The right to abandon & neglect children

Economics Political Theory
101

Nathyn,

I haven’t read every post, but from what i have read, my perspective is you put up a valid fight and take some unfair abuse well. I think what you said here,

“Someone else gave a good justification, though: When a person creates a child, they create the very situation of dependence (“life”) which makes the child vulnerable to aggression [or simply death]. Until that child is capable of defending [and caring for] itself, [or the parent can find another caretaker,] the act of having children and aborting them (in the late term) or neglecting them is itself a form of aggression, just like throwing a [/stowaway, i think an invited passenger is a more appropriate analogy] into the ocean and expecting them to swim [because the invitation has been arbitrarily and unexpectedly taken away].”

I think Rothbard had a blind spot to the question of voluntarily accepted positive obligations, in respect to parents and children. Stephan Kinsella addresses this somewhere on lewrockwell.com; if i happen across it, i’ll post the link here. But the upshot is, your moral intuition is correct. It is more than merely immoral to allow your child to starve to death on a whim, it is wrong from a pure Rothbardian property ethic as well.

So I’m with you.

But Rothbard, like us all, was only attempting to apply consistently his understanding of a correct property ethic to the parent – child relationship. If he were perfect, and got everything right, he’d not have been human.

102

The ‘abuse’ is not based upon a single thread. Perhaps before passing judgment, you should your due diligence. I think the issue many of us have with Nathyn is that he’s obviously intelligent, but seems incapable of forcing himself to examine his unexamined assumptions and inculcated biases, and seems unfamiliar with basic tenets of logic and debate, and so he often mounts baseless and illogical attacks on otherwise innocent threads that send them off into the weeds.

103

Maybe this is true, and i have missed something important. But he has a valid and logical dispute against Rothbard’s pretty clear “the parent is within his right to let his child starve” ethic, which i have not seen a persuasive defense of here - which again, perhaps i missed. Or maybe this list is in agreement with the initial thrust of Nathyn’s argument, and the debate broke off to something tangential that i missed.

To sum up what I have seen of this “debate”. Early on, Nathyn quoted Rothbard:

“Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights.”

To this post, he was responded to with (non-)answers such as “I see no problem with Rothbard’s position”, and non sequiturs such as “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?”, “The right to do nothing does not correlate with the right to drop a child in the wilderness against his will”, and kind requests to “Please, just leave”. Finally, the ultimate demonstration of reluctance to engage in the meat of the question: “My argument? I haven’t made one on this topic,”, and then a further ironic and tangential misdirection “Big on straw men arguments aren’t you?” Good one. LOL!

Grant’s sensible contribution should have been a cue to the list that in fact Nathyn’s question had at least some merit and warranted some cool-headed debate. But instead, the gist or theme i got from most comments was to the tune of “read my lips - parents shall not be slaves of their children – and stop attacking my Murray Rothbard”. And yet the Rothbardian answer to Rothbard’s own error is simple. The parent voluntarily acted in such a manner to make the child’s life dependent on the intervention of the parent. The child’s dependence is caused by the parent, therefore the parent has voluntarily taken on a positive obligation to care for, or find care for that child.

If the list has already made an argument against this position, then I missed it - sorry. But judging by how the discussion got dismissed and scuttled before it really got started, and turned instead into a personal attack against the one bringing up the issue, I doubt it.

104

My problem with Nathyn wasn’t so much the substance of his argument, as I already mentioned I agree that it is logical that positive obligations arise to children (I’ve argued this before on the Austrian Forum), except were they are not voluntarily conceived. It was the way in which he misrepresented (I doubt unintentionally) Rothbard’s arguments and resulted to petty trolling to get his point across.

105

Best Post in this thread so far.

106

Do apes or any other animal have a medium of exchange? Do they trade? And by trade, I don’t mean “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” e.g Vampire bats sharing blood.
Not really sure if this makes a valid point, but I thought this might be a difference in kind rather than degree.

107

IIRC rtr tried to use that argument once on the Mises blog, but I don’t quite recall how he phrased it; he brought in the notion of division of labour. He’s on this board, so maybe he can illuminate us.

108

Then you, unlike he, will certainly be capable of justifying social slavery through the means of chaining a parent to a child they may not wish to have anything to do with.

109

I’ll refer back to my earlier comment that if you can’t exclude chimps from human status you’ll have a hard time excluding anything. Once you accept chimps you must accept all of their chimpness and it becomes part of the new definition of human-ness, because I dont see much room for compartmentalizing chimpness and humanness in a single entity. So once chimpness is incorporated it’s easy to find the next species that most closely approximates a chimp. From there you can go to the next species. I dont know how gradual the available ‘devolution of species’ is, but I’d imagine someone creative enough could eventual encompass every particle of the universe as possessing rights. To me, this is part of the morality problem w/ the Theory of Evolution. If kind doesn’t produce its own kind but instead 99.99999999999999% kind and a lower and lower percentage w/ each offspring, then its an endlessly slippery slope when trying to apply absolutes.

110

Yes, the justification is in action, and the knowledge of consequences, and the fact of property damages. If you act in such a way that causes a person to require your assistance to avoid property damage, then you are ethically constrained to provide that assistance, or else you are liable for the damages. It’s pretty straight forward. The child did not ask to be put in a position of dependence on the parents, the parents put him in that position.

If you run past a person and bump him, a non-swimmer, in the water and he starts to drown, you cannot just shake your finger at him and denounce him as advocating slavery when he demands you help him out of the water and save him from drowning. Slavery is not part of the question; the question is who is responsible for his drowning, if you do not help him out?

111

They engage socially on some level as we do. Their difference is one of incremental behavior, not categorical ontology.

Ding ding ding! I’m not the only one to realize this after all. This is the Problem of Application. It’s nearly impossible to reasonably justify the application of diametrically-opposed principles (obligation vs non-obligation) to two entities which, as you said, are virtually identical in substance and detail.

112

From page 1 - I frankly do not see this response from allixpeeke as a ‘non-answer’ - in fact, I think it was exceedingly substantive:

Later, Nathyn makes one of his ‘meritorious assertions’ - the sort which in your eyes “warranted some cool headed debate”:

Of course, nobody had said anything like that. It’s a standard TROLL tactic intended to provoke, which, IF you had bothered to do the due diligence I suggested, you’d know. But you still haven’t it seems.

At any rate, pazlenchantinrocks, provided yet another thoughtful response:

It’s interesting to note that, in this case, your hero Nathyn was the one who hit the provocation button first - and yet you chose to ignore that and try to make pazlenchantinrocks’ response seem to be the provocative one - without providing the proper context. That’s quite dishonest of you, IMO.

I don’t see a hint of “read my lips - parents shall not be slaves of their children – and stop attacking my Murray Rothbard” in either of these substantive responses, which balance some of the more intemperate ones nicely all things considered. So it seems your analysis of the posts in this thread is highly selective in nature, and thus your characterization of it is skewed. This would seem to indicate an agenda on your part.

You don’t have to dishonestly mischaracterize the thread if you want to jump in on Nathyn’s side. You’d be better off just jumping in and using logic to support your position.

113

Actually, apes are reknowned for their eagerness to trade - ask any zookeeper who leaves his broom in the chimp cage. The chimps immediately seize and hold the broom until the zookeeper proffers an apple or banana - at which point, the chimps initiate a trade. Within the species, chimps can and do trade just about anything for sex.

As to a fixed medium of exchange, no. But then, there are innumerable barter economies in the history of human culture, so if you disallow the chimps on this, you gotta disallow an awful lot of humans as well over the last 200,000 years or so.

114

So can a 2 yr old chose to have sex? Can they chose to drink poison? I know you offer economic incentive as a way to reduce such acts, but what if people paid money to watch these things? I mean, a cup of poison could be placed w/i someone’s home and a child could and probably would chose to drink it.

115

First of all, I’m not sure how your response ties into my post. My point in that post was simply to try to ‘recharacterize’ this thread more accurately. What does this have to do with toddlers having sex???

There have been several posts that have noted the appropriateness of a trusteeship type of arrangement. Others which noted that it is the current system under which children are treated as, in essence, slaves or animals. Others have noted the difference between legality and morality, and still others have noted that no matter what the legal framework, parents will still love and protect their children because evolution has equipped us thusly. These are worth going back and reading if you have not done so.

116

sorry. i didnt mean to submit that and your comments. theyre obviously not very related. :wink: sorry. made a mistake.

117

No worries - those are common questions to ask, and good ones to understand the answers to. Check through the thread, and see what you can glean. Obviously, different people here have different views on the subject. Personally, I think that no matter what the approach one takes to it, the worst one is to leave it in the hands of the State. A free civil society will develop mechanisms based on voluntary action that will be far more effective (and ethical) than State coercive ones. Just think of all the horror stories you have heard about state government child protective services agencies and their failings. The State is a bureaucracy, organizationally speaking, and there are some things that a bureaucracy - by its nature - is simply unable to do well. Some people seem to think - for the life of me I cannot understand why - that government is some sort of magic wand, which can do just about anything asked of it. This is a faith based belief, unsupported by any rational argument, as far as I can tell, and it gets us into all sorts of horrible situations.

For example, if you restrict a bureaucracy to filling potholes and changing burnt out street lights, things will probably go pretty smoothly - these are things it can do relatively well (not to say that private sector could not do better, of course) - but when you ask a bureaucracy to take over in human areas - dealing with abused or neglected children, say, or dealing with the issue or poverty - you are asking for real trouble.

118

i suppose for it to be a difference it would have to be something which was inherent in our nature. So I think my point was as retarded as saying…“Do Chimps pay taxes?” ; )

119

No, the actions are not direct actions damaging someone’s property rights, they are actions in effectively doing nothing - including not damaging someone else’s property.

You’re still assuming positive obligations with this argument for positive obligations; it’s called a viscious circle.

You’re jumping logical sequences.

The action of property damage requires X to literally alter the physical being of Y against Y’s wishes.

As a parent neglicting Y, X merely does not act, at all, he is neither altering or affecting the property of Y. Whether Y needs X or not is irrelevant, X is an independent being, no authority but his own.

If you mean to say that X chose to create Y, that would be one argument, but consider Y as an individual himself. When else does Y come into individual existence but when the chord is cut?

The action of being born causes man to become man, and thus be void of any claims of social obligation from other men.

I get the feeling you’re referring to contractual obligations, but in the instance of parenthood, no real contractual obligation to act exists if it is assumed that an individual becomes an individual with individual rights and individual existence at birth. If you are proposing that individuals are not created at birth, but instead at some later date I would certainly enjoy a logical and non-arbitrary explanation of when this date occurs.

Situational damage is not synonymous to personal damage. Certainly, a being is thrown into existence involuntarily, but at inception the individual cuts all social obligations, including soical obligations to see to his prosperity.

That’s a terrible analogy. In your example the person has directly been attacked, whether it was an accident or not.

In our scenario the child has neither been attacked, nor is he attacking. He merely exists, tough luck if he doesn’t have the means to sustain himself; that’s part of individual existence, we all live and die alone.

120

"No, the actions are not direct actions damaging someone’s property rights, they are actions in effectively doing nothing - including not damaging someone else’s property. }

Procreation isn’t “doing nothing”, nor is putting someone in a position of needing your assistance for his survival doing nothing. You speak as if babies come from magic, or thin air or some third party stork drops him down your chimney in a fashion disconnected from any voluntary action on your own part. Wrong.

“The action of property damage requires X to literally alter the physical being of Y against Y’s wishes.”

This is not the only way to inflict damage. It is sufficient to act in such a manner to be reasonably expected to be the cause of property damage. To invite someone to go for a walk in the field you mined would make you responsible for the damage that ensued if they stepped on one of your mines. And creating a baby makes you responsible for its death if you do not provide for its needs.

“As a parent neglicting Y, X merely does not act, at all, he is neither altering or affecting the property of Y. Whether Y needs X or not is irrelevant, X is an independent being, no authority but his own.”

The act of procreation makes one the cause of a need, a need which if not provided results in death. And, yes not providing for the needs of one’s own child is certainly an act. And if you are confused on what constitutes action, you must go study Mises’s Human Action more thoroughly.

“If you mean to say that X chose to create Y, that would be one argument, but consider Y as an individual himself. When else does Y come into individual existence but when the chord is cut?”

There is a continuum. A new-born baby will one day be a full rights bearing individual, but in the meantime, he must develop some faculties to claim such rights. During this time, the parent as guardian must provide for the child, or he will die. And this state of affairs is due to a previous voluntary sexual act of the parents.

“The action of being born causes man to become man, and thus be void of any claims of social obligation from other men”

There is more to the question than this. Action requires purpose, awareness and an ability to use means to obtain the ends desired by the intellect. The newborn child does not possess these things. He is not an actor, and being born is not an action. He is unable to care for himself and will die without care.

“I get the feeling you’re referring to contractual obligations, but in the instance of parenthood, no real contractual obligation to act exists if it is assumed that an individual becomes an individual with individual rights and individual existence at birth. If you are proposing that individuals are not created at birth, but instead at some later date I would certainly enjoy a logical and non-arbitrary explanation of when this date occurs.”

There is no contract. There is an act of procreation which is well known to cause a life and death need for care of the child. For an elaboration of when we come to own ourselves, read Kinsella’s “How We Come to Own Ourselves” - Possible Solutions to the Dilemma, at http://mises.org/daily/2291 .

“… Certainly, a being is thrown into existence involuntarily, but at inception the individual cuts all social obligations, including soical obligations to see to his prosperity.”

Pure assertion; unsubstantiated by reason and against intuition as well.

"That’s a terrible analogy. In your example the person has directly been attacked, whether it was an accident or not.

“In our scenario the child has neither been attacked, nor is he attacking. He merely exists, tough luck if he doesn’t have the means to sustain himself; that’s part of individual existence, we all live and die alone.”

It’s not a bad analogy, if not perfect. The relevant parallel is, in each case your action was and could be predicted to be the cause of the person’s need for assistance, to save him. The child exists due to the actions of the parents. It is not merely tough luck; it is the nature of humans that he cannot sustain himself. With such an ethic as yours, we may as well concede that life is tough, brutal and short, and therefore might makes right. We are striving for an ethic beyond acknowledging that life is harsh and brutal.