Many libertarians wrongly believe that there are never legitimate positive obligations except by contract or as restitution for a crime. This is incorrect. One can also acquire positive obligations as a tort if one does something that has a reasonably foreseeable consequence of putting another person in peril. The positive obligation of parents is a clear example of this principle.
Children have rights. The most important right they have is the claim against their parents for all assistance necessary to get them out of danger. A child has this claim because his parents' actions resulted in him being in danger. This child's right has the corresponding enforceable positive obligation on the parents. The parents acquire this positive obligation because their un-coerced actions had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of creating the circumstance that a child is in a state of peril. Whether the parents intended to create this consequence is irrelevant. They must still accept any consequences as "chosen" if that consequence was reasonably foreseeable.
Roderick Long is one libertarian who seems, at first glance, to understand all this perfectly. He sets out the philosophical principle clearly:
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.”
He acknowledges that one may acquire positive obligations as a result of the consequences of one's actions, even if those consequences were unintended:
Negative rights generate derivative positive rights. If you (intentionally or accidentally) take my umbrella, you acquire an enforceable obligation to take positive steps to return it to me.
He also sets out the case for how enforceable positive obligations can arise by the creation of peril:
suppose Frieda is careening around the corner in her Lamborghini and suddenly sees Roscoe ambling across the road a short distance ahead. At her current speed, she has only two choices: (a) she can run over Roscoe, or (b) she can swerve around him. Running over Roscoe would be a violation of his negative rights; so Frieda has an enforceable obligation not to run over him. In the circumstances, what that amounts to is an enforceable obligation to swerve around him. But that obligation is not an obligation to sit back and do nothing; it is an obligation to take positive action, and a very specific positive action at that: she must turn the steering wheel in order to avoid running over Roscoe. Here we have a case, then, in which Frieda has an enforceable obligation to take positive action on Roscoe’s behalf – but only because that is the only way she can avoid violating her negative obligation not to treat Roscoe as a mere means. Roscoe’s right against Frieda not to be run over has generated, in the circumstances, a further right against her that she turn the wheel in a certain way.
One might assume from these quotes that Long is a trenchant advocate of the principle of causal parental responsibility. He is not. Despite setting out the causal principle so clearly, Long ends up advocating something quite different when it comes to parental obligations.
Men Have Responsibility For Their Actions, But Women Don't
When it comes to men, Long does think that fathers have obligations as a result of their causal actions, even if the consequences were undesired:
if (as I believe) fathers have responsibilities with regard to pregnancies that they cause, even when those pregnancies are the result of failed contraception, then such pregnancies cannot be treated as mere bolts from the blue. It seems that fathers could have such responsibilities only if engaging in intercourse with knowledge of the risks somehow made even pregnancies resulting result from failed contraception voluntary in Aristotle’s broad sense.
So far, this sounds like a clear defence of the causal principle. But Long then explains that he holds women do a different standard:
And if they are voluntary for the father, are they not voluntary for the mother? I need not decide this issue, however, since I shall argue that pregnancies may be terminated whether or not they were (initially) voluntary.
Long openly admits that he has a double standard, then gives himself permission not to resolve this problem because he has a justification for abortion. Apparently, his justification for abortion will be so amazing that it will override the requirement of logical consistency and absolve him of any need to justify contradicting himself. What could this justification be?
Pregnancy Creates Special Exemptions For Women Being Responsible For Their Actions
Long explores a range of arguments to justify abortion and finally lands on this: being pregnant is so deeply intimate and personal that a woman may always change her mind if she decides she no longer wants to be pregnant. Whereas Long thinks men have an obligation towards children created as a result of their voluntary actions (even if those children were undesired), women are always allowed to change their mind and evade responsibility for their actions because being pregnant is intimate and personal:
What gives a woman the right to kill as rapist in self-defense, then, is not that he threatens her with pain or injury, but that he uses her body in the most deeply intimate and personal way, without her consent (even if she originally consented, then changed her mind). And it is precisely this same fact that gives Miriam the right to kill her unwanted fetus Joshua: not that he threatens her with pain or injury, but that he uses her body in the most deeply intimate and personal way, without her consent (even if she originally consented).[
So for Long, a woman has parental obligations not because of her causal actions leading to the creation of a child, but rather she has an obligation because she decided not to un-obligate herself. He even spells this out, clarifying that the basis of parental obligation is the choice not to abort a child:
If a woman gives birth voluntarily (where the availability of safe, inexpensive abortion may be among the criteria of voluntariness), she has an enforceable obligation.
For Long, a man acquires obligations if his actions have the reasonably foreseeable consequence of placing a child in a state of peril, but a woman acquires obligations only if she chooses to accept obligations, which is supposedly evidenced by her refraining from killing her child.
An obligation is something that binds the will. Clearly, if you only have an obligation because you want to accept it–and you are only obliged unless and until you no longer want to accept it– then your will is in no way bound. It's a senseless way of defining obligation. Why for women does the act of not having an abortion bind the will but not the act of placing a child in peril? Also, if after birth one can give up a child for adoption blamelessly anyway, in what meaningful way is one obligated?
A Matriarchal Theory Of Parental Ownership
Another deviation from the principle of parental responsibility is Long's advocacy for a version of parental ownership. Like many libertarians, Long argues that parents have a kind of homesteaded property right in their children. His version of the parental ownership theory is a matriarchal one, in which the mother is always the owner, and the father may only share ownership if allowed by the mother:
How are guardianships acquired? Presumably in the same way as other property rights: by homesteading or transfer. The simplest way to homestead a guardianship would be finding an abandoned infant and undertaking to provide care for it. Another way to homestead guardianship of a child is to give birth to the child; the mother starts out as the child's guardian, a position to which no one else (not even the father) can have a claim unless the mother grants it.
So Long thinks a father acquires parental obligations as a consequence of his action in having sex (even if he did not intend to become a father), but only if the mother wants him to act as a father. If she does not wish it, the child is deprived of his rightful claim on his father for parental care, in which case the father has no parental obligations.
Dismissing Parental Obligations As Mere Sexism
If Long understands the principle that one may acquire positive obligations as a result of one's causal action, how does he respond to his libertarian contemporaries such as Doris Gordon, who applied this principle to parental obligations? He does not respond to them at all. He makes no reference to Gordon, he just resorts to an ad-hominem dismissal of one of her arguments as mere sexism:
The “parental obligations” objection to abortion, like the refusal to recognize rape in marriage, appears to stem from a traditional attitude that refuses to acknowledge women as autonomous individuals, and regards their bodies as mere resources to be used by family members. On this view, a woman is not an independent moral being worthy of respect in her own right, but instead exists only for the sake of her family relationships, and has her moral identity and standing only within that context.
The idea that Doris Gordon, a staunch libertarian and former Objectivist, was driven to her conclusions by "a traditional attitude that refuses to acknowledge women as autonomous individuals" is ridiculous.
Conclusion
Roderick Long clearly understands the principle that creation of peril generates positive obligations. He wrote about this principle back in the 1990s. At that time, there were contemporaries within the libertarian movement such as Doris Gordon arguing that this principle grounds the positive obligations of parents towards their children. Long must have encountered this idea and, given his philosophical training, he could have been a strong advocate for the theory of causal parental responsibility.
Instead, he is an advocate of a bizarre double-standard of parental obligations. He argues that whether a father has any obligation to his child is entirely the choice of the mother, but if the mother does wish the father to be obligated, then the father is positively obligated to provide care based on the father's action of having had sex (even if he didn't intend to create a child). On the other hand, a mother has no positive obligations to her child based on her action of having had sex, but rather if the mother chooses not to have an abortion then this is tantamount to voluntarily accepting the positive obligation not to abandon the child once born, although he thinks parents can also legitimately give up a child for adoption at any point if they want to. This is a bizarrely inconsistent theory of parental obligations.
Why didn't Long advocate for the far more consistent principle of causal parental responsibility? My guess is that Long could not accept the logical implication that abortion is incompatible with parental obligations. It seems that Long is axiomatically committed to affirming the legitimacy of abortion, even at the cost of contradicting principles that he has himself understands. He also seems to be committed to a kind of matriarchalist feminism that holds women to a different standard to men. His commitments to supporting abortion and to this kind of feminism evidently override his commitment to consistency of principles.