I stick by the “if you live under my roof” theory. As long as the child is dependent on the parent, the parent has full rights to determine the dependents welfare.
However, the child has certain “innate” rights that protects all humans. This includes a right to self-preservation which means the parent cannot kill the child at a whim, but can force the child to go to their room when they misbehave.
It also means the parent can “force” certain medical procedures, such as an appendectomy , tonsillectomy , or circumcision…if the parent believes it is in the child’s best long-term interests.
A child can, at any time, declare themselves “independent” and become responsible for their own actions and livelihood. At this point they become free agents and can enter into any consentual or contractual relationship that they choose.
Exactly. I would hasten to add, though, that this power diminishes as the child matures. At eight days, there’s no question of parental authority. At eight years, that’s less clear. At eighty years, the parents have no say whatsoever. The key is:
In principle, exactly. Which will never happen with a newborn, but could easily happen with a teenager. Another way to look at parental authority is to ask exactly how a child goes about “divorcing” his parents? For the newborn, it’s irrelevant, because it can’t follow any procedure. For the twenty-year-old, it’s again irrelevant, because there’s nothing you can really do to stop him moving out. But in the case of an abused ten-year-old? Clearly he has a right not to be abused, and a sensible way to express that right is to make a change of guardian. But how would that play out in a libertarian legal system? And how would the sequal play out, if the new guardian turns out to be abusive as well?
I do feel that even though maturity increases gradually there needs to be a singular moment when the entity stops being a dependent and becomes a free agent. This moment can only be decided on by the entity that is seeking free agent status.
I know you believe in a continuum, but for legal and consistency reasons there needs to be something well defined.
[8-|] Well, anarchists aren’t big on “legal” reasons–and “consistency” scares me. It sounds like making the mature ones suffer for the sake of “consistency” with a rule geared to the immature ones.
Seriously, though, I don’t see a problem with handling specific cases on their own merits. In proportion as we anarchists eschew rules, we favor litigation. Any rule based on correlative factors, like age, IQ, weight, etc., will at best be “often” right. I do think we owe our kids at least this much integrity, not to impose our will on them unnecessarily.
For a group of people to get along, whether you call that a society or not, they need to agree on certain, consistent, standards. In my example, the standard for determining when an entity is a free agent is when they request free agent status and remove themselves as a dependent from their guardians. There are no correlative factors. It can happen at any age, at any time, and by anyone with any IQ.
There would need to be some arbitration involved…the two-year-old having a tantrum and says “I don’t want to live here anymore” can’t be considered to have just become a free agent. But this arbitration can be handled in the same way that property right disputes and other criminal issues are…by a third-party that is hired by the two parties to arbitrate the dispute.
[:)] I’m all for it: in my corner of the free world, my neighbors will all be Christians, and prostitutes won’t be able to buy groceries. At least, if I can find a neighborhood like that to live in. That’s completely uncontroversial as long as the standards are “enforced” non-coercively.
There’s even room for some levels of force, for example under contractual arrangements that turn violators into trespassers. Bouncers can throw out people who dress too skimpily for family fun night at the bowling alley.
But when “standards” mean “laws that can be enforced coercively,” we need to be extremely careful. We risk opening the door to laws against anything imaginable by reinterpreting it as aggression. Remember “second-hand smoke kills”?
Another thing I am wondering about is whether an entity can be forced to become a free agent.
I do not feel that an entity is a free agent until they request this status for themselves. But can a parent eventually force their child into free agent status? Do I really want my 50-year-old son living in the basement while I pay for his room and board? Sure, I chose to create a new entity and thus bear responsibility to this entity…but that should probably have some time limit.
Then again, it is quite possible that if my child has severe Down’s Syndrome or some other major disability, I could easily be responsible for it’s welfare for several decades…perhaps even my entire life. That is something I need to consider before having a child.
My first instinct is that a human does not gain free agent status until it chooses to become a free agent, and cannot be forced to accept this responsibility by anyone else. But various societal variables would exist that would make this happen sooner-or-later for most people.
I must commit it if consensual == I will commit it regardless of consent
I’ve never understood this type of reasoning to be consistent with mathematical logic, but then again, I’m not a mathematician.
Shun the unpopular to promote liberty? This is downright interesting.
Oddly enough, I identified as a libertarian long before my research in sexology brought me to this understanding of childhood sexuality. Any ‘infiltration’ went in the other direction.
Or you’ll commit nonagression on me?
You may have credibility problems that have nothing to do with me.
This would, of course, include female circumcision? How about ritual scarification, foot binding, or tattooing? Would those only be permissible before the child can understand and withhold consent, or would you be able to force a clearly unconsenting child to submit to such practices?
Danno, amused by the joy of liberty and the sanctity of the individual.
You’re asking the right sort of question. You can authorize medical procedures, including painful or risky ones, so you obviously have some authority. You can’t kill your child, so your authority obviously has limits. How are those limits defined, given that the child is (at the start of its life at least) not a rational being?
It’s clear that a list of laws specifying age limits for every conceivable thing parents might do with their children is impossible. Trolls on this very thread illustrate that with their random examples–for example, decrying foot-binding, while declaring that a two-year-old is likely to “enjoy the heck out of” being diddled.
The interesting question, for those of us approaching the discussion seriously, is precisely what grounds justify the parents doing anything. And as a consequence of that justification, what the limits are. That’s the question some of us tried to address many pages ago, but were sidetracked by chatter from the peanut gallery.