Parents who want to act ethically need to have a set of philosophical principles. They need principles to understand their role and to guide their actions towards their children. Here are some key philosophical questions that parents need answers for:
- Do parents have enforceable obligations towards their children? Why?
- Are children rights-bearing individuals (i.e. self owners)? Why?
- Do parents have authority over their children? Why?
Libertarian philosophy, built on classical liberalism and the Enlightenment, ought to be able to provide parents with a clear framework to answer all these questions. However, for whatever reason, addressing questions related to children and the family has been the weakest aspect of libertarian thought. Attempts to apply libertarian theory to the family have been fraught with contradictions and sometimes justly subject to ridicule. This is strange, since it did not have to be this way.
Libertarianism can provide a coherent moral framework for parents. It can do this through the concept of rights. A core insight of the libertarian theory of rights is that all rights are human rights and all human rights are property rights.
The concept of property rights is the foundation of ethics. The root of all conflict is the fundamental problem of scarcity: in the nature of our universe, scarcity is unavoidable and therefore conflict over scarce things is always a possibility. Ethics enables peaceful cooperation within our universe of scarce resources through the mechanism of objective property rights. The function of property is to prevent conflict by assigning exclusive rights over scarce resources. Property rights are therefore necessary to make conflict-free interaction possible. You cannot have ethics without property rights. You cannot have a peaceful society without objective property rights.
Since property rights govern who can legitimately control scarce things, and human beings themselves are scarce, property rights also apply to human beings. Another great libertarian insight is that humans are self owners: each individual is the rightful owner of his body since he has the best objective claim to ownership. The implications of this insight for adults have been well established in libertarian thought, but there has always been a difficulty in applying the principles to family situations. Are children self owners? If so, what gives parents authority over children? If parents are self owners, how can children have a claim against their parents for obligations towards them?
In attempting to answer these questions, libertarians are divided among competing theories of the nature of parental obligations and competing theories of the nature of children's rights. My project on this blog is to assess these competing theories and identify which among them is both compatible with libertarian principles and indisputable in argument.
This project immediately gives rise to two questions:
- How can one assess competing ethical theories? Any such assessment presumes some kind of meta-ethical rules for determining what makes an ethical theory valid. What should those meta-ethical rules be and why should anyone accept them?
- Why should anyone accept any ethical principles relating to the family anyway, given Hume's insight that you cannot get an ought from an is.
These questions will be the subject of future posts.