Seems like a convenient arbitrary exception Spidey added.
You are just talking semantics. Adults and children both sleep and wake up. So no, it is not a process of waking up.
What about it? If you can’t take care of yourself or do not have funds to pay someone else to do so, then you can be owned. Sorry, no one has positive rights.
Yes, if you had accumulated wealth to pay people to take care of you. If not, no.
If they are owned, I would assume so.
If logic is convenient, yes.
I said arbitrary exception, not logical. [Y]
I’m still waiting to here what so-called “rights providers” are… if there is no such thing, this argument completely falls apart.
Right, there is no substantive difference in a child or a sleeping man being unable to reason at any one point in time. We’ve gone through all of these scenarios before. Can I “own” you when you are sleeping? You say I need to wake you up. Can I trespass across your lawn and into your house to wake you up since you are not acting rationally, right just then? No, the “average adult” is afforded some legal recourse, a minimum amount of negative rights when they are asleep.
You have once again failed to justify your arbitrary distinction with regards to time.
Clearly I am not talking about positive rights. Nobody has the obligation to care for a child they find on their doorstep or the person in a coma. If they do take this role of guardian, they are obligated to not throw the baby in the dumpster or rape the invalid.
Sorry, you are a joke. No amount of false accusations will save your faulty logic.
You are not talking about positive rights; you’re talking about the loss of negative rights. No one is claiming that a child or a coma patient must be cared for. Rather, the claim is that they have the right to be free from aggression.
No it isn’t. If so, then you would claim that forcing them into a car seat or locking them in their room at night would be criminal.
The claim is that they have positive rights, that others are obligated to “take care of them”.
It’s not arbitrary.
I think this about sums up the extent of your argumentative abilities.
To everyone, including myself: Keep it clean.
From your unsubstantiated point of view. The premise you use which delivers you to this notion is what is at stake. You have yet to justify the premise.
That claim is that parents do not have the right to rape their children or rent them to others to be raped. That is a negative rights claim - children have the (negative) right to not be aggressed upon, in this case, raped. You can conflate this negative right to include the right to be free from room locking and car seats. That may or may not be a logical conclusion. It in no way transforms the right in question from negative to positive.
I’ve been reading through this thread, and I see a lot of arguing about whether or not children can “reason.” (Or rather, I mostly see evasion of this argument and silly one-liners.) This presumes that reason is an either/or, that it either exists or does not. I apologize if this has already been addressed (my skimming accelerated after the first 6 pages or so, so I probably missed a lot), but I have to bring it up again, because as something presumed it is so manifestly false and contrary to all experience that I’m confused as to how anyone would get away with such an assertion.
Reason is not a switch that turns on. It is a capacity that gradually develops, and exists in greater or lesser degrees, even in adults. Children can certainly reason long, long before they are self-sufficient enough not to require an adult’s care. They learn, they understand cause and effect, they can speak sentences with meaning. They just can’t reason as well as the adults caring for them (in most cases!). As perhaps you can’t reason as well as me, or a monkey can’t reason as well as a chimpanzee. If your philosophy requires this to be an either/or situation to be coherent, then it doesn’t matter if it is self-consistent, because it is not consistent with reality.
As an aside, I was also amused by the concept of addition being used as an example of something either understood or not, full stop, and that this too went unchallenged. Even many non-human animals understand that combining quantities yields more. Yet a mathematician or a philosopher might take an entire book to prove that 1+1=2. Yes, there are certainly greater or lesser degrees of understanding arithmetic addition.
There is nothing more saddening or devastating than mass unemployment such as exists in countries such as Mexico or India.
I have visited Asia many times on Business in the last century. Crime, family abandonment, divorce, selling your 12 year old (and younger) daughters to brothels, selling your 12 year old sons to rug weavers, and other bad things increase during these periods of unemployment. The families sell their children as indentured servants (the same as slaves) in order to feed the remaining children.
We have met the enemy and it is ourselves.
Our basic industries such as steel, computer chip manufacturing, petrochemical refining, appliance manufacturing, tire manufacturing, automobile parts manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, textiles, and etc. have been decimated and/or totally eliminated from this country by US government Free Trade policies.
I am sorry guys that I haven’t responded yet. I know to some this seems pointless but it really isn’t. That children (even the unborn or day-old) have a certain amount of basic negative rights isn’t a very hard problem. My local paper today had an article on “sexting”. It applies to that. It applies to all elderly who become too sick to care for themselves or the college kid who gets slipped GHB in Cancun on spring break.
I think that I will forego part of my discussion that I said I was hung up on. It isn’t really a problem per se, just a matter of me finding several papers I need to read up on, which will make the theory even more general and clear. This has further implications for the whole of punishment theory I think. Kinsella’s paper in the OP cites Rothbard’s paper on children as an argument against (in natura) positive rights, but it doesn’t seem to be one against those voluntarily taken on. Quite simply it would be chaos if we look at a legitimate contract as “unacceptable positive rights”.
A parent-child or husband-wife relationship need not have an explicit contract, neither does that you walk down a street, see a house, and know not to rob it. An objection from a previous thread was that I am saying what parents can or cannot do with their child, that it opens up the door to any definition of abuse, and furthermore that nobody would agree to work with private firms who would attempt to ask their clients to submit to this tyranny.
As we’ll see though, that “a parent only owns a child insomuch as they aid it in becoming a moral agent” is fairly lenient. It is simply saying that a parent may punish a child only in such a way as could be argued to be “steering them in the right direction”. Even though we might say it is not acceptable to leave “permanent harm”, I think the case can be made to allow circumcision, ritual scarification, etc. What must be separated is those things which hold for all humans, and those of cultural more or individual idiosyncrasies.
I will move ahead from here, after my next post on the charge of legal positivism and the anti-child folk’s methodological errors. Last, I want to say a bit on the post I quoted. Stranger/Spidey have not produced a valid reducio because either their starting premise is flawed or they give human beings the incorrect treatment.
Children are human beings. We then ask if potentiality is important to the thing in question, rights. If it is said that potentiality is not important, “Well then, anyone could just legally come and shoot you when you are asleep.” is a valid reducio of that position. When I have time later, I will explain how this problem is being viewed by many in the wrong way (i.e. not praxeologically).
I mentioned Piaget’s stages as at least one perspective on this. Children definitely aren’t the same as helpless infants until “the age of consent”.
Regarding your first point, I mentioned this and the paper about Wittgenstein and rule-following. People here are taking this oversimplistic view of “ability to reason = rights”. The thing is, we don’t take reasoning tests and get our “rights license”. The dull or insane or the ascetic are all granted the same right to be free of aggression, so long as they do not initiate aggression on others. It simply doesn’t make sense to not have children in a similar position.
I agree. Which is why cases need to be tried on an individual basis.
Really? Can you prove it? At what age is someone old enough to be convicted of theft or murder? Or to choose to not be locked in their room at night by their parents?
Rape implies lack of consent which implies the ability to reason. Since babies/toddlers cannot reason, they cannot be raped or murdered. They can however be touched sexually and killed.
Are parents obligated to take care of their children? If not, then what is the difference between leaving them to die in the basement or slitting their throats?
Yes, of course I can prove it, by administering reasoning tests (like IQ tests) to young children. You act as if nobody has ever done this.
If you’re asking my opinion of when someone is old enough that they ought to be convicted of theft or murder, then I would say a single cutoff point doesn’t make sense. I would hold a three year old accountable for theft or murder (how else can they learn?), just not to the same degree that I would hold an adult accountable.