That one made me chuckle. An argument can be perfectly logical although the person using it does not care about human life. The term you are looking for is consistency (consistent) - to remain consistent with one’s values (for example).
Seriously, stop this Nathyn. Your presence depreciates any value a discussion may have (had).
I’m not saying, “It’s illogical, because you’re an evil person!!!”
I’m pretty calm and composed right now, to the point that I’ve successfully prevented myself from responding in retaliation to the slew of personal attacks I’ve faced.
You ignored the second half of my post above. It’s illogical because secular ethics are based on Humanism.
If you don’t care about human life, it is logically inconsistent to make arguments about ethics.
No ethical standard can deny the sanctity of human life, else there’s no real basis for ethics at all.
Yet you have not demonstrated it is against human life. You have asserted it. Arguments were given by several posters as to why Rothbard’s solution (whilst not perfect, for reasons Grant mentioned) is more humane than anything under the current system and its attendant ethical basis.
Can secular ethics include any form of sanctity? Wouldn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of them being secular? Hmmm…
That anyone responds to any of your posts at this point is a testament to the extraordinarily good nature of those on this forum.
You’re excellent at using fallacious arguments and laying circular logical traps. I really wouldn’t be surprised if you were a well placed toll or just someone with a personal vendetta against liberty, perhaps both. It’s obvious from what Rothbard said that he isn’t advocating dropping babies into the wilderness.
Legality and morality are two different things.
To understand why Rothbard makes his point about abandonment is to know the difference between freedom and slavery.
“We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a “trustee” or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult. It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child’s rights for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering him, etc. On the other hand, the very concept of “rights” is a “negative” one, demarcating the areas of a person’s action that no man may properly interfere with. No man can therefore have a “right” to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced. Thus, we may say that a man has a right to his property (i.e., a right not to have his property invaded), but we cannot say that anyone has a “right” to a “living wage,” for that would mean that someone would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate the property rights of the people being coerced. As a corollary this means that, in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former’s rights; the only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man’s rights.”
Stop. Stop. Stop.
In order to understand Rothbard you have to understand the difference between Legality and Morality. You can’t just take a chapter out of the middle of the book and pretend like you know what he means.
To say that parents have a legal responsibility to take care of their children is to say that violence can be inflicted against parents who do not meet some arbitrary standard of parenting.
It seems that otherwise liberal minded people on this board abandon all respect for the concept of volunteerism as soon as parenthood is mentioned. Rather than trying to devise a voluntary relationship that would fit inside our voluntary society, some seem to view it as mutual slavery.
And back to realty. People currently abandon their children all the time, by giving them up for adoption.
No. Parents do not choose the circumstances of a child’s existance, they most definately do not “push them into a lake”. Neglect is definately not aggression, thats the motto of socialists.
Your analogy is wrong. A correct analogy would be:
I stop a person from being hit by a truck, saving his life. Then an on looker(thats you), says that I have created new obligations for myself. Because I have caused his continued existance, I am now obligated to provide for him into the future.
You are objecting to Rothbard out of ignorance, not knowledge. The same ignorance that causes many enemies of liberty to share your belief
I don’t even give him that much credit - I don’t think it’s simple ignorance. Based on the posts I’ve seen, he seems to comb through anarchist philosophy looking for areas of potential disagreement so he can play the role of provocateur here. Perhaps this is amusing to him, or perhaps he’s a true believer that anarchism is evil and he feels he is on some sort of pro-State crusade - who knows. But in the process, of course, he ignores the vast majority of logic which is easy to interpret and rationally compelling (especially in the case of Rothbard), and so misses the nobility while searching desperately for its opposite. Instead of honestly seeking truth, he seems to be dishonestly seeking something he can readily twist into fallacy and lies. It’s sad, given the potential of the human mind, to see it used for such trivial, paltry and negative purposes when it so easily could have been an ennobling experience. Then again, maybe it still can.
You do understant that it’s intentional in order to get you either to go away or ‘play nicely with others’.
Since you have no real understanding of logic it is safe to assume that you have no idea how annoying it is to debate with someone who trots out fallacy after fallacy.
It is also (probably) safe to say that all the people that respond to you read your fallacious arguments and just start typing in response without having to research or critically think about an issue that hasn’t already been addressed by someone else before and that they are already knowledgeable about.
What exactly do you contribute? If you don’t wish to learn from the interaction with the people here why do you even bother to post ‘questions’?
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoying trolling socialists as much as the next guy but at the end of the day they at least learn something new from the experience – if nothing else the deep flaws in the socialist system as revealed by Mises.
Ah, it was a fine day that I was accused of being an astroturfer for the oil industry for advocating for a Free Market solution to the ‘peak oil crisis’…
Anyway…
Trolling as an attention seeking activity is just plain pitiful so please stop…or fully expect to face further slews of personal attacks.
Fair warning, the kid gloves are now off…
If Rothbard justifies late-term abortion, and abanonding and neglecting children, it is against human life.
He doesn’t put forth a consequentialist argument, like David Friedman, probably because it would be very difficult to prove. His argument is based in natural rights.
Something doesn’t need to be religious in order to be sacred.
For instance, for you all, liberty is sacred, but that doesn’t make Libertarianism a religion.
Rothbard says there should be no legal responsibility for parents to take care of their children, because they have no ethical responsibility.
If this is not the case, please cite where he makes such a distinction.
How don’t they? In the modern world, parents willfully create children. Early-term abortions and birth control are commonly available things. In ancient times, circumstances might be beyond the parent’s control, and might have to abandon a child (due to the threat of starvation, for example). However, these situations are very uncommon in industrialized nations.
When nothing goes wrong, parents do in fact choose the circumstances of a child’s survivability. When the unexpected happens (the threat of starvation, horrible birth defects, etc) then thats a very different situation. However, the death of a neglected, healthy child is as sure a thing as is jumping out of a plane without a parachute, and every parent knows this.
No, because the person who was about to be hit by the truck (presumably) did not wish to die. By saving his life, you fulfilled a request of his. Now, if this person was trying to commit suicide to escape the misery of battling a painful, terminal disease, and you prevented him from doing so, I’d definitely say you were responsible for his pain.
I wasn’t really trying to say that neglect is always an act of aggression. But if someone puts another person in a situation where they know (or at least suspect) they may die without their consent, that is aggression.
Do you know why Rothbard justifies late-term abortion? Giving up a child to a foster agency is a form of abandonment. Isn’t this against human life, too?
Why would it be difficult to prove? Chicagoans have argued for markets in babies based on consequentialism.
How about this: replace current system with an explicit contract system. When child is born, parent(s) sign a contract stating their intent and accepting an obligation to care for the child until the age of majority (which is a whole other topic we could discuss…). Essentially, parents do this implicitly now (i.e. it’s a given, backed up by legislation), except in the case of adoption, which already follows the contract model. If parent or parents refuse to sign, kid goes up for adoption.
Simply making it explicit and getting rid of special legislation, so it follows contract law, would fall within the parameters of Rothbard’s system of ethics, or so it seems to me. Obviously, evolution has already provided the implicit contract which works perfectly well in the overwhelming majority of cases, so worrying about people dumping their kids in the wilderness en masse is ludicrously unrealistic. Parents who are sufficiently wacked that they would do such a thing will not be deterred by legislation any more than, say, armed robbers are deterred by gun control laws. Just as repealing gun control laws would not result in en masse killings, repealing laws regarding parental support for children would not result in en masse dumping. This is sheer lunacy inasmuch as it constitutes a complete repudiation of everything we know about human nature and evolution itself. That said, it is rather common for Statists to make such idiotic arguments.
The really amazing thing is how many people actually buy such absurdities. Oh - public schools - yeah, never mind.
BTW, interesting that Nathyn has espoused support for government run welfare in other posts, and this style of welfare pays young women to have babies, which thus become simply objects of revenue generation. This actuality is abhorrent under any ethical system, so it would seem to make more sense - if one’s objections were truly about the ethics of the thing - to crusade against that (and to stop espousing support FOR such a system) than to spend time decrying some theoretical supposition based on a system of ethics which is not exactly about to be implemented nationwide. This can most accurately be described as ‘hypocrisy’ on the part of such individuals, in my view.
Child labor laws prevent children from liberating themselves from an unsatisfactory family relationship. A psychology of dependence can develop over time, resulting in even greater harms.
Now, I doubt that children would suddenly go off to start working in factories en masse, but more options would be available to young people otherwise abused by petty family tyrannies enabled by the state.
I haven’t read all the posts, and I must say Ideally I am much closer to Rothbard’s view than away from it.
But I would ask this. In practicality, most parents would choose to keep their children safe and healthy, either in a “want” based society like the current West, or in a “need” based society of eras gone by (and if the State were to be properly shrunk it would be so again perhaps). So to dwell on the cases of abandonment or abuse, you can draw whatever far flung scenerio you like, but then you should also take the opposite into account. Would you want a State based society wherein the parents are mere agents of the State in raising their children? How about the situation where immature children can make their parents’ lives hell by endlessly invoking the State at every turn? We are now much more toward this end of the spectrum than the other.
So if you’re going to paint the far end scenerio of children being tortured endlessly for pure pleasure and nothing will be done, then see the other end wherein children, via the State, run every aspect of a parent’s life from birth on, even to some ridiculous ends.
There is a reason that I had the distinct feeling that my wife and I were passing an oral/behavioral exam after my first child was born. The very hospital that WE contracted to assist in the birth seemed to be reviewing us again and again lest we prove ourselves unable and the authorities therefore would need to be called. Maltreatment of children IS unacceptable. But to default to the notion that the State is the solution is what creates the bureaucratic nightmare that is now parenthood. Don’t make your “solution” become part of the Leviathan.
If your actions are the cause that another person becomes dependent, than you are responsible to tend that dependency.
When parents create a child, intentionally or not, they have caused a situation whereby another human being, without their consent, is unable to communicate or make rational decisions for themselves. They put that human being in that situation, therefore, they are responsible for that human being until such time as they are no longer too deficient to properly care for themselves.
I think y’all on the “children have all the rights of adults” side might want to consider who you ally with. This is the same position taken by people (mostly men) who want to have sex with 8-year-olds, and frankly, I’d not be suprised if some of those who hold that position here in fact have that as one of their hopes. You only need to watch one of those “to catch a predator” programs to see how many men, from all races and walks of life, are eager for “the touch of the younger kind”.
I agree that we may need to revise our age of majority, as it’s probably too late, but I think it is unreasonable to say that a slobbering, potty-training, nose-picking little brat is capable of caring for themselves.
Which is why several people have cited Rothbard’s contention that “We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a “trustee” or guardianship kind.”
Sexual assault is aggression. It’s not inconsistent to note that children have the same rights as adults while recognizing that sexual contact between adults and young children is inherently exploitive.
Let me approach this issue in a practical sense instead of trying to justify child neglegence
If the law changes and gives you the right to neglect your children, would you do it?
It’s easy to blame it on anarchism; but when it all comes down to it, anarchism only gives you choices, it does not tell you what to do.
Humanism or not, it’s up to you. No one is saying humanistic elements are not valuable.