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 anniversary. 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-might 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.
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