What I said actually implied that you were not using Len’s silly arguments - so it was a compliment of sorts. But if it came accros as unpolite, I apologize.
Ah, fine. You can reject it all you want. That doesn’t mean that my position can be disregarded as mere ‘opinion’ while yours have some superior status.
I, on the other hand, reject formal legalism.
Your opinion. Desireable to whom anyway ? Just another attempt to smugle personal preference as objective ‘fact’.
Len, I’m not sure that regulating carbon emissions could be justified on the same basis as grabbing a drunk who’s headed into traffic. I’m pretty sure stopping a child who’se planning to have sex could be justified on the same basis. To be clear though, I’m focusing on coercing the child, and not the person who the child wants to have sex with. I think the latter kind of case is a little more difficult to think about; I’m not sure how exactly I’d approach that argument except to say that it seems like rape in the same way that taking advantage of a seriously drunk girl would be.
If such objective definitions of basic concepts really existed then this discusion would never have started. You think that you’re going to win the argument simply by invoking a circular definition. Think again. But if you don’t want to, just don’t say that it’s me the one who is not making some effort to prove his point.
i don’t know what threat you think you see there, but there isn’t one. Any more than pointing out that I will defend myself if attacked. The only way you could feel threatened by that is if you planned to attack me. Similarly, the only way my statement above could be taken as a threat is if you plan to have improper relations with the young people of Pittsburgh.
I do think it’s healthy to point out such facts of reality, though. You’re passionately defending child abuse, at least in theory. It’s healthy to remember that crossing the line from theory to practice will have dire consequences. Assault someone from around here, you’ll promptly discover your mistake. Molest a child around here, and the same will happen.
–Len.
A child is, as a matter of objective fact, not a rational agent. An adult is, as a matter of objective fact, a rational agent. They are distinct.
The concept of rights, which are realized through rational exercise, do not apply to children in the same way that they apply to adults. “Childhood” consists of being incapable of rational exercise to some extent, and therefore not being in full posession of one’s rights. A parent is the executor-in-trust of those rights until such time as the child becomes rationally capable.
The adult’s decisions as an adult do not resemble the child’s decisions as a child. The parent, as the child’s guardian, must act as a rational agent in the place of the child. This means that the child will be prevented from doing things that it wants to do, and that in no way violates libertarian ethics.
That is not circular reasoning.
Well, if you don’t provide substantive arguments for your position and don’t address the main points of our own arguments, then we can.
I do too. I’m not engaging in it.
I’ve made arguments supporting this position elsewhere. I have a working paper, in need of revision, on my website critiquing the Kantian/Hoppean approach to praxeology and arguing in favor of an Aristotelian approach. So I won’t go into it here. I was just pointing out that we appear to approach libertarianism from very different philosophical traditions.
Of course it is.
“A child is, as a matter of objective fact, not a rational agent”
That’s a definition, not a fact. Just like Len denies the fact that children are interested in sex, you deny the fact that children act as rational actors. Sure, sometimes they don’t. The same is true of adults.
I’m consistently defending individual rights. I’d say that you on the other hand are trying to justify your prejudices and the use of lethal force - wich strikes me as a bit unlibertarian, but to each his own.
It is no less a fact than the definition of the color blue. Words have meanings for a reason.
An adult always acts rationally. They may act wrongly, in that they do not achieve the end they seek, but an adult, alert and unimpaired, is always rational. A child is not. A child, as I said before, is guided not by reason, but mainly by sense, if not by sense alone.
Both involve coercion. Except for a bit of admitted hypocrisy as regards my son, I’m a non-aggression absolutist, and would condemn all coercion equally. Recall, though, that the solution to the drunk in traffic problem lies with the owner of the road. It isn’t coercion when he grabs the drunk.
That’s a pretty good parallel, because it bridges the gap between the drunk and the child. I’d condemn you for sleeping with a seriously drunk woman. But, if you saw a sloppy drunk girl heading to bed with someone–her boyfriend, or a random stranger, would you forcibly prevent them? Of course not. Unless they’re doing it in your bedroom, of course. So for me, this perfectly parallels the suicidal drunk.
If I saw my seven-year-old going into a man’s bedroom, you bloody betcha I’d intervene. And I’d treat it as attempted rape. But unfortunately a coherent natural-law justification isn’t available (that I know of). But I’ll admit hypocrisy sooner than hand my child over to a predator.
–Len.
It seems to me that people are misunderstanding or deliberately avoiding certain valid points Juan has made. He is asking “how do you know if a child is a rational actor or not?” Perhaps this question can be answered in the field of psychology or neuroscience, but so far all I have heard is something along the lines of “they are not rational actors because they are children and children are by definition not rational actors.” Perhaps Im missing something here but it certainly seems like circular reasoning to me.
Find me ONE solid example of a child seeking a sexual relation with an adult entirely on its own initiative, and without any sexualization by, e.g., the adult in question, or another adult or older child. Then we can talk about this “right” to sleep with adults that you defend so passionately.
–Len.
Children are not rational actors because those persons who we DO consider to be rational actors do not act like children. They are defined by their rational capacity which is manifested in their action, which is wholly and undeniably, categorically different.
Red and green are both colors, and they are not the same color. Children and adults are separated conceptually by the same kind of distinction.
Juan has thus far ignored my Aristotelian distinctions between rational capacity and diminished rational capacity, on the one hand, and between capacity and how well one exercises that capacity, on the other. He has persistently mischaracterized my position as grounding rights in ‘how well one exercises that capacty’. This is obviously not my position. What you raise above is an epistemic question that is distinct from the fundamental philosophical one we are here debating, which is the basis for rights and their full exercise.
What makes it non-circular is that nobody is defining “children” by an age range. The definition of “children” for the purposes of ethical discussion is, “humans that aren’t rational actors.” Juan is arguing that by that definition, two-year-olds aren’t “children”–but he hasn’t even tried to prove it. I think it’s safe to argue that the collection of “children” is non-empty, since it contains newborns.
Implicit in Juan’s argument is the assumption that the ability to articulate consent suffices to make one a rational actor. That’s easily enough disproven: parrots can be taught to articulate consent, but they aren’t rational actors. Retarded, insane or otherwise disabled people can also be made to articulate consent by various means, but that doesn’t make them consenting. That’s the first problem with his view, and it’s major.
Another problem is that “rational actor” is not in fact a binary condition. My child was able to pick which color shirt to wear before he could talk. It would be tough to build a convincing case that a pre-verbal one-year-old can consent to sex, and it’s just plain obvious that he can’t consent to, say, lifelong slavery. Just as intelligence occupies a continuum, so too does rationality. We do our best to treat rights as unconditional, even when people are stupid or irrational, and our effort falls short when we deal with the insane, the mentally disabled, and children.
–Len.
You deny that children are interested in sex, despite ample evidence to the contrary, so I doubt more evidence is going to change your mind.
Besides, you’ve finally acknowledged that
so, I see no point in pushing you further.
That’s Mises’s definition of ‘rational’. As far as I can tell it’s valid for all humans, children included. Besides, we’re talking about morality here - aggresion. Libertarians are interested in limiting wrong actions, not irational ones.
I don’t think so. I am asking how do you know whether such diminished capacity is at work or not in this or that particular case. Please, don’t tell me again that children are diminished because they are children.
Len, the original example of the drunk entering the road was a parallel to the child’s choice to have sex, not to the adult’s choice to try to have sex with the child. If you think that it would be condemnable to stop the drunk, I don’t see how you could consistently argue that it would be permissible to stop the child. Perhaps you’d take a different view if you knew that the drunk girl going upstairs with the guy would be emotionally scarred as badly as a child would be after being molested by a pervert, but were unable to convince her of this due to her inebriated state?
In any case, I agree that taking that position doesn’t commit you to a view on the justifiability of the adult’s actions. For example, we might imagine a person approaching the drunk and trying to arrange a situation in which the drunk would let the person hit him in her car. If the drunk agreed, after being convinced by the driver, we might still say that the driver would be wrong to go ahead and hit the drunk because the drunk was not in a position of being able to offer consent. I think it would be perfectly fair to stop the driver and say, “You sick fuck; you’re going to murder that guy!” even if he could truthfully say that the drunk had given him permission, if we had reason to suspect that the driver had somehow obtained that consent due to an incapacity in the decision making of the drunk.
Hmmm… I have to think about this more.