Where Does The Causal Theory Of Parental Obligations Come From?

The causal theory of parental obligations had odd beginnings. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the basic principles of this theory were stated by three different thinkers, yet none of these early proponents explored the wider implications of the idea. It was not until the twentieth century that a few people started to realise the enormous significance of this theory. In this post, I will outline how the theory emerged.

The earliest presentation of the causal argument for parental obligations is by the legal theorist William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. Blackstone argued that creating a child entails the obligation to care for it:

The duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children is a principle of natural law; an obligation, says Pufendorf, laid on them not only by nature herself, but by their own proper act, in bringing them into the world: for they would be in the highest manner injurious to their issue, if they only gave the children life, that they might afterwards see them perish. By begetting them therefore they have entered into a voluntary obligation, to endeavour, as far as in them lies, that the life which they have bestowed shall be supported and preserved. And thus the children will have a perfect right of receiving maintenance from their parents.

In this brief passage, Blackstone captures some essential features of the causal argument:

1. It is the actions of the parents (in creating the child) that give rise to the child being in peril.
2. If the parents were to fail to care for their children, the result would be that the child will perish.
3. Therefore the parents have an obligation to prevent this happening.

Blackstone credits Samuel Pufendorf as the source of this causal argument, but it is not clear that his interpretation of Pufendorf was correct. In his On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673), Pufendorf had made a slightly different argument that parental authority rests on natural law and the "tacit consent" of the offspring. It seems to have been Blackstone who first stated the causal argument clearly, although Blackstone himself only offers this brief statement of the argument and does not elucidate its further implications.

The first major philosopher to put forward the causal argument for parental obligations was Kant. There is no evidence that Kant got this argument from Blackstone. He may have read Blackstone or deduced the argument independently. In Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1797) Kant argued parental obligation comes from bringing an infant into the world without consent and placing it in peril:

From the fact of procreation…, there follows the duty of preserving and rearing children as the products of this union. Accordingly, children, as persons, have, at the same time, an original congenital right — distinguished from mere hereditary right — to be reared by the care of their parents till they are capable of maintaining themselves; and this provision becomes immediately theirs by law, without any particular juridical act being required to determine it. For what is thus produced is a person, and it is impossible to think of a being endowed with personal freedom as produced merely by a physical process. And hence, in the practical relation, it is quite a correct and even a necessary idea to regard the act of generation as a process by which a person is brought without his consent into the world and placed in it by the responsible free will of others. This act, therefore, attaches an obligation to the parents to make their children — as far as their power goes — contented with the condition thus acquired. Hence parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making; for a being endowed with freedom cannot be so regarded. Nor, consequently, have they a right to destroy it as if it were their own property, or even to leave it to chance; because they have brought a being into the world who becomes in fact a citizen of the world, and they have placed that being in a state which they cannot be left to treat with indifference, even according to the natural conceptions of right.

Kant clearly set out the creation of peril argument. In this brief paragraph, he captured all the main points of the causal theory. Kant specifically repudiates the theory of parental ownership and argues that children have rights. He also argues against the idea of tacit consent of the child. Instead of a merely biological explanation of obligation, he is making a clear argument that obligation comes from the actions of the parents. However, like Blackstone, Kant did not explore the wider implications of this argument.

The causal argument for parental obligations was restated by the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick in the 1874 book The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick had certainly read both Kant and Blackstone, so it seems likely that he knew of the causal argument for parental obligations from their earlier statements of it. He restated the principle in his own words, although this was again only a minor argument in the book and not the main purpose of the work. Sidgwick argued succinctly that parents have causal parental obligations based on creation of peril:

And this leads to what we may conveniently examine next, the duty of parents to children. This too we might partly classify under a different head, viz. that of duties arising out of special needs: for no doubt children are naturally objects of compassion, on account of their helplessness, to others besides their parents. But on the latter they have a claim of a different kind, springing from the universally recognised duty of not causing pain or any harm to other human beings, directly or indirectly, except in the way of deserved punishment: for the parent, being the cause of the child’s existing in a helpless condition, would be indirectly the cause of the suffering and death that would result to it if neglected.

After this brilliantly clear summary, Sidgwick begins to waffle that this issue is all very complicated, and then changes the topic. He did not explore the theory in any more detail. Nonetheless, many later writers who have made the causal argument from parental obligations have referred to Sidgwick as an influence.

What are the implications of this theory that all these early thinkers fail to remark on? This will be the subject of a future post, but one mind-blowing example is that you cannot give up parental obligations.

Are Empiricists Anti-Rational?

Stephen Hicks is a philosopher and author of “Explaining Postmodernism”. In a recent article, he answers the question “Is Austrian economics anti-empirical?” in the affirmative, stating “its roots and the tradition have been mostly anti-empirical.”

I commented on his FaceBook post that a better question would be “are empiricists anti-rational?” Professor Hicks responded:

“That's an interesting question, too, Jake. What makes it better?”

Here's my reply:

Thanks for your response. Empiricism is far more influential in economics than the Austrian School, so more deserving of scrutiny in my opinion. Popperian empiricism has been consciously adopted as the core philosophy of mainstream economics since Milton Friedman and others. The Austrian School’s emphasis on rational principles is a tiny holdout to this trend, and their rationalist approach is generally considered wacky and eccentric by the mainstream.

Empiricism’s victory has been so overwhelming that even the idea that some things can be known to be true or false based on reasoning from first principles is seen as “anti-empirical” (synonymous with bad). Yet one can hold that the answers to some questions about the world are knowable by reason alone, whilst other questions indeed can only be answered by checking empirical evidence. That’s the Austrian approach— not anti-empirical, just aware that reason shows us that some things can never be true. For example, when Mises demonstrated that central planning can never work in the socialist calculation debate, he did so by deductive argument from first principles, not by evidence.

Empiricism in economics is always vulnerable to radical skepticism, because empiricists hold that one can’t be sure of anything by reason alone (except, inconsistently, they are sure of that statement itself by reason alone). Will central planning work? Empiricism says the only way to know is to test it, and see if you can “falsify” it (and even then you are only provisionally accepting a hypothesis until the next test). 

Of course, Popper argued that you can be sure if a hypothesis is proven wrong, but any competent empiricist can always use “immunising stratagems” to protect a failed hypothesis (for example, that old chestnut “Russia wasn’t true Communism, it was Stalinism… so we need to try central planning again”). 

By the way, I hugely admire your book “Explaining Postmodernism” and I consider the continuation of the Enlightenment project a vital task for our times. My concern is that we’ve all assumed empiricism is the natural heir of the enlightenment (don’t we all want to be considered good empiricists?) but empiricism’s contradictions have undermined our ability to reason from first principles.

Professor Hicks responded:

Thanks for your explanation, Jake. Do you think the duality of empiricism versus principles can be overcome? That is, does empiricism have contradictions, or is is that we've not yet connected the basic empirical commitment to a good understanding of conceptualization, proposition-formation, and logic?

I appreciate the great questions. I’d love to hear your answer to them too. Here’s my take:
Empirical work is great, but empiricism as a philosophy is self-contradictory. Even committed empiricists rely on principles that aren’t dependent on sense data all the time. As Hume pointed out, you can’t derive a single causal relationship from the senses because all sense data ever shows is one thing happening, then another thing happening. Without rational principles, the evidence of the senses is meaningless. Empiricism always piggybacks on the deeper principles of reason.

Of course, it is vain to assume one could solve all questions with pure reason. But it does not follow that all questions about the real world can be answered with evidence from the senses. There are a-priori synthetic truths about the world, like the principle of causality and the laws of logic. I presume there is some kind of evolutionary explanation for how we acquired such rational principles, but ultimately how we got them doesn’t make a difference to the fact that they are true and useful. These principles are the ultimate foundation of rationality and failing to accept a-priori synthetic truths is a good definition for irrationality.

The Enlightenment philosophers lost their way when they assumed that empiricism could be the source of all truth. It led them away from developing rational ethics and towards utilitarianism, positive law, and relativism. When logic, causality, and other rational principles were assumed to be mere conventions, the Enlightenment lost it’s objective footing. That was a mistake we need to correct.

I think the task for continuing the Enlightenment project is to clean up rationalism. Rationalism doesn’t have to deny the existence of empirical questions, but empiricism as a philosophy must deny the existence of a-priori synthetic truths (which always leads to self-contradiction).