What’s an implicit contract? And what does the concept of “obligation” mean in this case? Contractual obligation?
My question was not as much regarding the practical way to resolve the problem of neglected babies, but regarding whether a crime has been comitted. By “crime” I mean violation of natural or contractual rights.
For a minarchist society, the application of the answer would be whether to punish the criminal or not. For an anarchist society, it’s not immediately clear for me what the application is, because I am not sure what people think would happen in the anarchist society to the people whose murder victims had no relatives, estate, or anyone who could protest on their behalf.
Another point I was making (with morality issue) is what the problem with abandanment is. Why should the parents be excommunicated if they haven’t violated the child’s right?
Also, if you believe in the concept of implicit contract (and I am not saying I don’t; it’s just not clear to me), why should we go to the implicit contract between the society and the parents? How about an implicit contract between the parents and the child? For instance: when the parents willingly conceive a child, they make an implicit obligation to take care of it until he is vaible. Afterwards, if they continue to take care of him after birth (i.e., they don’t give him up), they are making an implicit obligation to the child to continue taking care of him until he is physically independently able to do so himself.
In this sense, not only neglect, but even sending a child to bed without supper would be violation of the child’s rights.
(Now, obviously, the parents are not obligated to buy the child a trip to the moon every month, because that wasn’t a part of the implicit contract.)
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’d like to point out that the notion of society accepting something cannot be the same as the notion of an individual accepting something.
I actually like the argument from morality a lot, though, because it’s really about showing people the inconsistencies in their own moral reasoning. To me, the argument from morality goes like this: “If you think X is wrong, and Y is a form of X, then logically you must also think that Y is wrong.”
Ah, I think I see the issue now. I wasn’t trying to use the second sentence in that paragraph of mine to logically support the first. Rather, its purpose was to simply pinpoint which of the child’s rights would be violated in that situation. Here’s a syllogism that more explicitly outlines my position:
(Premise) Aggression is immoral.
(Premise) Abandoning a child constitutes aggression against the child if it leads to the child’s death.
(Conclusion) Therefore, abandoning a child is immoral if it leads to the child’s death.
If someone is drowning at the beach, and you declare to everyone on the beach that you will go and rescue him, but all you do once you reach him is tread water, you’re breaking an implicit contract. This is because you declared to everyone else that you would save him through your superior skill, which made everyone else not bother. From my understanding and opinion, the implicit contract only applies when there is a third party that is discouraged (by your actions) from taking the same action, usually to help the second party.
>>Also, if you believe in the concept of implicit contract (and I am not saying I don’t; it’s just not clear to me), why should we go to the implicit contract between the society and the parents? How about an implicit contract between the parents and the child? For instance: when the parents willingly conceive a child, they make an implicit obligation to take care of it until he is vaible.
Imagine if you could bring a person into existence, if just for a day. Your action gave this entity a consciousness! How can you be obliged’ to take any further action? Similarly, if I decide to rescue someone starving out at sea, but then abandon him on the beach in front of anyone else present, why should I be the one who gets stuck with an ‘obligation’?
>>Afterwards, if they continue to take care of him after birth (i.e., they don’t give him up), they are making an implicit obligation to the child to continue taking care of him until he is physically independently able to do so himself.
So from my viewpoint, there is no implicit contract between the parent and child, e.g. after rescuing some one from sea, instead of leaving him of the beach, taking him home for a week or two, before dumping him in a public place.
One practical advantage of this is that people don’t have to be forecefully burdened with severely deformed babies. If anyone wants to look after them, they may do so themselves, but don’t point a gun to someone else’s head to make them look after an entity they gave a consciousness to.
Another advantage is that because parents have no rights or responsibilities towards children, this is the case vice versa. Incest, emotional abuse and monopolistic neglect would be rare if children had freedom of association, and could choose their own caregivers in a competitive market of family rating agencies.
Roderick Long wrote an excellent article on this subject. He concluded that A woman who voluntarily bears a child but later changes her mind does not have the right simply to abandon her child, but must care for it until she can arrange for a substitute caretaker.
Suppose that Stan is a pilot for Clouds-R-Us, a charter airline company. Now ordinarily Stan is under no obligation, enforceable or otherwise, to work as a pilot; he has a right to go on strike at any time. But now suppose that Stan decides to go on strike in mid-flight: he abandons the controls, dons his parachute, leaps out the door, and leaves his planeload of passengers (none of whom can pilot a plane) to fall to their doom. (Clouds-R-Us does not waste money on frills like copilots.) When Stan is accused of murder he is indignant: “What do you mean, murder? I didn’t kill my passengers; I merely let them die. Since there are no basic positive rights, I was not under any enforceable obligation to take positive action on behalf of my passengers’s welfare; I was merely obligated to leave them alone. And that’s precisely what I did: I left them alone. What am I, my passengers’ keeper?”
This response is clearly inadequate; but why? The answer, I think, is that Stan’s relation to his passengers is importantly different from, say, an innocent bystander’s relation to an accident victim. When one is merely a bystander, one’s failure to take positive action counts as letting die, not as killing. But it is a different story when one is not a bystander but the pilot.24 The fact that all these passengers are traveling at a high speed, thousands of miles above the ground, is not simply an interesting situation to which Stan is a latecomer. The passengers are way up in the air because Stan brought them there.
I think a better analogy for Roderick Long to use would have been this:
Suppose human beings magically come into existence onboard planes in mid-flight, where their survival depends on the pilot taking them safely to the ground. By flying a plane, the pilot takes the risk that someone may come into being during his flight. Pro-abortionists would be content with the pilot asking the newly ‘born’ person to jump off the plane, and if he doesn’t, physically kick him out the door. After all, the plane is the pilot’s property just as the womb is the woman’s body; both have the right to expel anyone they deem an intruder by any means necessary. I agree with this.
But the pro-abortionists turn the situation on its head when it comes to abandonment. If the pilot is so generous as to drop-off the newly-born person firmly on solid land, why should the pilot then be stuck with an obligation to provide him with education so he can get a job and become independent? That would be ludicrous. Of all the people that didn’t bother flying planes around and bringing people into existence, why should the ones who do be subject to force?
The child voluntarily places themselves on the flight, just as the sperm voluntarily enters the egg.
Excellent work in thinking up this analogy. Let me improve on it. Let us say there is nothing magical about human beings coming into existence onboard planes in mid-flight. Let us say this is the only way humans may come into existence and how humans procreate naturally. Instead of it being a magical coincidence they are created by the act of flying a plane, by the person who flies the plane.
The question is can the pilot who personally created this new human being of his own accord now throw him out his plane?
Sperm is not a human being. Seeing it comes into existence the moment of its succesful completion a new human being is not an agent in its own conception. (But the mother is.)
Well, in that case, why should it even be that the third party is discouraged? I make a contract with you that I will paint your sister’s house. You’re not discouraged from painting it, although you probably won’t since you’re relying on me. (In that sense, it’s no different from any other contract. If I contract you to fix my car, I won’t try to fix it myself or hire someone else, because I am expecting you to do it.)
One thing I am troubled by is the one-sided nature of this contract. In a separate thread, I asked the question: can a person obligate himself unilitateraly, such that this obligation would be binding? Some people responded that without the second party providing a consideration to the first party, the first party cannot be said to be obligated by its promise. But I don’t really see why not. After all, we don’t always say that if a contract is broken, the second party merely gets its consideration back. Sometimes we force the first party to carry out its obligation (or provide monetary compensation).
I still think, however, that implicit contract can apply even to the child —
Well, that’s the nature of implicit contract — it depends on the implicit expectaitons. If I come into your restaurant, it is expected I will pay after the meal. If you say: “Hey, come spend a weekend at my villa and eat my expensive food and drink my expensive wine” and it’s clear it’s a friendly invitation, then I am not expected to pay after the weekend.
So, when someone rescues someone else, by his actions he does not implicitly obligate himself to take care of him after the rescue.
But when someone gives birth to someone else, one could say that he implicitly obligates himself to the baby to take care of him/her, until the baby grows up and can take care of itself.
My point is: the same mechanism that one would obligate oneself to the “society” to take care of the baby is the mechanism that one could obligate oneself to the baby itself! (And the same goes for adoption: if, somehow, one can break his contract with the society by giving up the baby to another parent, one can do the same re: contract with the baby.)
The advantage of the contract-with-the-baby model is that it does not involve the implicit contract with society which does not seem to be popular with most libertarians. (One could say that by using public roadways, one is making an implicit contract with the society to pay taxes in whatever amounts the society determined to support the roadways, protect them internally and internationally, etc.)
Well, a child is certainly free to give up its contract.
Anyway, I was thinking before that the case of a child neglect is similar to a case when a person sees someone fall down with an epileptic seizure. He pulls out his gun and prevents the paramedics from taking care of the epileptic. The latter as a result suffers brain damage. Can he sue the guy with the gun? It seems funny to say that no crime was committed (except violation of the paramedics’ rights), but at the same time, what rights of the epileptic did the guy with the gun break?
The reason this example is similar to parenting is that what “parents’ rights” are is rights to exclusive care of the baby — which is the same as preventing others from taking care of the baby. For instance, my wife and I are deciding which immunization shots we are going to give to our future baby. If we decide not to immunize the baby against chicken pox, for instance, we will be effectively preventing others from doing so. So, that’s similar to the first example, except, hopefully, there will be no harm to the baby. So, when a parent exercises his rights as a parent but then does not provide for the baby, he is similar to the person with the gun.
Except, again, though it seems funny to say that no crime was committed against the epileptic, still, which of his rights were broken?