This is a blog post on libertarian theory and child neglect. Although I run a newsletter, Children and Rights, which is precisely on issues of libertarianism and children, I consider that newsletter to consist merely in application of Murray Rothbard’s chapter of the same name, and works from other theorists that agreed with it, to contemporary issues. Hence, it is not the place for original theory, or even for talking about my own views on anything. I conceived of it this way in order to make it easier for other contributors to help me with the work, should they desire it; otherwise, they would have to accept all of my ideas, which is a difficult requirement for collaboration.
Today, Cory Massimino posted a blog post on the occasion of Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday. I have no comments on Massimino’s blog post. Massimino’s blog post, however, says that “on the legality of neglecting children, Rothbard was horribly wrong – see Roderick Long’s Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights – but not in a way that seems clearly left-wing or right-wing.” This is a comment on the correctness of one of Rothbard’s views in a blog post that otherwise attempted only to classify his views as left-wing or right-wing. This made me curious to check out Roderick Long’s essay which was linked by Massimino, and this blog post is my response to it.
Possible views on children’s and parents’ rights and duties
A word on my general orientation. I consider that there are two consistent views on children and parents’ rights and duties:
- The classical Aristotelian view, on which there is a natural link between parents and children, and hence there is both a duty of parents to care for children and a duty of children to obey parents, with the corresponding claim-rights on either side;
- The Rothbardian libertarian view, on which there is not a natural link between parents and children, and hence there is neither a duty of parents to care for children nor a duty of children to obey parents, so that there are no claim-rights on either side deriving merely from the parent-child relationship.
Whenever someone wants to defend an asymmetrical view, I regard that as suspicious, although of course, I will still listen to their arguments for their view. In keeping with the theme of Massimino’s blog post, I might say that asymmetrical views can be classified as left-wing and right-wing, as follows:
- A left-wing asymmetrical view holds that there is a duty of parents to care for children, but no duty of children to obey parents, so that children have a claim-right to be cared for but parents have no claim-right to obedience;
- A right-wing asymmetrical view holds that there is a duty of children to obey parents, but no duty of parents to care for children, so that parents have a claim-right to obedience but children have no claim-right to be cared for.
These views are equally bad, since they’re both indefensible. Usually someone who defends either of them is only pretending to actually care about rights: the left-winger is a utilitarian who only uses the language of rights because it’s rhetorically powerful, and the right-winger is a might-makes-right theorist who only uses the language of rights in the empty sense of the “right of the strongest”.
So much, then, for general remarks on possible views on children’s and parents’ rights and duties. Roderick Long’s essay defends a weak version of the left-wing asymmetrical view, applying only to parents who made a voluntary choice to have children; it is the burden of the next section to address Long’s essay.
Roderick Long’s essay
Roderick Long’s essay is long (heh) and intricate, and I do not care about most of it; I will comment only on the parts I care about. For instance, Roderick Long spends a lot of words on deciding how to interpret and accommodate a Kantian phrase, that “every person has a right not to be treated as a mere means to the ends of others”. I assume Long needs to do this in order to frame his views as standing within a mainstream ethical tradition, since he does not (within the essay) endorse any particular foundational approach to ethics, and seems to mostly be guiding himself by his intuitions about hypotheticals. My approach to ethics has a foundation, hence I do not care about that.
Portia’s Principle
Roderick Long rejects what he calls Portia’s Principle, as follows:
Portia’s Principle: [If S violates O’s boundary,] O (or O’s agent) has no right to invade S’s boundary, even if invading S’s boundary is necessary to end S’s violation of O’s boundary.
I hereby endorse Portia’s Principle, which Roderick Long rejects. In a situation where an owner O wishes to remove an invader S from O’s property, O’s action is not to be justified on grounds of any right on the part of O to violate S’s boundary in order to secure O’s own boundary, but rather on the fact that O’s action only intends removing S and merely accepts any violation of S’s boundary as a consequence. The extent to which this acceptance is to be held as morally/legally acceptable is to be left up to individual judges, who can assess the extent to which O really lacked intention to violate S’s boundary and the extent to which this lack-of-intention is exculpatory.
Related to this, as an alternative to Portia’s Principle, Roderick Long endorses an idea of proportionality:
Principle of Proportion: If S violates O’s boundary, O (or O’s agent) has the right to invade S’s boundary in whatever way is necessary to end S’s violation of O’s boundary, so long as O’s (or O’ agent’s) invasion of S’s boundary is not disproportionate to the seriousness of S’s violation of O’s boundary.
While I sympathize with this idea, I believe that it is very vague. I conjecture that most humans’ intuitions about what is “disproportionate” would more or less line up with their intuitions about exculpatory lack-of-intention in my response to the case. So there may not be much of a practical difference, but there is a difference in the fact that I am following my general orientation of not deciding to create rights out of thin air merely to make it easier to justify self-defense, eviction, punishment, etc.
The mid-flight striking pilot
Roderick Long motivates his views on child neglect with the following hypothetical:
Suppose that Stan is a pilot for Clouds-R-Us, a charter airline company. Now ordinarily Stan is under no obligation, enforceable or otherwise, to work as a pilot; he has a right to go on strike at any time. But now suppose that Stan decides to go on strike in mid-flight: he abandons the controls, dons his parachute, leaps out the door, and leaves his planeload of passengers (none of whom can pilot a plane) to fall to their doom. (Clouds-R-Us does not waste money on frills like copilots.) When Stan is accused of murder he is indignant: “What do you mean, murder? I didn’t kill my passengers; I merely let them die. Since there are no basic positive rights, I was not under any enforceable obligation to take positive action on behalf of my passengers’s welfare; I was merely obligated to leave them alone. And that’s precisely what I did: I left them alone. What am I, my passengers’ keeper?”
This response is clearly inadequate; but why? The answer, I think, is that Stan’s relation to his passengers is importantly different from, say, an innocent bystander’s relation to an accident victim. When one is merely a bystander, one’s failure to take positive action counts as letting die, not as killing. But it is a different story when one is not a bystander but the pilot. The fact that all these passengers are traveling at a high speed, thousands of miles above the ground, is not simply an interesting situation to which Stan is a latecomer. The passengers are way up in the air because Stan brought them there. And the passengers consented to being brought there on the understanding that Stan would return them safely to the ground; they would not have consented to be carried upward if they had known that Stan was going to bail out. Thus, if Stan bails out, he has violated the conditions under which the passengers’ ascent was voluntary; and so Stan’s total behavior toward the passengers (carry them upward and then leaving them there) counts as a violation of their negative right not to be killed without their consent. Therefore, once Stan and the passengers are aloft, it would be legitimate to force Stan to return the passengers safely to the ground before resigning his post at Clouds-R-Us. (And this is because Stan carried the passengers aloft voluntarily; if a gun had been held to his head from the beginning, it is not clear that he would have had an enforceable obligation not to bail out.)
The moral we may extract from Stan’s story is this:
(21) If S voluntarily places O in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in O’s death, then such a failure on S’s part is a killing, not merely a letting-die.
It is interesting that, in his last parenthesized sentence, Roderick Long seemingly agrees with my interpretation of what obligations would hold, under libertarianism, in the case of an enslaved pilot who decided to escape from slavery by parachuting off mid-flight. He seemingly disagrees, however, with my broader approach to ending aircraft-ride agreements mid-flight, which I had given in the same post when addressing a libertarian joke about a helicopter ride. It is very strange to me that Long clearly thinks that the pilot’s voluntary choice is important, and yet it does not occur to him to refer to the terms of the pilot’s contract. To quote what I said about the helicopter ride joke:
The joke about property rights is this: If I’m taking you, consensually, on a ride in my helicopter, it is also true that I remain owner of the helicopter and, as the owner of my property, can freely evict trespassers from it. So suppose that I change my mind about giving you a ride and cancel the contract. You then become a trespasser on my helicopter, and I can evict you, such as by pushing you off of it. Pushing you does no direct damage to your body, which, of course, remains your body via self-ownership, and is generally unharmed by being pushed. This was a minimal, least-harm intervention to quickly evict you, and it does not aggress against anything you legitimately own; you own your body, not anything surrounding it. It is no concern of mine what the ground will do to you once you’re out.
This stuff is funny, but it seems clear that no libertarian judiciary would let me off the hook for pushing you out of my helicopter. There are many things it might do instead, but here’s what it would do in my personal libertarian utopia: If the agreement for the helicopter ride was informal, then they might decide that, as a general unspoken part of such informal ride-agreements, I agreed to reimburse any damage to your body that happened due to me negligently letting you fall off of it, payable either to you if you survive, or to those named in your will if you don’t, or to your relatives if there is no such will, etc. I would then be punished by being saddled with a big debt to pay for the entire estimated value of your life, which is, basically, what would be done to any murderer; the gap between the treatment of my conduct and the treatment of murder is thus closed. If I had asked you to sign a written formal contract explicitly waiving such damages, I wouldn’t have this problem, but then you’d be a fool to sign it.
Similarly, I believe, in the case of a pilot who contracts himself out voluntarily but then decides to go on strike mid-flight, it all depends on what sorts of financial penalty are included in his contract with the airline for this sort of situation. To address this situation, there is really no need, and no justification, for postulating a general principle that “if S voluntarily places O in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in O’s death, then such a failure on S’s part is a killing, not merely a letting-die.”
That general principle creates many very odd instances of “killing”, besides. Suppose I fire my worker who is very poor, so that he no longer has an income, and hence I have put him in a situation where, if I do not give him an income, he will starve. Although a leftist like Long will likely be sympathetic to the worker, it is very odd to say that, if I fail to give him an income, I have just killed him. Long may argue that the worker is not really in such a situation since he may find employment or food elsewhere, but then again, it may also be said that someone who was left alone in an unmanned flight may technically somehow be rescued by a third party, although it is far-fetched. So such a response would leave it very unclear in what sorts of cases “S puts O in a situation”, etc.
The principle, which Long labeled (21), was his entire argument for enforceable parental obligations against child neglect. Long says that “when a woman voluntarily gives birth – i.e., voluntarily brings a child into the world – she is voluntarily moving it from a situation in which it has an automatic life-support system to a situation in which it does not”, and hence (21) applies. Since his principle was not justified, his case for enforceable parental obligations against child neglect is toppled. Note that, given (my interpretation of) Zark’s theory of easements, which I endorse, parents may not block a third party from rescuing their neglected child.
Abortion
Given my acceptance of Portia’s Principle and my denial of Long’s principle (21), Long’s case for abortion does not work either, in my telling. However, Rothbardian abortion-as-eviction, as in Rothbard’s Children and Rights chapter, is still justified by the libertarian property-norm as I interpret it, in all-and-only cases of abortion that can really be framed as eviction (and do not require, for instance, crushing the fetus before removing it from the mother’s body). It may, however, be overridden by the prohibition on homicide, and I have left that indeterminate; see §3.2.2 of my ethics. So that’s all that needs to be said about abortion here.
 |
| Illustration of Roderick Long’s example of the pilot Stan of Clouds-R-Us, made with Nano Banana. |
More words on left-wing asymmetry (2026-03-08)
Some of my readers who looked at this blog post remained drawn to a left-wing asymmetrical view, that parents have a duty of care toward children. I give them some advice and some clarifications.
Advice to left-wingers
My advice is that if you’d like to hold the left-wing asymmetrical view, it is better to support it by claiming that parenthood creates an implicit agreement/contract between parent and child, rather than using Roderick Long’s defense, which relies on his principle (21). Long’s principle (21), as argued above, is not sufficiently motivated by the thought experiment that was claimed to motivate it, and it overgenerates instances of “killing”. If you must be a left-winger about child neglect, it is better to believe in some sort of metaphysical parenthood contract, as follows.
Left-wing implicit-contract view of parenthood (LWIC): Whenever a person S voluntarily takes action to have a child, and successfully has a child C as a result, then S implicitly makes an agreement/contract with C whereby S is obligated to provide C with childcare (at least enough to prevent C’s death by starvation or other deprivation), but C has no obligations to obey S, or any obligations toward S at all merely as a result of the implicit contract.
I do not believe that parenthood creates an implicit contract, regardless what terms you write into it. It is simply a very odd view, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. But it’s way better than Roderick Long’s view, which had involved his principle (21). After all, the existence, in general, of implicit contracts is independently motivated, as in the case of the informal helicopter ride that I described above.
One issue with LWIC is the standard of childcare. Is “prevent C’s death by starvation or other deprivation” really all there is to it? Why? Many people may think that giving a certain kind of education is also part of a rightful upbringing. In general, it seems many parents may view other parents’ choices as being neglect when compared with the choices that they’d rather make, leading to endless disputes about “upbringings I dislike” being framed as “neglect” for the sake of stealing other people’s children. Maybe someone does not see this outcome as undesirable, although I do; and maybe someone sees a clear and obvious way to prevent it, although I don’t. It is something that I see as a problem, but it is not my problem, since I do not hold to LWIC; for me, the child’s runaway-freedom, as in Children and Rights, is quite sufficient to libertarian theory. I maintain, however, that LWIC is more workable than Roderick Long’s principle (21).
It is possible that free associations in a hypothetical libertarian-anarchist society could pressure parents to make explicit childcare agreements (specifying the standard of care), and then there would be no ambiguity anyway and everyone would be happy. But this is speculation.
Comparison of views in a specific hypothetical case
Given my views on punishment, the fact that Long’s essay was framed in terms of “enforceable obligation” may make it unclear what difference it even makes to me, anyway.
I believe this can be made clearer by noting that it makes a difference as to which actions are considered theft in the following hypothetical scenario. Let us assume that a mother M owns a supply of food F but does not give F to her son S (which M had voluntarily chosen to have), and we claim, for the sake of argument, that S is being neglected by M (that is, we do not here dispute whether this constitutes neglect, or what exactly constitutes it).
Then the application of different views works as follows:
- Under LWIC, since a contract is a title-transfer (under both my ethics and Rothbard’s), we may say S is the true owner of F, so that someone who intervenes to give F to S does not commit theft.
- Under a view that accepts Roderick Long’s principle (21), it is unclear whether S owns F, but M is currently in the process of killing S by not giving F (or an equivalent) to S, and giving F to S is to be thought of as self-defense, or homicide prevention.
- Under a classical Aristotelian symmetrical view that accepts a natural parent-child link, M is failing her duty to care for S, and someone who gives F to S may be seen as forcing M to do her duty, which may be rightfully done only by someone with authority – classically, the state, and in the Lockean state-of-nature, just about anybody. This natural link also implies a duty of S to obey M, however, since M is S’s mother.
- Under a Rothbardian symmetrical view, which accepts none of the above—that is, neither an implicit contract, nor a natural link, nor Long’s principle (21)—a third party who gives F to S commits theft, since F is owned by M. But just the same as in LWIC and in Long’s view, as well as in the Lockean state-of-nature case of the Aristotelian view, a third party may intervene to rescue S from M and take S to a different home, leaving F to M’s own management.
I advocate the Rothbardian symmetrical view, at least as the best interpretation of the libertarian property-norm, although I cannot rule out in principle (although I doubt in practice) the possibility of an Aristotelian metaphysician-scientist giving a sound proof of a version of the Aristotelian view grounded in child development data (as Aristotle would have wanted it to be supported) as something that should override the libertarian property-norm.
I sympathize with the person who intervenes to give F to S, but that’s mostly because S is a starving child, not because M voluntarily made the decision to get pregnant with S, nor because M has duties of motherhood to S. I may advocate for leniency for the intervener, but I would advocate much the same leniency if F were stolen and given to an unrelated starving child SC, who had not entered the story yet, and who has nothing to do with M or her choice to have a child.
A repair of Long’s principle (2026-03-09)
In conversation with Teerqz, it was offhandedly suggested adding “without O’s consent” to Long’s principle (21). I then had the thought that this addition would make it plausible to interpret S’s action as aggression, that is, a quite standard violation of the nonaggression principle, and then not have to think so much about killing/homicide in particular, so that we can broaden the principle to talk about harm to body or property, more generally.
That is, we would have the following principle:
(21′) If S voluntarily places O, without O’s consent, in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in harm to O’s body or property, then such a failure on S’s part constitutes aggression against O.
Unlike Long’s (21), this does not overgenerate: my hypothetical worker consented to his work contract, and hence plausibly to the possibility of its termination by me at any time. Similarly, the passengers voluntarily boarded the plane, so Stan of Clouds-R-Us also does not trigger (21′). But someone may defend that neglectful parents trigger (21′).
Some issues
Two questions are raised by the claim that neglectful parents trigger (21′), which I will call the preexistence issue and the maturity issue.
The preexistence issue
It seems like S can only “place O in a situation without O’s consent” if O existed before being in that situation, since otherwise O was simply always in the situation and was not placed into it.
After all, if a danger to O is to be thought of as a violation of the NAP, then it is a wrongful damage to O’s property in O’s own body. But if O’s body did not exist before, and was created in the dangerous situation, then O never owned an unendangered body which was then placed into danger; S could be culpable for the danger only if S created the danger, not if S merely created O in a situation exposed to the danger.
For instance, suppose S owns the area B, and a person O absentmindedly walks into area B, and S doesn’t want O on S’s property (which S is about to clean, or something) so S pushes O into the unowned area A, but area A is a warzone which is about to be bombed. It seems that S has (knowingly or not) placed O in danger, since before S’s action, O existed and was in safety. But suppose O is instead brought, by S, into existence in the area A. Then O was never in safety, and it is odd to say O was wronged by S. However, the person who bombs the warzone A may be, to whatever extent, culpable for creating the danger to O which was created by their act of bombing.
As an analogy using only land gifts and no bodies being brought into existence, suppose S owns two properties, A and B, which are both warzones, but S protects both A and B with S’s own bomb-defense gear. Then S gifts A to O, but does not gift the use of S’s bomb-defense gear in A, and hence gives O new property which is endangered by bombs. It does not seem that S wrongs O, especially if O is too young to consent anyway; and this seems closely parallel to S creating O, i.e., giving O a body (since a new human O is initially made out of matter which was part of S’s own self-owned body, and is in this way analogous to a gift) but not giving O the further protection from harm which S ordinarily applies to S’s self-owned property (food, shelter, bomb-defense, etc).
Roderick Long had said that “when a woman voluntarily gives birth – i.e., voluntarily brings a child into the world – she is voluntarily moving it from a situation in which it has an automatic life-support system to a situation in which it does not.” Technically, I think a fetus is, long before birth, already in a situation where the mother’s failure to take positive action in its behalf will result in its death. And besides, it’s not biologically possible to never give birth so as to keep a child in “automatic life-support”; clearly the relevant voluntary decision (for a voluntary parent) is conception, not birth. But a child does not exist before conception (regardless whether it exists immediately at conception or only later).
Without relying on the preexistence of souls (in some sort of safe aethereal realm), we could maybe interpret the consent violation as happening only shortly after the child is born, and only in cases where there is the option of the mother notifying someone else who may rescue the child. The mother’s voluntary choice is then not conception, but the choice of placing the child, after birth, in some physical location where it is in danger if not helped by her. It can then be defended that this is the point at which the child is put into a new situation, rather than pregnancy or birth, because this is the point at which the mother has an actual choice: she can either place the child somewhere where the child continues to be in danger if not helped by her, or she can place the child somewhere where the child is not in danger even without her help. During pregnancy, there is no way for the child to not be in danger without the mother, but after pregnancy, if the mother decides to keep the child in some location where it is in danger without the mother, that is the mother’s choice, to which she had alternatives.
Other repairs are possible; some libertarians may also simply accept the preexistence of souls, or deny that the preexistence issue is a relevant problem at all, although I don’t do either.
The maturity issue
It seems like it can only be aggression for S to “place O in a situation without O’s consent” if it is possible for O to consent. But it seems that newborn babies cannot consent to being placed in a situation either way.
Someone can deny this by appealing to a modular autonomy framework, which is independently motivated, and then claiming that “being placed in a situation” is, conveniently, one of the first things to which children gain the ability to consent. Maybe this is not plausible, but it seems that applying (21′) to neglectful parents requires it.
A comment on Desyllas
Teerqz linked me to this piece by Jake Desyllas, which Teerqz does not endorse, but sees as nevertheless an interesting source in libertarian theory. I had not seen Desyllas’s piece before, and find it worth commenting on in this connection.
After reviewing other theories, Desyllas ultimately defends a “theory of causal parental responsibility” which starts from something like (21′) and ends up deriving very similar consequences to the Aristotelian “natural link” view. This is done as follows.
- Desyllas more or less assumes that (21′) applies to all parents and that the preexistence and maturity issues covered above simply aren’t issues; “children cannot consent to being born”, hence they never consent, and hence there is always aggression unless they are helped.
- Desyllas furthermore derives that “parents have a positive obligation to do whatever is necessary to remove the child from a state of peril”, and hence “there is a clear basis for parental authority provided by the theory. To remove a child from peril, a parent must act paternalistically toward the child; therefore, the parent is justified in assuming authority over the child.”
I find both of these moves way too fast. Desyllas quotes from Blackstone and Kant and Locke, seemingly without noticing that these authors wrote in the natural law tradition, where the Aristotelian “natural link” view was a commonplace. Although Kant does say “it is a quite correct and even necessary idea to regard the act of procreation as one by which we have brought a person into the world without his consent and on our own initiative”, I do not think that (21′) was in Kant’s mind as a justification for parental obligation; I think more likely he thought of it as merely a helpful frame of mind to have about the obligation, whereas the obligation is justified simply by natural fact of parenthood.
The applicability of (21′) to parents is simply not all that obvious given the issues I just raised, and the derivation of parental authority from it is questionable to say the least. In other cases where a person S puts a person O in danger without O’s consent, it does not seem that S is permitted to take any further action in O’s defense unless O gives consent to that further action; two wrongs don’t make a right. Why may a parent “act paternalistically”, if the parent’s right is derived merely from (21′)? Desyllas is sliding into Aristotelianism without noticing it.
Conclusion on the repair
Overall, while I accept that (21′) is clearly true as stated, I do not believe that it can apply to all child neglect, although maybe it applies to some of it. It is an interesting avenue of research. Libertarians looking for a left-wing asymmetrical theory that can forbid all “intuitive” cases of child neglect are still advised to accept LWIC. Libertarians who are willing to accept parental authority, such as Desyllas, should simply accept classical Aristotelianism (at least regarding the parent-child link) rather than making convoluted detours through accusing parents of aggression. I continue to “advocate the Rothbardian symmetrical view, at least as the best interpretation of the libertarian property-norm”, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment