Kids are People, Too (…Maybe)

The life I live between blog posts is truly stunning in its subsumption of the nonessential. What with the constant need to buffer my property against the ravages of the South Los Angeles trashscape, and my exhausting struggle to prevent the occurrence of gross and improper groin angles (PDF warning) during episodes of repetitious lower-body exertion, one would expect the upkeep of essential gastric functions to be a foregone prerequisite to facilitating my many trivial pursuits. And yet, even this simple requirement at times escapes me.

As my body waged war against the nefarious agents of a most well-disguised Trojan Horse, my mind busied itself with an essential question of libertarian philosophy last introduced in my previous post regarding prostitution. From a rights-based perspective, the Prostitution topic provides a fantastic entry point to one of my favorite (read: unresolved) philosophical inquiries: the question of whether Children are indeed People. Phrased less flippantly, my struggle is in understanding the nature of “children’s rights” (or, phrased more flippantly, “Kid Lib”!). This issue remains a key sticking point of libertarian philosophy that, when left unresolved, allows the paternalist to cloak all sorts of value-based arguments in the defense of a child’s “best interest”. At the same time, it is a subject that presents particular difficulties for libertarian thinkers, as blogger KevinCK articulates in his blog education philosopher:

“I want to briefly outline why I think libertarians have such a hard time with the “child problem.” Libertarians, I think, are good at dealing with two different ideas: people (in the sense of autonomous adults) and property. To put it bluntly, children are neither of these and are probably best seen as somewhere in between the two in resemblance…. They are not quite autonomous persons because we – except some libertarians – recognize that children lack the mental ability to make certain decisions on their own or have the type of absolute freedom we grant to adults. Nor are they property because, morally, it strikes us as horrendous to think about parents being able to do anything they would like to their children. Unlike property, children have at least SOME freedoms.”

Paternalists defend their right to live in a world without legalized prostitution on the grounds that such a society would exert exogenous pressures upon child-rearing that neither the parents nor child could escape. It is essentially the same argument as the argument from the Offense Principle, which I had earlier dismantled in my previous post. However, by introducing the complexities of 1) A child’s right to realize his potential as a rational, self-owning adult, and 2) The parent’s right to raise his child as he so chooses, we are made to contend with a much more troubling moral argument that requires us to delineate the exact freedoms possessed by children and the parents that rear them.

To do this, we must clarify the parent-child relationship. As a unique individual separate from the parents, children must necessarily be as free from coercive force as their adult counterparts, their status as self-contained agents raising them above mere chattel or living property. Even in a free society, parents have no moral or legal grounds upon which they may initiate maiming or killing of their own children, for the same reason that they are prohibited from performing such acts on their adult neighbors. Furthermore, children–being potential adults–reserve the right to decide the exact point in their development at which they may set out on their own, taking on full responsibility as an adult and leaving the household and supervision of their parents. Whether this point overlaps with the 16th, 18th, 21st, or any other birthday is inconsequential; we must recognize that the decision rests with the child to remove himself from his parents on the basis that all potential adults have the right to claim for themselves the gift of self-ownership. Note that I am not advocating the removal of children from their homes; instead, I am defending the child’s essential right to decide for him or herself when separation may occur, given that separation necessarily transforms the child into an independent agent saddled with the full responsibilities of self-ownership.

But what then of the younger child, who yet struggles with helplessness and is years away from leaving the household as an adult? These children reside upon the property of their parents, dependent on their voluntary charity in the form of “unearned” goods and services. Thus, it follows that parents reserve the legal right to regulate the child at home, so long as such regulation excludes aggressive force and interference with the child’s absolute right to leave the household (once again, an act that severs the child’s connection to his parents’ property and care, thereby absolving the parents of their right to regulate).

Such are the rights of the child; as for the parent, he or she can be understood as an amalgam of property owner and voluntary guardian.

This leaves us to decide upon the moral and legal roles of the parent as guardian, and whether that role carries with it the right to limit others from changing social norms in a manner that affects the child’s upbringing. Entering into this discussion requires a deeper understanding of how moral responsibility and positive rights are distinct yet related, and a clarification on whether either of these notions can be legitimately defended.

I leave this task, and the resolution of the original question, for my next post.