Rothbard’s position (from Ethics of Liberty) is that parents may at any time repudiate their child, that is, refuse to care for it any longer. I disagree with Rothbard but not because I believe parents have some intrinsic moral duty to care for their children. I think Rothbard fails to investigate why the normative legal concept of parental duty arose in the first place.
It is rarely the case that both parents simultaneously desire to abandon their child. Most of the time, one or the other parent wants to abandon, most often, the male*. Hoppe has noted (can’t remember the cite, sorry) that the modern human “nuclear” family is an evolutionary innovation over our early ancestors where the costs of child-bearing and rearing were borne by the female alone or the group as a whole, rather than by the individual male and female who conceived the children. Paternity uncertainty is the primary reason for this … it is impossible without DNA sequencing technology to be certain that a particular child is indeed the offspring of a particular male. The family is possible because of the human female’s concealed fertility which essentially makes it difficult for her to reproduce with a man with better genes while accepting provenance from a more diligent man**. The family privatizes the costs of begetting offspring by placing the costs of bearing and raising children on those who benefit from the children, that is, the genetic parents of the children.
Since the emergence of the human family, the parties with vested interests in a child have become more numerous. The grandparents, uncles, aunts, and so on, all have an indirect interest in the survival of a child since that child carries a significant fraction of their genes. When a man abandons his children, he is implicitly repudiating the cost of raising his wife’s children, that is, he is pushing the burden off himself and onto her family. With the advent of the “single, working mom” this is a little less the case today than it used to be, but that is an extremely recent invention in the grand scheme of things.
The more resources which a father must expend on the raising of one daughter’s children, the fewer resources he has for his other grand-children or for procreating more of his own children. That is, when a son-in-law abandons his children, the father-in-law’s reproductive success is diminished. This fact pits these two individuals in a natural conflict of interests. For this reason, when a man abandons his children, the father-in-law is likely to be motivated to retaliate against the son-in-law, since he now stands to lose nothing if his son-in-law is dead. So, child abandonment naturally leads to disputes between in-laws and even blood relatives. It is the role of law to resolve such disputes without resort to martial contest. I believe that a robust theory of property has to take into account the particulars of human nature and, particularly in the area of family, this can become very complex. These issues have typically been handled through religious institutions, for better or worse, but what is important to realize is the material conflict of interests between the various persons involved.
So, I think Rothbard - for all his genius - was too simplistic in his treatment of child abandonment. It’s not as simple as saying, “it would be aggression to force the parents to care for a child, even if they no longer want to”. The family and in-laws certainly have standing to sue at law and it is a matter of law to hammer out who is responsible for what expenses. If we had a free market in law, precedents and best-practices would emerge that would act as a guide, permitting people to reason about and calculate the costs of having another child, of divorcing, of repudiating the care of a child, and so on. As always, the root problem is the territorial monopolization of law and the inevitable zombie law that results.
Clayton -
*Evolutionary psychology tells us why males tend to abandon their children more frequently than females, it has to do with a concept from biology called reproductive anisogamy which basically means that the female invests a hell of a lot more into a child than a male does, as a matter of biological fact (the male invests a sperm, the female invests 10 months of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, etc.) One less child for a male is easily replaced, for a female, it is a major loss. This is true of most (all?) mammals, not only humans.
**The idea is that, somewhere in our ancestral history, primate males began exchanging food for sex which began to break down the alpha-male model. But the alpha males could still beat the “provider males” by copulating with their “wives” only when she was fertile and leaving her alone the rest of the time. She benefitted by having children with better, alpha genes. The alpha male benefited by having someone else pay to raise his children. The “provider males” were all-round losers until the emergence of concealed fertility which made it impossible for a female to double-dip in this way.
