No, I’m actually not. I found an opening and took advantage of what was there. However, you did make a blanket absolute statement about self-ownership being a mind/body dichotomy–and it isn’t.
Now take your ball and go home.
Back to the OP.
If you own something you can do whatever you wish with it unless you aggress someone else. If you have a rule on your land that you beat your child and the child is given an option to leave thus demonstrating consent to stay if he does not leave, this is irrespective of whether the child has the means the leave. Note this line of argument is not the same as the statists “if you don’t like it leave” argument since in this instance the land is legitimately owned.
However as BP pointed out this could allow a father to murder his child if the father had this as a punishment for a certian misdemeneour. This is surely absurd.
The most fruitful line of reason, IMO, is to say that parents homesteaded the right to bring up the child since they were there first. Now the question is, is it possible to create a libertarian version of the right to bring up a child? Walter Block has an interesting argument here.
I would argue that it is outside the purvue of libertarianism. I’d make a Biblical case for this which would include being able to smack the child. Btw I believe a child has the same rights as any other human sinc ethey’re image bearers of God. The argument from rationality excludes young children and the severely disabled. Further the argument from potential rationality could include gnats and grass since there’s no a priori to exclude them.
In practice the content of the right to bring up a child would be decided by common law decided upon by competeing judges and would vary place to place.
Reading through all the responses, there seem to be 2 camps that I will summarize.
Camp #1:
Children have no rights and are also considered property of their parents. In this camp, children are ‘anything goes’. Child rape, murder, selling them, microwaving them, etc, is ok and permissable. The worst case scenario, is that other people find out what really happend and they ostricized you and cause you financial harm by not making economic dealings with you. Of course this is easily overcome with lies. “Hey Johnson, where is your kid at?” Johnson replies “visiting relatives/died of baby cancer/away at school”.
Camp #2:
In this camp, children do have rights because although they lack rationality, they will some day, and furthermore they are human beings. Parents have an obligation to protect their children… or else… something. Rationality can not be defined, so their is a basic problem with establishing when then can enter into contracts and when they can’t.
My thoughts:
Camp 1 = Hell World. Its absurd. I have a “rule” at my house, that if you sneeze you get put in a microwave for 90 seconds. So if you come to my house, you are ‘engaged’ in a contract and the NAP no long applies. Thus its anything goes, murder, rape, etc. I suppose you just need to have a sign up “If you enter this property, you are subject to my rules, enter at your own risk”.
Camp 2 = Clearly the more rational realist group. What I find lacking, is the ability to use libertarianism to justify their beliefs. I think they are mostly realists who understand we can’t be murdering and raping children and that parents have a responsibility to raise children, but have no way to tie it into their libertarian beliefs about non-coersion and the NAP. Since you can’t use laws to ensure behavior, yet they do want that behavior, they have a serious philosophical problem, and I have not seen anyone explain away. With the exception of Juan, who doesn’t want the murder and rape, but has no solution for discipline. He has no tools that parents can use to insure survivial of their children, other than ‘talking with them’ which has the horrible flaw of assuming children understand language.
Ixtellor
Um, no rights were ever “ceded”. The rights simply did not exist.
You don’t read very carefully, do you? What I’m saying with the ceded bit is that, since the kids were property, you could sell them, right? Cede the ownership to another. What I’m asking is, do the parents have to voluntarily give ownership of the child to the child for that person to become a self-owner. If not, by what right do they take ownership away from the parents? And don’t just say “they achieve reason” because that’s still a new person who is trying to claim something someone else owns.
I believe I did tie that belief that parents have an obligation to raise children to the NAP on my post at the end of page 5. Probably a concerned family member or some other person would sue the parents for damages against the child since the child does not have the means to sue for himself.
Or you could just hold their hand, idiot.
Jesus, it’s like talking to the retarded version of the Marquis de Sade.
ROFLMAO, dude!
or if the child says, dont hold my hand mummy, and the mummy holds it, then she is the marquis de sade ?
Try to refrain from insults. It just makes you look immature.
Right
No.
Because they gain the ability to reason.
Not anymore, because the other person can reason.
Can someone please tell me the ways, under Austrian theory, that ownership of property can be legitimately transferred, and then tell me how this appearance of reason qualifies under these terms?
im gonna play more with the discource ethics stance;
ownership of property can legitamely transferred in many ways, one particular way, is acceptance by an original owner of a would-be owners request to the original owner that the would-be owner will henceforth be considered the new owner
the emergence of reason within a body makes argumentation with the body possible. and if one would presume to argue with the newly rational body, either to convince it through argument that it is or isnt a 'self-owner; then one is implicity accepting the bodies ownership under new administration.
Are we allowed to make posts like this? If so I have a lot of color language I would like to start using.
Ixtellor
we are kinder to our friends than our enemies.
Not really, no. John Ess will be getting a 3 day ban if he does it again though. Same with anyone else who repeats that strategy.
When people start advocating beating defenseless children “to a pulp”, they’re going to have a major problem from me. I would say the same for child molestors and all other sadistic pieces of trash.
there isnt a single statement on this thread where anyone has ‘advocated’ the beating of a child
Au contraire.
Quote:
"If the father beats his soon to a “bloody pulp” it could be legitimate depending on the circumstances, if the father said that if the child continued to live on his property and broke rule X he would be beaten to a bloody pulp, yes, it would. "
and
“smacking is a part of good parenting”
and the coup de grace
“It is no different to a boxing ring… blah blah blah … once the child is on the parents property the father has every right to take a belt to him [if the child gets into dad’s heroin needles, for instance].”
Right, but as I pointed out before, if you carefully restrict your interactions with your slave to commands, punishments, and rewards, you do not thus acknowledge their self-ownership. I also pointed out that the removal of the tongue while they were still unambiguously property would make this task much easier. I know it’s cheap to use such an emotional appeal, but I’d like you to see the implications of the position you’re putting forward.
i apologise john, i didnt realise that Giles had advocated smacking as being good parenting. i dont agree with that.