As discussed in my previous post, most postwar libertarians have denied that parents have positive obligations to their children by arguing a theory that parental care is a form of voluntary charity. However, libertarians also make three consequentialist arguments against recognising the validity of parental obligations:
It would be a slippery slope to recognising general welfare obligations
It would entail denying the validity of the right to abortion.
It would legitimise totalitarian state interference in families
Are Parental Obligations A Slippery Slope to Arguments for Welfare?
This first objection is simply false. Parental obligations do not entail general welfare obligations because:
the justification of parental obligations is specific, not general.
The justification is based on responsibility for an individual's own actions, not some general responsibility for humanity arising from membership of the human race.
Without contradiction, we can both
acknowledge the validity of chosen positive obligations (including those obligations one must accept as "chosen” as a consequence of one's actions); and
deny the validity of unchosen positive obligations.
Therefore the first objection can be dismissed.
Are Parental Obligations Incompatible With the Right to Abortion?
This is true: one cannot hold both that abortion is just and also that parental obligations are valid without contradiction. Something has to give. For many libertarians, the mere fact that an argument is incompatible with the right to abortion is considered a refutation of the argument. They hold the right to abortion as axiomatic. Even many libertarians who are unsure about the validity of abortion appear to assume that the right to abortion is the libertarian position, and that the burden of proof is on those who think otherwise.
This is a big topic for another day but in short, I believe the assumption of a valid right to abortion is another huge error in libertarian theory, one closely related to the error of denying parental obligations.
Pointing out the incompatibility with abortion is not a valid objection to recognising parental obligations, it is merely a logical consequence. Which of these ideas is philosophically valid needs to be decided on the merits of the arguments, not the fact of incompatibility.
Would Acknowledging Parental Obligations Give the State an Excuse for Totalitarian Interference in Families?
Another argument made against acknowledging parental obligations is that it would give the State excuses for totalitarian interference in families. The two ways that this are envisaged is:
The State would have excuses to check whether parents are fulfilling the care that they owe their children, such as checking on diets etc.
The State would have excuses for massive interference in women's privacy to check if they are having illicit abortions.
There are two problems with this kind of argumentation. Firstly, why should one assume that these empirical predictions are correct? They are merely someone's guesses about the future. As a simple point of historical fact, up until fairly recently abortion was illegal in Britain, the US and other western countries and this state of affairs did not entail totalitarian SWAT teams breaking into homes to check for illicit abortions.
The more important problem with this objection is that it is motivated reasoning. It is of the form "If I accept an argument is true, it might provide the State with excuses to do things, therefore the argument is false". This is unsound reasoning. Either principles are correct or they are false. One cannot decide the veracity of an argument on the basis of whether the State will use it as an excuse to do bad things.
The fact that State power can be abused is not an argument against the validity of an ethical norm. Laws against child neglect can be abused, but that does not distinguish them from every other law that the State can and does abuse for illegitimate overreach of authority. The State's laws against homicide can be abused to frame innocent people when authorities want to show a prosecution regardless of justice, but that is not an argument for viewing homicide as morally acceptable.
Conclusion
According to Argumentation Ethics, ethical norms must be aprioristic not consequentialist because one has to be able to act on them. Only an aprioristic rule is available to act on at a specific time. If one accepts this approach, then consequentialism itself is invalid as a basis of forming or evaluating ethical principles.
Nonetheless, it is still useful to address the three consequentialist objections to parental obligations raised by libertarians. The first is simply false. The second is not an objection but rather a logical consequence. The third is a group of empirical predictions that can be denied by historical precedent and are also examples of motivated reasoning.