Opposing Parental Authority As A Strategy To Increase State Control Of Children

Parents can and do abuse their authority over their children. Children have rights and should not be aggressed against, neglected, or denied the care and support from parents that they have a legitimate claim to. However, those who argue for children's rights do not always have the interests of the children in mind. Sometimes the advocacy of children's rights is a vehicle for promoting the interests of political authority.

As discussed in previous posts, one school of thought in philosophy of the family holds that the State is the rightful owner of children and that parents are a barrier to State power.

Those who see parents as a barrier to State power seek strategies to separate parents from children. One example is to advocate for communal child rearing. A related strategy is to seek ways to weaken parental authority.

In What's Wrong With Children's Rights, Martin Guggenheim identified two distinct goals within the children's rights movement of the 1960s:

Broadly speaking, the children’s rights movement since the 1960s has focused on two sometimes intertwined but often completely separate matters. One concerns the rights of children with respect to the exercise of state power; the other, the rights of children with respect to the exercise of parental authority.

Guggenheim argues that the goal of reducing state power over children was rapidly sidelined. Instead, reducing parental authority over children became the dominant goal. A key group driving the movement was lawyers involved in the emerging field of children's rights law. Guggenheim was himself a children's rights lawyer and he laments the fact that the movement came to focus almost exclusively on the reduction of parental authority as opposed to the reduction of state power.

This opposition to parental authority is characteristic of all Statists who see parents as a barrier to political authority. From the early Progressive movement, parents were seen as a problem that children need to be liberated from. In The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued for recognition of children's rights as a way for the State to gain more influence over them and the parents less:

There is no more brilliant hope on earth today, than this new thought about the child .… the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal ownership—the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked indulgence, of the private home.

Many intellectuals have made the argument that only people approved by political authority ought to have the right to parent children, and that unapproved should never be left with parental authority. This is set out as a policy goal of licensing of parents, or restricting of parenting to only those approved by the State. One of the anthropologist Margaret Mead's proposals was that children be taken from natural parents and assigned to couples specially trained and certified for parenthood. This idea was also advocated by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) and by the academic Hugh LaFollette in his 1980 paper Licencing Parents. LaFollette argued that if any unlicensed parents have unapproved children then the State should "remove the children and put them up for adoption.”

Communal Child Rearing As A Strategy To Separate Parents From Children

In a previous post I outlined three schools of thought on the relationship between parents and political authority. One of those schools of thought sees parents as a rival power base to political authority that must be overcome. This is the perspective of communist and leftist movements that view the influence of parents on their children as a barrier to State power.

This group sees children as property of the State. By separating parents from their children, parents can be more easily controlled and children more easily indoctrinated by the State. One strategy of those who want to separate parents from children is to advocate communal child rearing.

The earliest advocate of communal child rearing was Plato, who set this out in The Republic. Plato wanted the State to become the central focus of commitment instead of the family, possibly influenced by the example of Sparta using this policy for the same goal.

The abolition of the family has been an explicit goal of all communist movements and is stated in The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (1848). It was also advocated by pre-Marxist communists such as Morelly in his La Code de la Nature, (1755). Although Rousseau did not call for full communal child rearing, his critique of the family led many that he influenced, such as Morelly, to see this as a solution.

The goal of abolishing the family was advocated by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and by various others since as a perennial aim of radical leftist movements. What the abstract goal of "abolishing the family" means in terms of specific policy is compulsory separation of children from their parents and raising of children in communal groups organised by the State.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued for removing the children from parents as part of her critique of the nuclear family. She presented a positive depiction of Samoa where she argued that the "large family community" of communal child-rearing "diffuses" affection and prevents the formation of the "crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes, and so on". Mead's goal was "to mitigate… the strong role which parents play in children's lives."

Contemporary philosophers Brighouse & Swift advocated breaking the relationship between biological parents and their children in pursuit of egalitarianism. Rather than specifically advocating communal child rearing, they make a more general argument against the view that children should be raised by their biological parents. They argue that "adults have no fundamental right to parent their own biological children". They see being a parent as a benefit that should ideally be distributed in a more egalitarian way, so they argue that non-parents such as homosexuals, single people, and polyamorous groups should have access to children to experience the benefit of raising kids too. They argue that the claim children have a right to be raised by their biological parents should be opposed as prejudice.

Moderate leftists such as Brighouse & Swift advocate incrementally more separation of children from their biological parents, whereas radicals such as Marx want total abolition of the family.

There may be other motivations for the advocacy of communal child rearing, but for some it is a conscious strategy to separate parents from their children and thereby attack the family as rival power base to the State.

A Response To Kerry Baldwin on Fetal Self Ownership

Whilst doing research for a forthcoming book about libertarianism and parental obligations, I was interested to come across the work of Kerry Baldwin. This post is a response to the ideas that Baldwin put forward in her two-part podcast series on libertarianism, abortion, and fetal self-ownership as well as her debate with Walter Block on evictionism.

Abortion

On this blog, I have written about how support for abortion has corrupted libertarian theory. Baldwin makes an excellent point in this regard. She argues that the belief that abortion is legitimate undermines the principle of self ownership. The logical implication of assuming that abortion is valid is that individuals only have rights if their mother decides to grant them rights. As Baldwin puts it, this is not a theory of self ownership, it is a theory of "matriarchy".

In a recent post, I argued that the theory of acquired rights violates Hoppe's specificity principle. Although she used different terms and argued it a little differently, Baldwin made a very similar point in her series on fetal self ownership.

In her debate with Walter Block, Baldwin made an important objection to Block's evictionism. She pointed out that Block's characterisation of abortion as "eviction plus killing" is not accurate. As she noted, in fact most abortions are a process comprised of "killing plus removal of a dead body". This objection applies to Judith Jarvis Thomson's defence of abortion too, which also relies on the idea that abortion is legitimate because it can be categorised as an example of letting die not killing.

If Block is concerned to allow eviction but deny killing as he says, the logical consequence would be for him to argue that only extractive abortions (for example, hysterotomy) are legitimate and all non-extractive abortions are illegitimate according to evictionism. Extractive abortions are arguably examples of letting die, not killing, which is central to Block's justification. Yet Block seems entirely uninterested in such details. He provided no defence to Baldwin's objection in the debate, saying "I don't know as much about this as she does so I defer to what she said".

Parental Obligations

Baldwin is one of the few libertarians who argue that parents do have enforceable obligations towards their children as a result of their own causal actions. She argues that since pregnancy is a known possible outcome of consensual sex, parents have responsibility for the consequences of their actions and therefore they have obligations towards the child. This argument is of great interest to me, since I believe that among the competing libertarian views about parental obligations, only the principle of causal responsibility is correct. It seems that Baldwin might accept this principle.

However, Baldwin seems to have a much narrower definition of parental obligations. If I understand her correctly, she holds that a mother has the obligation to provide life support (gestation) during the period of non-viability of a fetus, and if the baby is unwanted then the mother also has the obligation to find a suitable caregiver once the baby is born.

If parents have an obligation to their children because they have responsibility for the consequences of their actions (in cases of consensual sex), then the obligation is far greater than Baldwin seems to accept. Children have a rightful claim against their parents not only for life support during pregnancy (as Baldwin argues), but also for whatever else is necessary to get the child out of peril and to a position of safety and self-sufficiency. This involves raising the child (and all that this entails) to the independence and self-sufficiency of adulthood.

According to this principle, parental obligations apply to both the mother and the father and both are jointly and severally liable towards the child, since both are responsible for putting the child in a state of peril as a result of creating the child. Baldwin makes the case for some limited enforceable obligations of the mother, but it is not clear to me whether she thinks that fathers have enforceable parental obligations or what these are.

Baldwin argues that it is a legitimate choice to give up a child for adoption. She emphasises that "there are many good reasons for not wanting to have a child". There are some cases in which parents do not have obligations, such as pregnancy resulting from rape. However, apart from those exceptions, you cannot legitimately give up parental obligations.

Parents who place a child in peril have a tort liability until that child is out of peril. Adoption is at best a delegation of this obligation, but even then the parents can never fully rid themselves of the legitimate claim that the child has on them (since it is not their claim to give up or nullify). It may be beneficial to support the institution of adoption for purely pragmatic reasons (making the best of a bad situation). Even if adoption should be supported for the sake of children, it is not a legitimate choice for the parents in terms of libertarian theory.

Finally, Baldwin seems to argue that the nature of pregnancy is significant for the role of women within libertarian theory, although it is not clear to me exactly what her argument is. She likens pregnancy to an act of production, with the mothers being "the producers of new self owners". Perhaps she is advocating some form of the theory of gestationalism (the idea that gestation is the primary basis for parental rights and obligations). This idea is not compatible with her support for children as self owners from conception because the unborn self owner already exists during gestation. Gestation is not an act of production since it does not contribute to the existence of the child. Rather, gestation is the first form of nurturing for an already existent unborn child that is developing. This idea of the mother as the "producer" is therefore incompatible with inherent self ownership.

Although I have outlined some disagreements, Baldwin is one of the few libertarians making philosophical arguments for inherent rights and for parental obligations and I appreciate her work.