Is it true that, in The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard justifies the right of parents to abandon and neglect their children, in the same sense that Spartans used to dump sickly kids out in the wilderness?
This seems rather unjust to me. Why should Murray Rothbard’s property rights matter, but not the lives of children?
And also, if freedom truly comes from the right to make contracts – and children are forbidden from making contracts – this essentially means that under anarchism, children will universally be slaves.
No matter how intellectually you put it, justifying this is downright dastardly, particularly when juxtaposed with the claim that the mere existence of government amounts to theft and murder.
This is what I meant, by the way, when I said that one has to be thoroughly dehumanized to buy into such radicalism.
It is also inconsistent, because all philosophical ethics are rooted in Humanism – the idea that humans are valuable, in and of themselves, apart from what they can be selfishly used for. If humans are not to be regarded as valuable, but are disposable commodities that can be traded away or enslaved, then there’s no reason to care about what’s right or wrong, period.
There is a vast literature on this so anything I say will not be enough to make the case, but let me say that when i first read this, I was horrorified. But in time, I began to realize that it is consistent and humane and correct that a parent should not be able to force a child to stay under his or roof and nor should the government force the parent to provide for a child up to a certain aga, say 16, as it does now. I’m quite certain that he is right that all people should be considered self owners regardless of age and should not be subject to coercion against their free will to come and go. Moreover, I think this is rightfully considered a “conservative” position: I’ve known parents who would have been right to kick out their kids early than the law the permits but have been unable to do so. Rothbard might have filled out his argument a bit more but it seems clear to me that under this system, private institutions would emerge that would do quite well without state intervention.
Why don’t you go to mises.org, download “The Ethics of Liberty” for free, and actually read it for yourself?! You’ve made quite a lot of inflammatory statements in several different posts on this site, but it’s clear that you haven’t taken the time and trouble to try to understand the arguments. Do a little reading. That’s my suggestion.
Does it specifically say ‘abandon and neglect’ or is that just an interpretation?
There are many historical and cultural examples where children were free to leave the care of their parents and chose the upbringing of others or where parents could pawn off their children on willing foster-parents.
I seriously doubt he is implying that it’s OK to dump your kids out in the woods and leave them to be raised by a pack of wolves.
Doesn’t ‘the right to make contracts’ come from the ability to freely associate with whoever you chose?
I can think of a lot of aspects of freedom that has nothing to do with ‘the right to make contracts’ like, I don’t know, the freedom not to get hit upside the head with a dead rabbit by a complete stranger.
So humans have an intrinsic value apart from their market value?
Hmm… I wonder if that’s where their inherent Freedom comes from or perhaps that could even be the basis of their inalienable rights?
Maybe, just maybe it could be that they are valuable because they possess this Freedom and inalienable rights…
The argument I’d make on this point is the same I tend to make about abortion (uh-oh, pro-lifer here!). If you cause a traffic accident (whether negligently or not), and you injure a person such that they require being hooked up to someone’s kidneys for nine months to heal (a ridiculous situation, I know, but stick with me) or they will die, I hold that you are OBLIGATED to allow yourself to be hooked up to them. Similarly, if you engage in sexual activity (voluntarily), which you know (or ought to, anyway) always carries at least some slight risk of pregnancy, and, lo and behold, a pregnancy is caused, you have created a person, without their consent, into a situation of utter dependency on you. Your actions caused their dependency, and therefore, you are obliged to provide for it, until such time as they are no longer dependent.
As much as the custom may seem horrifying it was codified in some societies.
In Finland ihtiriekko was the name gave to a child led to be lost in the woods by his/her own parents. The practice was officially illegal under the Swedish and Russian legal systems but few were ever persecuted. Gendarmes could not reach every hamlet where ancient customs still ruled.
In Japan, as usual, there existed an official procedure called mabiki. During times of famine parents could legally leave their children to die or kill them outright. Of course there were procedures to be respected: the children had to be under a certain age, the village elder had to give his consent, it was forbidden in large cities etc.
It may seem repugnant but abandoning children has always existed and, unbelievably, still exists. Different societies have different ways of dealing with them.
For example in many Catholic countries many nunneries had a special wheel where unwanted children could be left without revealing the parents’ identity. The children were cared for by the nuns and later sent to an orphanage where they were kept until a family agreed to take them in or they reached the age of consent. One of my great-great mothers was left at the wheel and raised in an orphanage. I could be a descendant of royalty for what I know…
This didn’t cost taxpayers a penny: orphans were provided for by charitable institutions or religious orders and often recieved a decent, above-average instruction. Of course it was not the Western Paradise of the Great Bliss, but it was surely better than be left to die of exposure in the woods or be closed in a cloth sacked and tossed in a river.
Of course later the State had to tuck its nasty nose in. Wheels had to go, since parents needed to be identified and punished. Children could not be risen anymore by stern but caring nuns and friars. They were “ward of the State” now or, better yet, “property of the State”: Leela’s Oprhanarium in Futurama gives a perfect description of the State-run orphanage. Adoption has also become increasingly difficult: for example in Europe it’s much much easier to adopt an Ethiopian or Colombian children than a Flemish or Danish one. It takes many years for a domestic practice to clear: even a love gesture like adopting a child has been ruined by the Modern Behemoth.
The axiom of self-ownership is essential, for without it, there would be nothing to stand in the way of Smith’s claim to own Brown. It is because Brown owns himself, and cannot alienate from himself that ownership, nor can have that ownership alienated from him by anyone else (Smith, for example), that Brown cannot ever be ethically enslaved.
This axiom of self-ownership applies to every human, regardless of age. Every child, no matter at what age, has a natural right to his/her self. Rothbard’s property rights matter precisely because children (and everyone else) should be free from coersion and force.
In short, without Rothbardian property rights, children could be enslaved!
It’s not that the lives of children don’t matter, but rather that children must be treated equally with adults. No adult has the right to force me to labour so as to sustain his/her existence. Neither, in fact, do children, no matter at what age they may be, or how wealthy I may be.
Children should be treated as equals to adults, and since Smith must abide by the “My house, my rules” rule when in Brown’s home, so too do Brown’s children. If Smith does even the slightest thing to irritate Brown, Brown has every right to demand that Smith leave the premises. Likewise, Brown has the right to demand that his own children leave the premises.
Finally, because children are naturally equal to adults, if a child wishes to secede from his/her parents and “run away,” the parents have no right to force the child to return, nor does the state and its henchmen have the right to employ force to coerce the child into returning.
I fail to see why children would be forbidden from making contracts.
Rothbard’s major flaw in The Ethics of Liberty was in implying that babies can be owned. They cannot be. He is correct that parents can sell guardianship to other would-be parents. But since children are, by their very nature, human beings, and since human beings all have the same rights vested in them as each other, a child has every right to alter or abolish his/her bonds with his/her guardians. In the same way it is our right to alter or abolish the government, a child is free to A) leave his/her guardians and seek adoption from others, or B) leave his/her guardians and set out to live on his/her own.
The fact is, under anarchism, children cannot be owned, just as adults cannot be owned–except by the self. Even if a parent said, “My house, my rules; you may not sign that contract, and if you do, you must leave here,” the child would still be free to sign the contract if he/she deemed the reward of signing to be greater than the disadvantage of needing to find a new home, just as I am free to terminate my employment with my employer.
Methinks you are confused. It is our current system which enslaves children.
Our current system forces children to attend ten years of education, regardless of their opinion on the matter.
Our current system says that children must sign up with Selective Services so that the state, any time it wants, can enslave you and force you to murder.
Our current system enslaves children to their parents. Try running away, the cops will bring you back. And unfortunately we don’t even have an underground railroad anymore to help escaped slaves make it to Canada.
It’s our current system which is downright dastardly.
One has to be thoroughly dehumanised to support the current statist system, which enslaves children, treats them as animals, and refuses to even acknowledge the validity of their contractual agreements.
The benefits of abolishing all slavery, even looking at this from a utilitarian standpoint rather than the natural law standpoint I commonly employ, are far greater than the negative consequences, both for the parents and for the children.
I see no problem with Rothbard’s position. Conversely, under our current system of statism and ageist privilege, children are treated as animals. They are enslaved (e.g. conscription), they are forced into institutions regardless of their wills (e.g. educational institutions), they are condemned and even punished for committing acts no adult would be condemned for (e.g. smoking, drinking, engaging in sexual activity), the contracts they consensually sign are treated as illegitimate, and they are forced to live with (or rather, under) people they might not otherwise choose to live with (or under) by that apparatus of coersion we call the state.
Rothbard’s position is far more compassionate than what children must deal with under statism. At least under anarchism, children are equal to adults under the law, not treated as second-class citizens or worse, not treated like cattle that can be herded, moulded, and controlled.
The choice is simple: either we treat children like equals–like fellow humans–to whom we have no natural obligations but also whom we may not violate the natural rights thereof; or, we treat them as inferiors with no rights and only a small set of state-mandated privileges which serve primarily as a tool to placate the masses so that they won’t notice the outright injustice afoot against children.
I could go on to explain why there would be virtually no instances of parental neglect in a free society, but I think that’s beyond the point here. Since you’re clearly concerned with ethics here, I’ll simply conclude by saying that the system which treats all humans as equal is by far the more ethical system over the one that treats children like a lump of clay with no sovereignty.
“Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway-freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. Superficially, this sounds monstrous and inhuman. But closer thought will reveal the superior humanism of such a market. For we must realize that there is a market for children now, but that since the government prohibits sale of children at a price, the parents may now only give their children away to a licensed adoption agency free of charge. This means that we now indeed have a child-market, but that the government enforces a maximum price control of zero, and restricts the market to a few privileged and therefore monopolistic agencies.”
So is it that you advocate the state having control over the children so they can sustain repeated abuse at the hands of state orphanages?
When you’re trying to establish the law you can’t mix in morality. They are two different subjects.
" What we are trying to establish here is not the morality… (which may or may not be moral on other grounds), but its legality, i.e., the absolute right of the mother…"
I guess you conviently missed that.
Anyway, if there was a free market in children, then why would anyone abandon their child when they can put him up for adoption and be compensated for him? The states’ rules against the free market and the states’ establishment of rape room orphanages are in many cases what drive people to toss their babies into dumpsters in the first place. A free market would solve these problems.
You’re putting words into Rothbard’s mouth. He never argued from a consequentialist position, but from a natural rights position. The book was called, “The ETHICS of Liberty.”
This was Rothbard’s essential argument. You must be mistaking him for David Friedman.
Since rights are only negative, he sees nothing wrong with abandoning or neglecting children.
Again, no matter how intellectually it’s put, it’s still inhumane.
You misunderstood what I meant. When I said, “drop off in the wilderness,” I didn’t mean to forcefully drag them there. I meant doing it without any aggression. For instance… a parent takes their child to a playground. The parents points and says, “Hey look, Johnny!” Johnny looks away.
The parent then dashes off, leaps into their automobile, and is never seen again.
According to Rothbard, there is nothing wrong about this.
And just so you know I’m not making up this because I’m some kind of crazy statist, “Libertarians For Life” agree with my analysis:
I disagree with their position on abortion, but I agree with them when it comes late-term abortions and caring for children when they’re actually out of the womb.
Translation: I cannot find any flaws in your logic (i.e. logically, children might well be better served under your proposed system, especially when one considers that evolution ensures that protection of children through adolescence remains of primary importance to the overwhelming majority of parents) so I’ll disagree based on my emotions and choose to consider Rothbard a mean and heartless person.
Not exactly. Your argument is illogical because you don’t care about human life.
If you don’t care about human life, no philosophical ethics can stand, because humans (other than yourself perhaps) are regarded as unimportant as sticks and stones. As such, why should it even matter?
If you wanted to apply this to my criticisms of Rothbard on animal rights, yes, that’s just my own personal feelings… But not this issue.
My argument? I haven’t made one on this topic, but nice try. Big on straw men arguments aren’t you? Also on asserting your intimate knowledge about what people you have never met do and do not care about, like, human life for example. This template thinking will not serve you well, I promise…
I don’t think many people pay attention to that part of Rothbard’s ethics. Having a child creates a life totally dependent on the parents. If neglected, the child will die. Its no different from pushing someone into a lake, and having them drown. You can’t say “the lake killed him, not me!”, or “the bullet killed him, not me pulling the trigger!”. Abandoning one’s child differs from shooting the child only by the length of time involved before death, and both are acts of aggression.
Obviously there were strong reasons for children to be abandoned throughout history. But we no longer have famines, or anything like that. Those reasons are gone.
I think Rothbard just made an error here (and many other places as well), thats all. He’s hardly the final word on libertarian ethics.
More ignorant posts from Nathyn; that is to be expected I suppose.
Learn, already.
I actually agree with Niccolo. So far you’ve trotted out fallacy upon fallacy, misinterpretation upon misinterpretation, lie upon lie. Alex refuted your misunderstandings already (no words need to be put into Rothbard’s mouth.) You’re neither here to debate nor to learn; only to troll. You will be treated accordingly henceforth.
I’ve noticed that it is far too easy for people to take a quick glance at what Rothbard has to say and pass it off as an “error.” I think you have to look deeper at Rothbard was actually trying to accomplish and what he has actually dug up. I doubt very seriously that he is incorrect. I suggest reading my previous post on this topic.