Certainly a three year old can reason. He can solve a myriad problems.
I meant the degree to which I should respect that decision changes with age. If my one year old wonders away from me, the chances that it really wants to “leave home” are close to nill. If my 5 year old goes off in a huff saying “I’m leaving” after I refused to let it have more ice cream, then I may think “ok, maybe they do genuinely want to leave home at this precise instant, but they’ll probably have changed their minds within ten minutes”… then if my 15 year old leaves in a huff saying “I’m leaving” because I wouldn’t let them drink alcohol, then I may think “Hmmm, this time they may really mean it”. You see there is a progression of my changing attitude with the age of the child. Its doesn’t suddenly flip from one thing to another on one particular day.
Maybe I should have said I’m not a fan of the philosophy that appears prevalent on this forum that says that it is meaningless to attempt to make judgements about peoples motivations to act. i.e. that the act itself reveals the favoured state of the person performing the act and there is nothing more that can said about any mental processes involved.
[:D] .. if that happened then I’d think, “damn, I’ve made a mistake”… but it could happen the other way round… I could grab the guy forcefully, he then tells me he’s an undercover cop who’s chasing a murderer (whom I never saw) and my delaying his chase allowed the criminal to escape. The cop was fully aware of the other car and had correctly judged that there would be no collision.
Economics is value-free. Conscious living isn’t. People here still make value judgments about how other people act. They just say that economics itself isn’t a normative science. It doesn’t tell us to lower the minimum wage. It just tells us the effects of such a policy.
We can still make value judgments and infer the state of mind of a person from the way they act. But when we do this, it has nothing or very little to do with economics.
And you just proved either the child can choose to leave or the child cannot. There is no progression. At 15, the child can choose to leave, permanently. At 5, the child probably cannot.
Agreed. I guess the point I was trying to make was that there is a difference between the everyday rules you might have for a child and the split second descisions you might make in an emergency.
I wouldn’t make a “rule” that my kid can’t go in the road, but i would certainly grab the same kid if I saw them wandering in front of a car. Instead I would explain to the kid why they shouldn’t go out into the street.
I don’t think most people want to hear this but, the degree to which you should respect your childs decision should reflect the quality of your parenting, not the childs age.
If your kid decides to leave at age X and they are unprepared to survive without you, you have failed as a parent.
If your kid decides to leave at age X and doesn’t understand the consequences, you have failed as a parent.
If your kid decides to leave at age X and you have to physically stop them, you have failed as a parent.
None of these means that you are a bad person, are immoral, suck, etc… But it does indicate that you could have done a better job of parenting.
If you are an anarchist, bring them up according to the anarchist way, whatever that is (and I am sure there is some anarchist authority you appreciate that will show you the proper way)
If you are you, you can bring them up your way, asses the situation and act accordingly.
First of all, a child’s ability to reason is irrelevant to whether they have basic negative rights to not be raped, murdered, etc. This is relevant to the issue of potentiality, the sleeping man, person in a coma, etc.
Second, see the paper by Long on rule-following. Does it matter, legally or otherwise, that the man passing you on the street is a philosopher king and can ratiocinate about property rights? No, it just matters that he follows certain grundnorms and doesn’t slash your throat or whatever. Infants don’t have many problems following this rule and thus retain basic negative rights, generally, in practice.
All of this is covered in the thread I linked and there doesn’t seem to be much point in repeating it.