authoritarian government is dependent on how much difference you see between a child and an adult. A government of adults trying to rule over other adults is not equivalent to a situation with an adult directing a child. If a child is in danger of eating something that could harm or kill it, this is not the same as an adult doing something dangerous that they have consciously chosen to do. In the first case, proper stewardship of your parental responsibilities would cause you to impose your will on the child and keep the bottle of bleach out of their reach. In the second case, you don’t have any right to keep the person who wants to drink some bleach from doing it, provided he/she is not imposing harm on someone else in the process.
OK, let’s look at this. The authoritian family. From the perspective of adults in the family, the family association is voluntary. Any adult is free to leave the family, and thus disavow its rules at any time. A wife can leave her husband or vice versa. If an adult family member is prevented from leaving and forced to comply with its rules, that violates the natural law. I assume you don’t disagree.
Your problem seems to be that libertarianism does not allow children in the family to disobey its rules and that this is therefore coercive. But it’s not. Consider that while the child is present in the home, it is on the property (in this case the real property) of its parents. Under libertarian philosophy, any property owner is free to dictate the rules governing their own property. If you come into my house, you follow my rules. If you don’t like it, you are free to leave. So the question then becomes when is a child free to leave? The answer is at any time. The parent may persuade the child to stay or implore him to return, but every child regardless of age must be given the absolute right to run away if he so wishes. If he does, he has demonstrated his complete right of self-ownership because at this point he has demonstrated it in nature. So you see so long as a child chooses to live in the home, he must follow the rules. But it’s not coercive because he’s free to leave at any time, and thus disavow those rules. When he does so sucessfully, we call him an adult.
So, a parent uses coercion against a child to prevent him from being harmed.
And a government does the very same thing with its subjects
It seems to me that the government libertarians so dislike, and the family, both operate on the same principle ?
Drugs are banned to ‘protect’ people. Seat belts are mandatory to protect people, welfare exists to protect people, etc, etc
No. Families are a form of voluntary association.
Its also important to understanding that what Leonidia is talking about only applies to infants or the very young. Children consent to parenting by choosing to live with their parents. If children do not wish to remain with their parents they can choose to live with anyone else willing to take them in, any voluntary relationship. Infants are not capable of expressing consent(in words or actions), this is the case where parenting rights might be “homesteaded” because an abandoned infant can not consent to be raised by anyone. The child would become a “trust,” not unlike a family fortune without any heir old enough to manage it.
I have many of the same conclusions that you do, but I greatly differ with you over the definition of terms. Hopefully I’ll be able to explain that my distinctions make a huge difference.
Firstly, there is your defintion of the word ‘right’. Rights and indeed all laws within a free society serve only to promote justice. Thats it, nothing else. There is no morality involved. Justice supercedes morality. Indeed it is very dangerous to try to make laws ‘moral’ or philanthropic, because this morality almost always comes at the expense of liberty and this philanthropy is virtually always false.
Secondly, I have a very big problem with the fact that you define a right as a claim. Defining rights solely in the affirmative use of them is extremely dangerous. Rights are a choice. Whether or not a person chooses to excercise a right does not determine whether or not they justly possess it. Only if a person misuses a right do they forfeit it. Simply choosing not to excercise it does not mean that it can be taken from them. If you do believe that rights can be taken away from a person because they do not exercise them, then what you are in fact describing is an obligation, not a right.
For instance, a person has the right to bear arms, if they choose not to own a gun, can someone then force them to own one? Have they forfeited their right because they havent chosen to own a gun? Of course not. A right is a choice, and therefore the right to bear arms implies that a person also has the right NOT to bear arms. This is why simply not using property or vacating it does not invalidate your just claim to it. A parent can be stripped of their custodial position over a childs rights if they are beyond a reasonable doubt not acting in the best interest of the child. This is because by taking on a childs rights they are agreeing to use them in the best interest of the child. This is the condition of their custodianship (i dont know if thats a word). It is because they have violated this condition that they can be stripped of their parental rights, not because they havent exercised the rights.
Also, nowhere is there greater confusion over the definition of a ‘right’ than in the case of the right to life. The right to life implies a right to death, therefore, suicide, attempted suicide, and voluntary assisted suicide are all just. Simply because a person believes that suicide is immoral does not give them the right to strip another of their rights. A right is a choice. Additionally, those who are against abortion rights often call themselves ‘right to lifers’. This is an enormous perversion of the word right. Firstly, a fetus cannot possibly choose whether or not they want to live, therefore, how can fetuses have rights? Secondly, this claim of a moral duty to prevent pregnant women from aborting a pregnancy obviously comes at the cost of the mothers right to possess her own body. The ‘right to lifers’ would be much more appropriately called the ‘obligation to lifers’.
The difference is that a child does not have the capacity to accept or reject a risk. By their nature, they are unaware of it. Whereas with government, it’s not as if by virtue of being in government that you gain access to some higher level of being where you can see and understand the nature of the universe in a way that mere citizens cannot. If indeed there were some difference like that, perhaps the argument would have merit.
As I said before, if you can’t recognize any difference between a child and an adult, then you won’t accept this argument.
Now if the child who was trying to get at the bottle of bleach spoke up and said something like, “Father, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you must respect my right to self-determination here, and I am fully capable of making these choices for myself. Please cease your coercive actions against me immediately.” Now, assuming you didn’t freak out and think you were suddenly transported to a bad remake of The Omen, there’d at least be good reason to treat what appeared to be a child as a self-determined adult. But generally children do not demonstrate any such capacity.
So a government could exist so long as it only tells people who do “not have the capacity to accept or reject a risk” what to do?
Your logic is broken. Parenting is justifiable because of the nature of the relationship, not the nature of children. If parents are allowed to tell children what to do simply because children are stupid then any adult could tell any child what to do. Obviously that is not the case.
Parent/child is a voltunary relationship just like employee/employer or husband/wife. Child do not have to listen to what every adult tells them, because they do not have to listen to any adults. But children do choose to listen to their parents(for the most part) because they enjoy living in their home. Unfortunately, today the State trys to tell children that their parents own them.
I was arguing more generally that the treatment of children by adults cannot be a legitimate argument to justify how adults treat other adults. You’re taking my rejection of a general premise to be an endorsement of a particular opposite. (can’t remember what the technical term is for that rhetorical maneuver.) So I’m rejecting the specific analogy “parent is to child as government is to adults in general” because government is composed of adults, whereas parents are not indistinguishable from children.
There are some cases where any adult can tell any child what to do, and I gave a specific example. You see a child pickup a gun (ignore how they came to be in that situation for the moment), or as I mentioned before, about to drink some bleach, etc. You are not the parent of that child. Are you suggesting it’s wrong for you to coerce the harmful thing from the child because you don’t have the appropriate ‘relationship’ with the child? I’m not suggesting you should be compelled to keep the child from being harmed, but I don’t understand why you’d object to someone else who did just because they weren’t the parent. Perhaps you could explain the logic of it to me, but it doesn’t make sense as I’m reading you. I could be misunderstanding your point.
In general cases, though, I agree that the relationship does have a place and importance, but I don’t see it as being as symmetric as you do. (more on that below)
At what age are they entering into a voluntary relationship exactly? Not from birth certainly. Would they have to speak first, or can they give non-verbal consent? I understand that it would be wrong to think of children as property, so I’m not totally against what you’re saying, but in practical terms I do not think it makes sense to think of children as simply underdeveloped adults who enter into contracts with people for parenting duties. If a kid voluntary gets into a bad guy’s car because he offered them candy, we don’t treat that as a voluntary relationship that we have to respect. Perhaps you disagree, but that seems a bit unrealistic.
But there are different kinds of rights. The rights to which you refer are inalienable rights or natural rights. i.e. rights that cannot be taken away. I have the right to my life, my liberty and my property. No disagreement there.
However, the word “right” can also refer to alienable rights such as contractual rights or rights of use or custodial rights. It was in this context that I was using the word “right”, which is precisely why I was careful to define it beforehand. So, I have the the inalienable right to property that I own, but I lose the right to use that property if I transfer the title to someone else. Two different meanings of the word right.
However, since most people here when they see the word “right” assume it to refer solely to an “inalienable right”, perhaps I should have used the word “claim” instead. Would that have satisfied you?
If you vacate your property or abandon it, it may be claimed or “homesteaded” by someone else in which case you very definitely do lose your claim to it.
Wow, are you implying that if a person is incapable of expressing a will to live, they have no right to life? How about the mentally impaired?
Don’t disagree with you there. This is why the “right to lifers” are wrong. It’s because the mother’s body takes precedence over the fetus and not because the fetus is incapable of expressing a will to live.
To say that coercion is legitimate because it’s needed to prevent children from being harmed sounds like an utilitarian argument to me.
If utilitarianism is valid, then I don’t see why it’s not OK for the state to use coercion in order to prevent its subjects from being harmed.
No, I don’t see any fundamental difference between children and grown-ups. Not from the point of view of individual rights at least. .
I’m not saying that if a child is about to drink poison, he should be allowed to - It would be silly to say so.
What I’m saying is that the claim that parents have the right to educate their children as they see fit is wrong. For instance, is it OK for a parent to indoctrinate his children with ,say, this or that revealed religion ? - I’m not saying that this indoctrination should be prevented, yet I’d like to point out that this is indoctrination. - I’m sure there are other examples of parents being a harmful influence…
Firstly, on an entirely unrelated note, do you know why all of my posts come out as a paragraph? I skip lines and seperate the posts into paragraphs when I’m writing them, but when I post, it doesnt show up that way. I would appreciate any advice you could give me.
Now as for other matters…
I would first point out that you didn’t address your use of the word moral in your definition of the word ‘right’.
Also, your questions make it seem as if you didnt read my full post, rather just the first sentence. I’m not sure how you’re question over the use of the word claim instead of right circumvents all of my grievances over the word claim.
I dont agree with you that there are different kinds of rights. I’m not sure that the terms inalienable and alienable are all that helpful. For instance, you are correct in observing that if a person violates a contract then they lose ownership over any rights that the contract may have given them. However your example of transfering ownership of property to someone else does not make your right to that propery any more alienable, being as it is that by transferring ownership of the property you are forfeiting any right to it altogether.
Here’s my question though, you would say that a person’s right to do as they please with their body is an inalienable, natural right? Am I correct that you would say this? If you would say that, I would point out the following. If you use your body to violate someone else’s rights, they are intitled to use force to stop you. Or in other words, you have forfeited your right to do as you please with your body. This is because you have violated the terms of society, of the larger social ‘contract’ that we live by. Therefore, how is your right to your own body any more natural or inalienable than the rights that you would call ‘alienable’.
And lastly, I took issue in my last post with the fact that you were claiming that people forfeit there rights even when they dont violate the terms of ownership. For example, you said that if a person is not using their property, another person can justly claim ownership of the property. But according to what contract is the original owner required to use the property? What have they done to warrant the forfeiture of their rights?
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If I’m not mistaken, according to the Anarcho-Capitalist understanding of property rights, an individual is by no means obligated to use their justly owned property in order to retain ownership over it. What you have described sounds exactly like the practice known as “squatting”. You are in essence arguing the libertarian socialist position on property.
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Yes, I believe I am arguing that. In the case of the mentally impaired (and this only pertains to the severely mentally impaired), they do not possess the right to life. However, the fact that they are an individual who is alive in society means that the right to life for that individual does exist. The mentally impaired individual does not retain active ownership over that right, because they cannot use it. Therefore, just as the case of a parent with a child, another individual can claim custodial possession of the mentally impaired individual’s right to life.
The case of abortion is much more complicated. If a person believes that rights are granted to human beings at conception by a deity, then there are rights that pertain to a fetus. However, since the fetus cannot excercise its rights, another person may claim ownership over these rights. The person with the most just claim is of course the mother. However, this still leaves the complication of precisely why a woman does not have the right to abort a pregnancy. The only way a person could argue that they have a more just claim to the fetus’s right to life is if it is believed that the fetus would unequivocaly choose to live if it could give its consent. Therefore, a mother who chooses to abort the pregnancy forfeits her custodial claim over the fetus’s right to life because she has violated the terms of her custionship (if thats actually a word). But of course it is very difficult to argue that a fetus would unequivocally choose to be delivered.
Now, if you believe as I do that rights are derived from the individual’s existence in society, then abortion rights become a far less complicated issue. So long as the fetus remains inside the mother’s uterus, and is not an individual who is physically in society, the fetus is virtually dependant on the mother and is within her body, and therefore the mother can legally treat the fetus as if it is any other part of her body. In this case, there are no rights in existence that pertain to a fetus.
“Firstly, on an entirely unrelated note, do you know why all of my posts come out as a paragraph? I skip lines and separate the posts into paragraphs when I’m writing them, but when I post, it doesn’t show up that way. I would appreciate any advice you could give me.”
Some browsers don’t format the html right in the message section. Like Safari. You have to manually put in (br) or (p) to get a paragraph. Switch to Seamonkey or Firefox and there should be no problem. Speaking from a Mac perspective. Don’t know about Windows.
Moderator please fix!!
I have to disagree somewhat with what you’re saying about the family. I would argue that the family has the capacity to be the most direct form of tyranny, much more direct then the state could ever be. For as bad as the state is, and it certainly is bad, parental authority is much more direct. One’s family is literally right there standing over your shoulder, while the state is at least somewhat physically removed from the individual. Parental authority is argueably even harder to escape than state authority.
Many families are far from voluntary associations, they may very well involve unchosen positive obligations and the threat of force to enforce them. Many parents use fear and guilt to control their children. While I essentially agree with Rothbard’s stated views on how children gain their rights as they mature, it nonetheless has some potentially ugly implications for allowing extreme control of people by their parents before they mature into adults. I also don’t think that all spousal relationships are genuinely voluntary associations, for some involve the threat of force.
I tend to take the Molyneuxian view that people should choose to actually completely disassociate from their families of origin if they are miserable hotbeads of unchosen obligations. There is no rational reason for an individual to be obligated to bend over backwards for their family members if their family members do not actually value them as individuals or possess any genuine virtues.
The rise of the state could be seen as coming directly from the family. A tribe is nothing but an extended family, and the heriditary nature of many monarchies suggests an obvious connection between the state and the family. The progression could be seen as being family —> tribe —> monarchy —> democracy and so on. Another point is that people’s ideological support for the state could easily be seen as stemming from their percieved need for parental authority.
Sorry if this post is derailing the thread.
Yurp. Thanks for your help. Turns out the formatting problem was caused by AOL. Switching to Firefox did the trick.
I don’t believe I ever used the word “moral” in my definition of the word “right”.
Your grievance seemed to be over the use of the word “right”, which is what I tried to address.
I have a right to my property, i.e. my body, the fruits of my labor, things I appropriate from nature etc. You can’t take these things from me. I have an absolute right to them.
On the other hand if I rent property from you, I might have the right to use your property under the terms of a contract, but this is a different kind of right, in this case a contractual right. Or if I have custody over someone I may speak of a custodial right. However, these are not absolute rights because they’re dependent on fulfilling some obligation.
Your property right in your body is inalienable, but that doesn’t mean you can violate another person’s natural rights. If you do, they are entitled to self defense, not because of some “social contract”, but because all natural rights must be similarly applied. So yes, another person may legitimately use force against you, but only if you violate their natural rights. Your right to your property is absolute, except in cases where you have aggressed against another. That’s the only exception.
If a person claims unowned property there is no contract. They make it theirs by using it. They homestead it. However, if they fail to use that property it returns to nature, and it can then be claimed by someone else. “Failing to use” does not mean, for example, leaving your house to go on an extended vacation. It means abandoning the property altogether such that it is obvious that it has returned to its state of nature.
I refer you to my earlier answer. I am certainly not advocating squatting. As for your assertion that I’m arguing some sort of libertarian socialist position, that’s nonsense.
Of course they do. A mentally impaired person has an absolute right to life, just like every human being. They possess this right. No one else does. Their right to life cannot be taken away or given to someone else. It belongs to them and them alone. They cannot be killed. This does not mean that they have a right to be fed, clothed etc; but no one can take their life from them.
Nonsense. They’re alive aren’t they? They’re using their life.
No. A person can have custodial rights over the individual. But they emphatically do not have possession of the individual’s right to life. We get back to the fact that these are two different kinds of rights!
I would be happy to discuss abortion, but I think you should start another topic.