The Theory of Acquired Rights Is Incorrect

There are two competing theories of the origin of children's self-ownership rights: the theory of inherent rights and the theory of acquired rights. If self-ownership rights are inherent, then a child has rights from the moment he or she comes into existence. If self-ownership rights are acquired, then a child starts life without rights, and then acquires rights at some later point.

Over a series of posts, I will make the argument that only the theory of inherent rights is logically defensible, whereas the theory of acquired rights is logically indefensible. To begin, I will outline the main points of the theory of acquired rights.

The Theory Of Acquired Rights

The theory of acquired rights holds that a child does not have rights until he exhibits some characteristic or ability that only rights-bearers have. Here is the argument:

1. Not all humans have rights (for example, criminals don't).
2. Therefore, rights do not come from being human.
3. Rights come from possession of some characteristic or ability that confers rights-worthiness.
4. Therefore, a child qualifies as a rights-bearing person once he or she demonstrates possession of this characteristic or ability.
5. Existing rights-bearers (adults) do not have to respect the rights of the child until the child exhibits this characteristic or ability.

Implications

An important implication– according to this theory– is that children can be legitimately owned, at least for some period of time. If children start life without rights and only acquire rights at some later point, then there is nothing stopping them from being treated as property during the period when they have no rights. The theory of acquired rights supports the theory of parental ownership.

Another implication of this theory is that every adult may behave as a kind of rights-granting authority, in the sense that he may judge a child to be worthy or not yet worthy of rights, depending on whether the child meets the adult's qualifications.

Based On Assertion

The argument used to justify this theory is invalid. It simply does not follow that since some humans do not have rights, rights cannot be inherent and must be acquired. The existence of criminals does not refute the idea that rights are inherent for humans. On the contrary, criminals did start out with rights but then forfeited their rights because of a criminal act. To deny rights to the innocent is wrong, and the principle of the presumption of rights is valid. Therefore, the argument that rights are acquired and not inherent is merely asserted.

The Problem of a Qualification for Rights

The big problem for the theory of acquired rights is defining a rights-qualifying characteristic or ability that is logically defensible. There is no consensus on this. Some advocates simply choose to leave this part of the argument vague or unspecified (and thereby render the theory incoherent). For those who do specify the qualification, the arguments fall into some variant of these three:

1. When a child has the potential to be capable of reasoning at some point in the future, he qualifies for rights. (This argument does not support acquired rights, it supports inherent rights, as outlined here.)
2. When a child demonstrates the capacity to reason, he qualifies for rights. (This is logically indefensible, as outlined here.)
3. When a child acquires some other physiological feature that is not related to rationality, he qualifies for rights. (This is logically indefensible, as discussed here).

Each of these rights-qualifying criteria present insurmountable logical problems for the theory of acquired rights.

Any norm that would generate conflict is invalid

A norm of withholding respect for another individual's rights until he has demonstrated some specific trait would create conflict, obviating the very function of norms. The purpose of ethics is to prevent conflict over scarce resources. Since we live in a universe of scarcity, there is always the possibility of conflict over who can use each scarce resource. The role of ethics is to provide objective rules for handling scarcity without resorting to aggression. Any norm that would generate conflict (instead of avoiding conflict) is a priori invalid.

A norm that others do not deserve rights until they demonstrate some qualifying trait implies that aggression is permissible until proven otherwise. It would imply that strangers are fair game for aggression until they show good reason to respect their rights. This is the equivalent idea of guilty until proven innocent for rights. This is why it is a conflict generating norm and is invalid. The only workable norms are those that conform to the presumption of rights.

Any norm that is not universal is invalid

All valid ethical norms must be universal because the logic of argumentation implies a universality norm. A universal norm of rights must start with the presumption that rights are inherent (ie universal) and only identify specific, objective actions that— if undertaken— would forfeit rights.

Ethical claims that purport to apply to only one group and not another discriminate in a way that falls foul of logic. The theory of acquired rights has exactly this problem. The theory of acquired rights assumes that nobody starts life with rights. One group then asserts that they are the ones who have qualified as rights-bearers and that another group do not qualify for rights. The problem is that the discrimination is logically indefensible. This means that it does not meet the criteria of a valid moral rule.

The Presumption of Rights

The presumption of rights is a central principle within libertarian ethics. Here is a short summary of its meaning and implications.

The Question

Some starting presumption of a strangers' rights status is required in order to act in any way towards them. In the absence of other information, one must either start from the presumption that a stranger is a legitimate self owner (i.e. a rights-bearing person) or with the presumption that they are not a legitimate self owner. Your view of a stranger's rights status can change in light of evidence, but before you know anything else about them you must start with some presumption. Which is the ethically correct starting point? This is the question that the presumption of rights addresses.

The Purpose Of Norms

To answer this question, one needs a valid ethical rule or norm. Any ethical norm must conform to the rules of norm formation and justification. The purpose of ethical norms is to prevent conflict over scarce resources. Ethical norms are rules for handling scarcity without resorting to aggression. Norms must strictly adhere to the laws of logic and reasoned argument in order to provide an objective method for determining who legitimately controls each scarce resource, and thereby prevent conflict. Therefore, any norm that would not prevent conflict over scarce resources is an invalid norm.

A norm of starting with the presumption that a stranger is not a self owner would immediately lead to conflict. Under this norm, an individual X could legitimately assume the right to attack another individual Y on sight, unless given evidence as to why he should not. Conversely, Y could assume the right to attack X too. This would be a conflict-promoting norm.

The Presumption of Rights

Therefore, the only ethically valid starting presumption regarding a stranger's rights status is that the stranger is a legitimate self owner. Absent any evidence to the contrary, the starting presumption must be to respect the other individual's rights. This is called the presumption of rights.

The presumption of rights provides the philosophical justification for the related legal principle of presumption of innocence. It is also similar to the related principle of the presumption of an existing property owner's legitimacy (an existing property owner's title must be presumed legitimate in the absence of evidence to the contrary, otherwise conflict would be promoted).

The presumption of rights reflects the principle that property rights are rightfully assigned to the individual with the best objective link. Since each individual has the best objective link for ownership of his or her own body, all humans are rightfully self owners or persons.

Rights can be forfeited through acts of aggression. An individual can lose the right to control his body as a consequence of his actions (criminal or tort). He ceases to be a rights-bearing person when this happens. However, absent any evidence of aggression, the presumption must be to respect his self ownership.

Implications

This principle has a number of important logical implications:

1. The burden of proof is always on those who wish to deny an individual's rights. (Just as the burden is always on those who deny the legitimacy of an existing owner's property rights).
2. If there is any doubt as to an individual's rights, he or she must be presumed to be a legitimate self owner.
3. A norm of only respecting an individual's rights once he or she has demonstrated a specific capacity (such as rationality) would conflict with the established valid norm of the presumption of rights.
4. Denying rights to the innocent is always unjust.

I will discuss these implications in more detail a future post.

When do Parental Obligations Not Apply?

The Theory of Parental Responsibility holds that parents have enforceable positive obligations to their children because in creating a child the parents are responsible for placing the child in a state of peril.. Given that parental obligation only arises as a consequence of action, there are cases in which a child can come into existence without a parent incurring positive obligations.

Rape

A rape victim would not have parental obligations for any resultant child since the rape victim did not take action that resulted in a child being created. It was the rapist who acted, and thereby forced those consequences on her.

The rapist would have obligations to support the child, although a reasonable legal system would presumably deem him a criminally unfit parent and deny him access, so his obligations would have to be in the form of monetary payments to whoever was the caregiver of the child for the child's support, alongside restitution payments to the victim.

As a side note, the fact that there are no positive obligations in cases of rape victims means that parental obligations do not provide an argument against abortion in those cases. In cases of consensual sex, parental positive obligations do refute the right to abortion, but not in cases of rape. Whether or not abortion is justified in those cases depends on other arguments.

Gamete Theft

In cases of gamete theft, the biological parents would not have parental obligations. One qualification is that gamete owners have an obligation to be responsible owners, since gametes can have such enormous consequences on the lives of innocent others. Rivka Weinberg has argued that gamete owners have an obligation to take the same level of care with their gametes as one must do with a hazardous material.

Presuming that the biological parent did exercise due care, he or she would not incur parental obligations. For example, if a student donated sperm to a respectable university research team for the expressed purpose of aiding a scientific study of sperm motility and his sperm were stolen from the university and used instead to create a baby, he would not have parental obligations. He could not have reasonably expected to create a baby by his action.

Paternity Fraud

A man fraudulently told that he is the father of a child (when in fact he is not) does not have enforceable obligations towards a child, since he is not the one who created the child's peril. Believing a fraudulent obligation claim does not convert the fraudulent claim into a real obligation. The child's legitimate claim is against the natural father. Whether or not the duped man chooses to become an adoptive father is a matter of personal choice for him, but not obligation.

Endangered Life Of The Mother During Pregnancy

If the life of a pregnant mother is endangered by the unborn child, the mother would have a presumptive right of self-defence against the child to preserve her own life. Her self-defence right would nullify her parental obligations, assuming that the risks to her life were not the result of reckless negligence on her part.

How Do Libertarians Justify Parental Authority?

Parental authority presents a significant problem for libertarian philosophy. The principle of self ownership is incompatible with paternalism. Self ownership means that people have the right to control their own bodies and actions, even if those actions include harming themselves. Paternalism means taking authority over someone to restrict their freedom in their own interests.

If a drunkard chooses to drink himself into an early death, it is his right to do so, however unwise it may be. You may legitimately offer him non-coercive advice or assistance. However, as long as the drunkard is not aggressing against others (not stealing, trespassing etc), then (according to the principle of self ownership) it is not legitimate to restrict his freedom by forcefully preventing him from drinking.

What about parental paternalism? Parents have the authority to make decisions on their child's behalf. This includes restricting children's freedom in various ways, in order to prevent them from coming to harm. It can also include decisions or restrictions that go against the expressed wishes of the child. This is paternalism. Is the philosophy of self ownership therefore incompatible with parental authority?

Libertarians have come up with conflicting arguments in response to this problem:

1. Children are not self owners
2. Parental authority is unjustifiable
3. Parental authority is a homesteaded property right over the child
4. Parental authority derives from parental obligation

Argument 1: Children Are Not Self Owners

For those who advocate the theory of parental ownership, there is no problem justifying parental authority. If parents own their children, then they have complete authority over them. According to this theory, the relationship is the same as that of a master to a slave. If a parent is paternalistic, this is merely a choice over how to use his property. Therefore no contradiction between self ownership and parental authority arises since children are not self owners.

Children cannot be legitimately owned, as I will argue in a separate future article. But even if we accept that children can be owned for the sake of argument, this theory creates more problems. Firstly, there is no justifiable limit to parental authority if children are owned. Locke was the first to argue that parental authority must have limits. Since the Enlightenment it has become generally accepted that parents do not have completely unlimited authority to do whatever they want to their children. However, the theory of parental ownership provides no philosophical basis for limiting parental authority in any way.

Another problem created by this theory is that there is no basis for explaining how (and why) a child could ever cease to be owned and attain self ownership.

Argument 2: Parental Authority Is Unjustifiable

The second view accepts both the argument that children are self owners and the conclusion that parental authority cannot be justified. In this view, parents have no authority to act paternalistically towards children. As a corollary of this view, parents should treat children in the same way that they would treat a rights-bearing adult. This view was represented by the child liberation movement of the 1970s.

This theory faces practical challenges, given the complete helplessness of children and their inability to express preferences on many decisions that affect them, especially in the early years. Some choices will be made paternalistically by default, regardless of whether the parents intend to wield authority.

It is important to note that the argument for treating children the same as adults logically leads to justifying such evils as pedophilia, since (in this view) there can be no basis for paternalistic protection of children against the sexual advances of adults. If this implication does not immediately disqualify this argument for you, I don't know what to tell you. This position was explicitly advocated in the 1970s by intellectuals such as Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and de Beauvoir and by some of the child liberationist authors such as Richard Farson and Germaine Greer.

Argument 3: Parental Authority Is a Homesteaded Property Right Over the Child

This argument is as follows:

1. Children are self owners.
2. Attached to each child is a property right to authority over the child, albeit not an ownership right.
3. Whoever holds this property right can legitimately wield the authority to be paternalistic towards the child and can exclude others from doing so.
4. This right can be homesteaded. Most commonly it is homesteaded by a natural parent.

There are a number of problems with this theory. Most importantly, this right to authority over the child seems to be merely asserted. What is the basis of this argument that children come into the world with a right to authority over them available for homesteading? Where does this kind of property right come from?

Another problem with this theory is that it doesn't seem to involve fathers in any role of parental authority or responsibility. Since the argument is about homesteading, many authors have argued that the mother is the one who naturally homesteads the parental authority role. The act of giving birth to a child is taken as a demonstration of homesteading the authority rights over it. Fathers don't seem to get a look in according to this theory. Murray Rothbard and Roderick Long both explicitly argue that this first-homesteading right goes to mothers only.

A third problem is that there is some equivocation about what exactly this property right amounts to. Sometimes the idea seems to be that parents homestead a limited right to certain kinds of authority, but at other times the idea seems to be that parents do in fact simply own the child, albeit on a temporary basis. Rothbard seems to slip between definitions of this property right when discussing it.

Argument 4: Parental Authority Derives From Parental Obligation

This argument comes from the Theory of Parental Responsibility. It is as follows:

1. Children are self owners.
2. Parents are responsible for the peril that children face because parents put them in a state of peril as a consequence of creating them.
3. Therefore parents have an obligation to remove their children from peril. This means raising them safely to the independence of adulthood.
4. In order to remove a child from peril, a parent must assume authority to act paternalistically towards the child.
5. Therefore the parent can legitimately assume authority over the child insofar as the parent is fulfilling his or her positive obligation towards the child.

There are a number of logical implications of this way of viewing parental authority that differ from the alternative arguments above:

1. Parental authority is strictly limited and there are objective criteria for determining whether it is being misused (based on the positive obligation of removing peril).
2. Protecting children from threats such as pedophiles is not only justified, it is a positive obligation of parents.
3. Parental authority is not a homesteaded property right in the child, rather it is a logical requirement of fulfilling the positive obligations that parents have.
4. Parental authority goes to both mother and father because both are jointly and severally liable for parental obligations as a consequence of creating the child.
5. As Locke pointed out, parental authority is derivative of parental obligation, not the other way around. Far from being a homesteaded right, the authority that parents have is a responsibility arising from (and temporally subsequent to) their acquiring obligations towards the child. This also entails that all use of parental authority must be justifiable in terms of the fulfilment of parental obligations, otherwise it is a misuse of authority.

Which Is The Correct Libertarian View of Parental Authority?

I argue that Argument 4 (parental authority derives from parental obligations) is the correct libertarian view on parental authority. However, most libertarians who have written on this subject have put forward some variant of argument 3 (parental authority is a homesteaded property right over the child). Rothbard and Block have both argued this. This is somewhat surprising since both these writers are advocates of the Theory of Parenting As Charity and the logical implication of that theory would seem to be that parental authority cannot be justified, but this is not the argument that Rothbard or Block make.

As I've argued elsewhere, the Theory of Parental Responsibility is the only theory of parent-child relationship that is compatible with other libertarian principles. The argument that parental authority derives from parental obligations is a logical consequence of this theory. This theory not only provides a philosophical grounding for parental authority, it also provides a clear grounding for limits on that authority.

Do adoptive parents have the same positive obligations as natural parents?

The Theory of Parental Responsibility argues that parents have enforceable positive obligations to their children based on the legal principle of creation of peril. In creating a child, parents change the state of the world from one in which there was not a specific rights-bearing person in peril, to one in which a specific rights-bearing person is in peril.

In contrast, adoptive parents are not the creators of the child. Do adoptive parents still have positive obligations through creation of peril? Or do they have positive obligations through some other means? Or do they not have positive obligations?

Contract

A common way to acquire positive obligations is by contract. Since adoption usually involves contracts, one might argue that adoptive parents can acquire positive obligations via contractual obligations. However, any contract would be between the biological parents and the adopters, since children cannot contract. Such a contract would make the adopters agents of the biological parents, contracted to fulfil various duties on their behalf. It would not create a claim by the children against the adopters (or negate the children's claim against their biological parents). Is there any way that adoptive parents acquire positive obligations to the children themselves, such that the children have a legitimate claim against them?

Peril

I believe adoptive parents do acquire positive obligations through creation of peril. The basis is:

1. A child is owed obligations from his natural parents through creation of peril.
2. An adoptive parent is relieving the natural parent of that obligation and assuming it for themselves.
3. In doing so, the adoptive parent removes the child from the protection of the natural parents (i.e. takes the child away from the care that they are owed by their natural parents).
4. The adoptive parent has thereby removed the obligated caregiver from the child's life, which is the creation of a state of peril, and this gives the adoptive parent a positive obligation to act as the new caregiver.

It may be objected that adoption is probably taking place because the natural parents either cannot or will not meet their obligations. Even if we accept that this is the case and that the natural parents have not been fulfilling all their obligations, the adoptive parents are still effectively cutting off any chance that the child has of receiving care from the natural parent. This is the creation of peril, and it is mitigated by the adoptive parent meeting the obligations instead.

Abandonment, Custody, and Creation of Peril

What about the case of abandoned babies that are adopted? In this case, the adoptive parent has not deprived the child of the natural parent, since the natural parent has abandoned them. The adoptive parent is also not bound by contract, since there is nobody to contract with. Does this mean that the adoptive parent does not have enforceable positive obligations?

I am not sure. A tentative answer is that the process of taking custody is a kind of creation of peril. When an adoptive parent takes custody over an abandoned child, there are various logical consequences:

1. The adoptive parents are excluding anyone else from parenting the child
2. In doing so, they are effectively depriving the child of the possibility of parental care from anyone but themselves.
3. Since this is essentially cutting the child off from care from others, one might argue that this creates positive obligations to provide the care.

I'm still evaluating whether this argument is correct. Any feedback would be welcome.

Practical Barriers To Enforcement of Parental Obligations

Stephan Kinsella argues that even though parents do have rightful positive obligations, these obligations could be largely unenforceable for practical reasons:

a parent who needs to be forced to care for their kid will not be a good parent, so probably best to let a third party adopt the kid. It could be the case that the positive obligations we think parents have assumed in the case of kids, are simply mostly unenforceable, except for some narrow cases like forced heirship law or legal obligations of financial support, and so on.

Are parental obligations practically unenforceable? And if they are practically unenforceable, what do we infer about any failure to meet such obligations?

Are Parental Obligations Practically Unenforceable?

Some positive parental obligations do present enormous practical challenges to enforce. For example, there are sociopathic or incompetent people who are so dangerous to children that presumably they could never be forced to provide even the bare minimum survival care required for any child.

There are workarounds for enforcement even in these cases. A dangerous parent could be rightfully forced both to give up custody of their child to a responsible party and/or to provide financial support, as Kinsella suggests.

The ultimate consequence of enforceability is that adults should be able to sue their parents for a failure to meet parental obligations to them back during their childhood. There are still practical barriers to enforcement in these cases. The passage of time would work against the plaintiff. Also, the fact that the plaintiff is a functioning adult is prima-facie evidence that their parents did deliver them to adulthood safely, so this would also work against the plaintiff in many cases.

However, if such barriers were overcome, a parent could be held liable for damages. For example, if it could be demonstrated that a child suffered sexual abuse as a result of a parent leaving them with in the care of the abuser without exercising reasonable diligence to check the safety of the person they were entrusting the child to, that parent should be considered liable of a failure to protect the child (and protection is a parental obligation).

What Do Practical Barriers Imply About Justice?

It is incontestable that- at least in some cases- positive parental obligations may be practically impossible to enforce. What are we to make of this? There are three competing inferences that one might draw from this:

1. Since the practical barriers to enforcement are insurmountable in some cases, it cannot be defined as an injustice if parents fail to meet their positive obligations.
2. It may be an injustice if parents fail to meet positive obligations, but since we can't practically do anything about it, it is meaningless to even talk about it.
3. Justice matters, even if there is no practical way to redress an injustice at present.

For me, the correct inference to draw is 3: justice still matters even if we sometimes can't enforce it for practical reasons.

Rothbard once made the point that is valid to have a goal like the eradication of murder even if you do not ever expect that goal to be achieved. Similarly, it is valid to have the goal of eradicating the neglect and abuse of children, even if you never expect this to be achieved for practical reasons.

There are insurmountable practical barriers to achieving a 100% enforcement on the prohibition of murder, but the injustice of every murder still matters. Similarly, there are insurmountable practical barriers to enforcing every parent to fulfil all their positive obligations to their children, but the injustice of child neglect and abuse still matters.

Objections Against The State-Of-Peril Argument For Parental Obligations

This post addresses direct objections to the theory that parents have enforceable positive obligations to their children as a result of the creation of peril. There are also consequentialist arguments against this theory and these are addressed in a different post.

Ten objections have been made to the argument that parents have responsibility for a child's state of peril:

1. Creating a child is not an act of aggression and therefore does not incur obligations.
2. Parental obligations are only valid if voluntarily agreed to.
3. Unborn children commit aggression against their mothers, so parents cannot be obligated to them.
4. Giving life is a net benefit and therefore parents are not obligated further.
5. Adoptive parents disprove the causal theory of parental obligation.
6. It is too difficult to determine who caused a baby to exist, therefore parents don't have obligations by causal action.
7. Causal action leads to insufficient parental obligations
8. Creation of peril only occurs if someone's rights have already been violated, but creating a child does not violate rights.
9. The non-identity problem means there is no creation of peril.
10. The concept of parental obligations is merely a cover for prejudice or ulterior motives.

Objection 1: Creating A Child Is Not An Act of Aggression and Therefore Does Not Incur Obligations

This argument is that the only way to incur positive obligations is by voluntary agreement or as restitution for an invasive act of aggression. Since creating a child cannot be classed as an act of aggression, obligations do not arise from being the cause of a child's creation. Elizabeth Brake made this argument.

This objection misses the point of creation of peril. Certain actions create a positive obligation without voluntary agreement and without having committed a crime. The obligation is essentially to prevent a crime from taking place for which one has set the causal chain in motion but which has not yet taken effect.

The parents have not harmed the child or aggressed against it by creating it, but they have created the peril that the child is in. If the parents do not look after the child, the child will die. The parents are the cause of the child being in a state of mortal danger. Their obligations are not to provide restitution for a harm done. Rather, they are obligated to prevent harm from taking place. The responsibility is to stop the peril from turning into harm.

Objection 2: Obligations Are Only Valid If Voluntarily Agreed To

The assertion that the only way to incur positive obligations is by voluntary agreement or as restitution for an invasive act of aggression leads to another objection against parental obligations. This is the argument that parental obligations only apply in cases where the parents voluntarily accept them, and not as a result of causal action. Walter Block asserts that parents cannot have obligations if they did not intend to have children:

The father, and the mother too, violated no one's rights by engaging in voluntary sexual intercourse. All of a sudden, well nine months later, there is another human being in great need of care. Neither parent, we posit, … desired any such outcome. Indeed, they took steps to prevent it. There is nothing in all of libertarian law that would make criminals of these two people if they refused to raise this baby.

The causal principle is that people are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions. A foreseeable consequence of consensual sex is the creation of a child. Therefore, even if the parents in a given case did not intend to have a child, they are still responsible for it. It is simply an assertion that obligations can only arise through voluntary agreement or as restitution. There is nothing in libertarian theory to prevent tort obligations that arise from the creation of peril as a consequence of reasonably foreseeable action. This is the origin of parental obligations.

Objection 3: Unborn Children Initiate Aggression Against Their Mothers

This argument was advanced by Williamson Evers, who was influenced by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Evers in turn influenced Rothbard, who characterised unborn children as "coercive parasites" following this argument. Evers' line of argument is:

1. An unborn child "attaches itself" to the mother, "burrows into the wall of the womb" and "expands like Alice-in-Wonderland in the rabbit's house".

2. These actions constitute an "attack" by the unborn child on the mother and are "aggressive" in character (i.e an act of initiatory aggression).

3. Since the mother has been aggressed against, she has not put the unborn child in a state of peril by creating it.

4. Therefore parents in general do not put their children in peril by creating them.

There are things to contest in every premise of this argument, and even if you accept the premises, the conclusions do not follow. Using odd or aggressive words to describe various facts of pregnancy does not prove children are aggressors against their mothers. It is simply a fact of nature that babies embed in the womb and grow. This is not an act of aggression, it is a natural consequence of getting pregnant. The mother's own body plays the decisive role in facilitating, regulating, and nurturing the entire process.

Furthermore, there is no sense in which describing the steps of pregnancy using weird language challenges the core thesis regarding peril (that creating a child entails creating a situation of helplessness, and therefore responsibility). Evers' does not refute this.

Yet further, given his argument is all based around describing pregnancy, Evers also

A) ignores fathers completely, as if they have nothing to do with any questions of responsibility; and

B) fails to show how any of this relates to children once they are born (he merely asserts that the same conclusions from the pregnancy example somehow apply).

Objection 4: Giving Life Is A Net Benefit And Therefore Parents Are Not Obligated Further

This argument has the following form:

1. When parents create children, they are giving them the gift of life.

2. Life is a net benefit.

3. Since the parents have benefitted the child by creating him, it would be an injustice if on top of that they were obliged to provide other things.

Having been created is not something that is susceptible to cost-benefit analysis. Even if one accepts the premise that life is a gift of incomparable worth (which I do), gifts do not nullify other obligations. The two are separate. This is especially the case since the obligation in this case is to relieve a state of peril. If I take you up in an aircraft, give you a million dollars in cash, and then parachute out of the plane leaving you unable to fly, I cannot legitimately argue "I gave you an enormous gift, therefore I don't have obligations to you!".

Evers makes this gift-of-life argument using an analogy. He argues that it would be unjust for someone who saves a child from a car crash (in which both parents have been killed) to then be lumbered with responsibility for the child.

There is something fundamentally different about this analogy. When parents create a child, they change the state of the universe from one in which there was no child in peril to one in which a rights-bearing child is in peril (the fact that the child did not exist beforehand is irrelevant to this argument). In contrast, the rescuer in Evers' example did not create the peril. He merely alleviates some of the immediate peril that a child was already in.

Arguably, whilst the rescuer still has the baby in his hands, he does indeed have a responsibility for it. He cannot simply abandon the baby directly after saving it from the accident. Although the rescuer was not obliged to save the child initially, once he did so it would seem to follow that he has to keep looking after that person until

A) he finds someone else who can take over the responsibility; or

B) the child is no longer helpless.

However, it does not follow that the rescuer would be the one responsible to raise the child to adulthood. In real life, there are many cultural practices to address what would happen in cases where both parents die, such as written wills that state who should have custody, or the practice of assigning godparents.

This kind of tragic accident is a foreseeable risk, so one of the positive obligations that parents have is to make arrangements for their children's care in the event that both parents die before the children reach adulthood.

Another way of framing the net-benefit argument is that since being born does not worsen a child's situation, it does not generate obligations. Both Walter Block and Łukasz Dominiak have made the argument that creating a child must be viewed as a net positive and so cannot be a source of liability for obligations. Their argument is that it is better to be born helpless than not born at all, therefore parents don't have an obligation to remove the helplessness.

The reductio ad absurdum of this idea is that it is better to be born into a highly abusive family than not to be born at all, therefore parents have no obligation to refrain from abusing their children. Block even uses this same logic when he argues that it is better to be created for a few months and then killed via abortion than to not have been created at all, therefore abortion cannot be a rights violation. He does not seem to view this as a reductio, but it seems self-evidently absurd to me.

Another way that the argument is posed is that there is no way to come into existence as a human without being helpless, and since being created is a net benefit, helplessness just comes as part of the package and is not a source of obligation. But this is merely to assert that no obligation is incurred. The fact that there is no way of creating a child that does not put the child in a state of peril logically implies that creating children incurs obligations, not that children just have to accept that they are helpless.

Objection 5: Adoptive Parents Disprove The Causal Theory of Parental Obligation

The adoptive-parents objection is an argument against any causal theory of parental obligation (and state of peril is a causal theory of parental obligations).

This argument is simply:

1. Adoptive parents have the same obligations as natural parents
2. Adoptive parents are not the cause of their children's existence
3. Therefore parental obligations do not come from being the cause of a child's existence.

This argument has been made by Williamson Evers and Roderick Long.

It is not being the cause of creation that generates a positive obligation for the parents, it is the causal responsibility for creation of peril. Adoptive parents do create peril for a child by removing them from their natural parents (regardless of whether those natural parents are unwilling or incompetent). Therefore, adoptive parents do acquire obligations to the child as a result of creation of peril, albeit in a different way to natural parents.

The child has a claim against his natural parents as a result of creation of peril and the adoptive parents have deprived him of the chance to benefit from his rightful claim. The fact that the natural parents may have been unwilling or unable to care for the child does not invalidate this claim, nor does any contract that the adoptive parents made with the natural parents (the child was never involved in any contract and cannot be said to have given up his claim). In addition, the fact that we judge it to be in the child's best interest to be adopted (and therefore ultimately in his best interest to be deprived of his rightful claim against his natural parents) also does not invalidate his claim or change the fact that the adoptive parents have deprived him of the chance to benefit from it. In this way, the adoptive parents become causally responsible for a child's state of peril.

What about the case of abandoned babies? One might argue that in this special case the parenting as charity theory is valid. I think that even in this case, adoptive parents are depriving the child of their natural parent (letting the natural parents off the hook for liability to the child's claim) and therefore they become responsible for the child's helpless state.

I have also addressed the question of adoptive parents in a separate post here.

Objection 6: It is Too Difficult to Determine Who Caused a Baby to Exist Therefore Parents Don't Have Obligations by Cause

This objection is that parents cannot be ascribed obligations as a result of their role in creating a child because many people played a role in the causal chain that led to the child's creation (for example the grandparents by creating the parents, the matchmaker who got them together, the lab technician in the case of IVF, etc). The worry is that too many people will be implicated in parental obligations. Theresa Baron has argued this.

For justice to be done, an objective set of rules is needed to allocate responsibility for a baby having been placed in a state of peril. For the vast majority of babies, this is entirely uncomplicated. In those rare cases where it becomes more complex, human beings can use reasoned argument within a legal system to generate precedent and case law about how to handle such cases. It is also worth noting that some of the complex cases such as IVF may only be more complicated because they involve morally illegitimate practices, but that will be addressed in a future post.

I do not consider it reasonable to argue that it is impossible to allocate parental responsibility because we can't tell who created a baby.

Another variant of this objection is to argue that the concept of causal parental obligations is so complex that the theory cannot be discussed or refuted. Brighouse & Swift's book "Family Values" is ostensibly about "the ethics of parent-child relationships", yet they fail to address or refute the causal theory of parental obligations. Their excuse for evading the question is that the issue is too complex and "needs further specification":

Do children have a right to a parent, the right to be parented? Do they have, as some have argued, a right to parents, to a mother and a father? Can they claim a right to be parented by a particular adult, or by particular adults, such as those who procreatively brought them into being? Though we will say something about these big and difficult questions, we cannot provide a compre­hensive treatment; they need further specification before they can properly be addressed, and, on receiving that specification, they quickly disaggregate into a variety of different, and difficult, issues.

Objection 7: Causal Action Leads To Insufficient Parental Obligations

This objection holds that parental obligations from causal action do not obligate parents to do enough. If parents only have to alleviate the state of peril then parental obligation will not be sufficiently weighty, therefore parental obligations must be based on something else. Elizabeth Brake made this argument. She admits that some kind of obligations follow from causal action but argues that not enough obligations do.

This objection is based on the mere assertions and personal judgements. It is a mere assertion that causal responsibility for state of peril only generates limited obligations and personal judgement that those obligations are not enough.

One can just as easily assert that the obligations arising from causal actions are enormously weighty. Since peril is only alleviated once a child is a self-sufficient, healthy adult, parental obligations might be judged to involve an enormous amount of sacrifice. As just one example, a child needs love in order to grow into a self-sufficient adult. Just as a malnourished childhood would lead to actionable harm, so would a loveless childhood. Providing loving care to a child is not a superficial task.

The key reason that this objection fails is because it is self-contradictory by definition. The only way to demonstrate that parental obligations from causal action are insufficient would be to show that a child did not grow into a self-sufficient, healthy adult as a result of having received inadequate care from their parents. But if the child did not grow up to be healthy and self-sufficient because they received inadequate care, then the parents by definition did not fulfil their obligations.

The obligation is to do whatever is necessary to prevent the bad outcome. If the bad outcome occurs by omission of action of the parents, then the obligation has not been fulfilled by definition.

Objection 8: Creation of Peril Only Occurs if Someone's Rights Have Already Been Violated but Creating a Child Does Not Violate Rights.

This objection is similar to the argument that parental obligation only occurs if rights have been violated by aggression, but in this case the argument is that creation of peril itself only occurs when aggression has taken place. Since creating a child or giving birth are not in themselves invasive rights violations, the argument is that no creation of peril can be said to have taken place. Łukasz Dominiak has made this argument.

This argument uses an absurd definition of peril. Creation of peril means putting someone in danger. Putting someone in danger comes before you have actually violated their rights. If I start a huge fire in my backyard, I may put my neighbour's house in danger, although not yet actually damage it. I have an obligation to prevent the fire from spreading out of control to my neighbour's house. This obligation exists precisely to prevent the invasion happening. My obligation to mitigate peril is no use to anyone if I let the peril convert to actual harm. I am not free to ignore all the foreseeable risks I can create for others right up until I actually hurt people.

On this absurd definition it would not count as the creation of peril for me to plant landmines all over the beach, it would only be creation of peril when somebody actually stepped on one and blew up.

I agree that creating a child is not in itself a rights violation, but that is irrelevant to the question of creation of peril.

Objection 9: The Non-Identity Problem Means There Is No Creation of Peril

Dominiak appeals to the non-identity problem as an argument against creation of peril. The non-identity problem refers to moral questions regarding people who do not yet exist, such as whether it is right or wrong to create a person if that person may face particular difficulties in life, or alternatively whether it is right or wrong to do things that may negatively impact people who do not exist yet.

This problem is irrelevant to the question at hand, since the argument is not that creating a child is an act of aggression. It is true that children do not consent to be born, but it is also true that creating a child is not an act of aggression. It happens to be the case that as a consequence of being created, a child is put into a state of peril. The parents are responsible for this: they changed the state of the universe from one in which there was no specific child in peril to one in which a specific child is in peril. The question at hand is not whether they should have had the child or not, rather it is what obligations do they have now that they have created a child. Therefore, the non-identity problem is irrelevant.

Objection 10: The Concept of Parental Obligations Is Merely a Cover for Prejudice or Ulterior Motives

Roderick Long dismisses the idea that abortion is incompatible with parental obligations by claiming that this concept of parental obligations is merely 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.

It would be logically consistent if Long were to also argue that the idea of fathers' parental obligations is merely a misandrist prejudice which sees men as nothing but providers of resources for family members and not individuals etc., but Long does not apply the same logic to men and has no problem with fathers having obligations as a result of their actions.

This objection is nothing more than an ad hominem fallacy and utterly fails to refute the logic of causal parental obligations.

Brighouse & Swift simply assert that children have no claim against their biological parents without refuting the causal argument. Instead, they characterise acknowledgement of children's claims on their parents as mere cultural prejudice ("bionormativity"):

Our articulation of the child’s interest in a relationship with a parent makes no reference to biological connection. Nothing important need be lacking, from the child’s point of view, if she is raised by an adult without that connection, so children raised by adoptive parents have no complaint, no claim against their biological parents that they be the adults with whom they have a relationship of the kind we have described… our account of children’s interests simply fails to recognize the very important interest that children have in being parented by an adult to whom they are biologically connected… We could agree that children are owed the kind of parenting they need to develop a sense of self and the capacity for agency, while denying that they must be provided with what they need for the particular, biologically informed, identity that is currently culturally dominant. Perhaps, while discharging our obligations to current children seeking a healthy identity in a culture dominated by particular ways of finding it, we should also be challenging “bionormativity.”

This is another example of retreat to ad hominem.

Why Do Parents Have Responsibility For Their Children?

If someone falls into a lake, bystanders have no enforceable obligation to save them. However, if you push someone into a lake, you have an enforceable obligation to save them because you are responsible for putting them in a state of peril. This is a principle of jurisprudence: one may acquire positive obligations by placing someone in a state of peril.

When parents create a child, one consequence is that the child is in a state of temporary helplessness or peril. Therefore, the parents have an enforceable obligation to bring the child out of this state of helplessness. This means doing whatever it takes to raise them safely to the independence or self-sufficiency of adulthood. The parents have responsibility for the child in the same way that someone who pushes a person into a lake has a responsibility to rescue them. This is the basis of the causal principle of parental obligations.

A competing theory argues that creating a child does not entail placing someone in peril and therefore parents do not have enforceable obligations. In this view, parents are more like the bystanders who see someone fall into a lake. The child may be helpless (I.e. in peril- just as the person in a lake is in peril) but this view argues that the child's helplessness is not a source of responsibility for the parents. This alternative view is the Theory of Parenting as Charity.

Parental obligation does not arise through contract but rather as a result of the parents' actions being causally responsible for the peril that the child faces. Even if the parents did not intend to create a child (and even if they took the precaution of using contraceptives), creating a life was a foreseeable risk that they are responsible for. In legal terms, it is a strict liability tort.

The causal principle of parental obligation has radical implications:

1. Voluntarily making your gametes available for fusion is the act that creates parental obligations, regardless of whether any resultant child was intended.
2. Both the mother and father are jointly and severally liable for their obligations.
3. Parental obligation is to the child, not anyone else (not the other parent, nor society at large)
4. Pregnancy is not an act of creation, it is an act of nurturing a child that has already come into existence at conception.
5. Abortion is incompatible with parental obligations.
6. Parents cannot legitimately absolve themselves of their obligation by giving up a child for adoption
7. Gamete donation cannot be justified
8. You cannot give up your parental obligations.

Libertarians Have Erred on Parental Obligations

As discussed in a previous post, there are competing philosophical theories regarding the relationship between parents and children. Libertarians are divided between two of these theories:

1. The Theory of Parental Responsibility

According to The Theory of Parental Responsibility, parents have enforceable positive obligations to their children. Here are some implications:

1. Parents have enforceable positive obligations to bring their child out of peril, which means both protecting the child and doing whatever is necessary to enable the child to become an independent (self-sustaining) adult.

2. Parents also have the negative obligation to not aggress against their child (no spanking, beating etc).

3. Both parents are jointly and severally liable for their positive obligations, since both have responsibility for their actions.

4. Both parents are obligated regardless of whether they wanted the child, since the obligation comes from responsibility for actions, not desire or agreement.

5. Parents cannot abandon their responsibilities, since the obligation is based on action not agreement. They can only pass on the obligation by finding others willing and able to adopt the children and thereby assume the responsibility. The original parents must also exercise due diligence in choosing adoptive parents, or they could share liability for any mistreatment by the adoptive parents.

2. The Theory of Parenting as Charity

According to the Theory of Parenting as Charity, parents do not have enforceable positive obligations to their children. Here are some implications:

1. Parents only have the negative obligation to refrain from directly aggressing against their child.

2. Deliberate starvation of children is permissible (Rothbard was honest enough to acknowledge this).

3. All forms of neglect (regardless of how extreme and regardless of whether it is intentional) are permissible.

4. There is no way in which fathers can be held responsible towards children. Any support they provide is merely akin to charity.

5. Parents can abandon their children whenever they want.

6. Unborn children may be justifiably aborted at any point (although many libertarians fail to see any problem with this implication as they want abortion to be permissible).

Which is The Correct Libertarian Theory?

Which theory is compatible with broader libertarian principles? Prima facie, the theory of parental responsibility appears entirely reasonable to me, whereas the theory of parenting as charity appears horrifically unreasonable. However, the reasonable theory is in fact the minority view among libertarians who have written on this topic. The majority have argued some version of the theory of parenting as charity (the one with the horrific implications).

Some libertarians have attempted to create workarounds to blunt some of the horrific implications of the theory of parenting as charity:

• Rothbard argued that parents do have a duty to provide care based on personal morality, albeit not an enforceable duty. On this line of argument, deliberately starving your child to death is a vice, but not a crime.

• Block has argued that although parents can abandon their children, they have an obligation to ask others first, and only if nobody else wants to care for the child can the parent leave them to starve. In this bizarre view, it is not that parents have any obligation to their own children not to starve them, but rather they are obliged to random strangers not to deprive those strangers of the chance to adopt their children.

Such workarounds are not only ineffective, they do not address the core problem which is that the theory itself is wrong.

Libertarians pride themselves on being tough-minded enough to accept highly counter-intuitive ideas when those ideas are correct. But the fact that a theory is counter-intuitive is not evidence that it is correct. Sometimes it is just an awful idea. Adopting the view that parents have no obligations has been a huge error in libertarian thinking. There is a perfectly reasonable alternative libertarian theory of parental obligations. Libertarians should rethink their views on this.

Consequentialist Arguments Against Parental Obligations

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:

1. It would be a slippery slope to recognising general welfare obligations

2. It would entail denying the validity of the right to abortion.

3. 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:

1. the justification of parental obligations is specific, not general.

2. 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:

1. The State would have excuses to check whether parents are fulfilling the care that they owe their children, such as checking on diets etc.

2. 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.

Three Theories of Parental Obligations

One of the most important philosophical questions relating to the family is whether parents have enforceable positive obligations towards their children. How you answer this question depends on your theory of the relationship between parents and children. Here are 3 major theories of that relationship:

1. The Theory of Parental Ownership

2. The Theory of Parenting as Charity

3. The Theory of Parental Responsibility

The first two theories deny parental positive obligations. The third affirms them.

The Theory of Parental Ownership

The theory of parental ownership views parenting as a kind of property ownership. In this view, parents are the owners of their children and children are the property of their parents. This is an ancient theory. Versions of it have been expressed by Aristotle, codified in Roman law, and argued by Hobbes. This is the main line of argument:

1. Parents create a child

2. Creators rightfully own what they create

3. Therefore parents rightfully own their children

4. Owners can do whatever they want with their property

5. Therefore parents don't have any positive obligations

Sometimes this theory is modified to say that parents may have obligations towards other adults that indirectly influence their treatment of their own children. For example, some posit that a parent must inform other adults before abandoning a child in case other adults would like to adopt. Another example is the idea that parents must ensure that they do not raise children who will aggress against other people. Yet these kinds of obligations are ultimately not to a parent's own children but rather to other adults.

The Theory of Parenting as Charity

The theory of parenting as charity denies that children can be owned. It views children as self owners who have rights. According to this view, parents do have some negative obligations: they must not to actively abuse (aggress against) their children. These are the same general negative obligations that any adult has towards another adult. However, according to this theory, parents do not have any positive obligation to provide care to their children if they don't want to (or if they stop wanting to). The theory of parenting as charity has this main line of argument:

1. Parents create children

2. Children are temporarily helpless

3. Creation itself is not a source of obligation

4. Helplessness itself is not a source of obligation

5. Therefore there are no enforceable parental obligations (making any parental care a voluntary act of charity).

Why isn't creation a source of parental obligation? One argument given is that if this were the case, parents would be obliged to care for their children forever and this is taken as self-evidently false. Why isn't helplessness a source of obligation? The argument is that the mere fact that some person is in need does not logically create an enforceable obligation on any other person to provide for them.

The Theory of Parental Responsibility

The theory of parental responsibility also denies that children can be owned. It differs from the theory of parenting as charity in that it argues that obligations can come from a different basis than merely the act of creation or the fact of a child's helplessness. The core argument is as follows:

1. People are responsible for the consequences of their actions

2. As a consequence of creating a child, parents have put another human being (the child) in a state of peril.

3. Children cannot consent to being born

4. Since the child did nothing to create their state of peril nor consent to it, the child's peril is entirely the responsibility of the parents

5. Therefore parents have a positive obligation to do whatever is necessary to remove the child from a state of peril, since not doing so would constitute an act of aggression as a form of tort.

The Libertarian Error on Parental Obligations

Most postwar libertarians who addressed this question have denied the validity of enforceable parental positive obligations. For example, Murray Rothbard, Wendy McElroy, Walter Block, and Harry Browne all denied them. Libertarians usually justify denying positive parental obligations by arguing some variant of the theory of parenting as charity. Rothbard provided a detailed defence of this idea. He saw the needs of children as just a subset of the more "general problem of the sick or the helpless". Although Rothbard never used the term charity in relation to this, I think it is a logical name for this theory.

I believe that the denial of parental positive obligations is a huge error in libertarian theory. Only the theory of parental responsibility (which affirms enforceable parental obligations) is logically defensible. A few libertarian thinkers have argued for variants of this theory in the past. Nathaniel Branden, Doris Gordon, and John Walker all made arguments along these lines, but only in short fragments. In present times, Stephan Kinsella is the main proponent of this idea, although it is not the focus of his work. I believe parental responsibility is the correct theory and the only one that is ultimately compatible with the broader principles of libertarian philosophy. I'm currently researching this subject and will be addressing these arguments in more detail in future.

On A Gift for My Daughter

Harry Browne had a huge influence on me because he successfully achieved three of my goals: he became financially independent, he designed a life of maximum personal freedom, and he travelled the world an expatriate. I learned how to invest through listening to the archives of his radio shows and reading his book Fail Safe Investing. Another of his books— How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World— was a big influence on my decision to sell my business and leave my career behind.

Many years ago I read an article of his called A Gift for My Daughter. I revisited the article after becoming a father myself, as I have a daughter too. I found the article very thought provoking because I disagree with Harry’s outlook on parenting.

Harry Browne’s Article

In 1966, Harry Browne was divorced from is first wife and had lost custody of his daughter, who was nine years old at the time. He was writing a column that was published in various newspapers, including one in the town where his ex-wife and daughter lived. When he found out that his column was going to come out on Christmas Day of 1966, he sent a Christmas card to his daughter that said “your Christmas present will be on the editorial page of the Santa Anna Register on Christmas morning”.

In the article, Harry explained that the gift was an idea:

If I could give you just one thing, I’d want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it. The truth is simply this: No one owes you anything.

He goes on to explain the significance of this statement as he sees it:

When people do things for you, it’s because they want to — because you, in some way, give them something meaningful that makes them want to please you, not because anyone owes you anything. No one has to like you. If your friends want to be with you, it’s not out of duty. Find out what makes others happy so they’ll want to be near you.

He describes how he uses this knowledge in his own life:

A great burden was lifted from my shoulders the day I realized that no one owes me anything. For so long as I’d thought there were things I was entitled to, I’d been wearing myself out — physically and emotionally — trying to collect them. No one owes me moral conduct, respect, friendship, love, courtesy, or intelligence. And once I recognized that, all my relationships became far more satisfying. I’ve focused on being with people who want to do the things I want them to do. That understanding has served me well with friends, business associates, lovers, sales prospects, and strangers. It constantly reminds me that I can get what I want only if I can enter the other person’s world. I must try to understand how he thinks, what he believes to be important, what he wants. Only then can I appeal to someone in ways that will bring me what I want.

Unchosen Obligations

I appreciate Harry Browne’s emphasis on finding win-win relationships with other people. He wanted his daughter to know that it's better to find positive ways to incentivise people to give you what you want, rather than rely on their sense of guilt or obligation. As a practical matter, relationships are more fulfilling when based on positive incentives than on obligation. This approach informed Harry Browne's whole outlook on life. In How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, he applies the idea of finding win-win solutions to problems in business and personal relationships.

Underlying the idea that people don't owe you anything is the philosophical principle that unchosen positive obligations are invalid. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't owe anyone else anything, unless you make a deal and agree some kind of debt or obligation.

I agree with the approach of finding win-win solutions and not relying on guilt about owing you something. When it comes to adult relationships, nobody owes you love, or attention, or interest, or respect, or anything else. You have to earn these things in a positive, win-win way with other people.

But A Gift for My Daughter is a strange article because it shows up one of Harry Browne's blind spots regarding obligations. As something that he wrote for his daughter, it is strange that he chose to emphasise that nobody owes anyone anything.

When it comes to consenting adults who have no previous history with each other, it’s true that nobody owes you anything. If you are romantically interested in someone, they don't owe you romantic interest back. If you want to do business with someone, they don't owe it to you to do business with you. If you want people to read your work, they don't owe you their attention. But that isn’t true of all relationships.

Chosen Obligations

Although there are no unchosen positive obligations, there are chosen positive obligations. People can owe each other things. You can have positive obligations to other people, if you choose to take on obligations through your actions. For example, if someone borrows money from you, then rightfully they do owe you something: money. If that person glibly stated that “nobody owes you anything”, that would be annoying. You'd be justified in saying “hey, you borrowed $500 from me and I want it back. You do owe that to me”.

I appreciate the Harry Browne wanted to emphasize that there's no way of forcing other people to feel like they owe you. But it is possible for people to owe each other if they do something to incur a debt or an obligation through their own actions. The most important obligation you can have in life is that which comes from the act of having a child. This is what Harry missed.

Imagine the following scenario: You are on a boat out at sea, standing on deck with a friend. Your friend is leaning over the side of the boat, looking at something in the water. Now imagine you give him a push- enough to knock him into the water. Your friend yells for help. Obviously it would be immoral for you to yell back down, “I just want to let you know that nobody owes you anything in this life”, and then sail off.

If you push your friend into the ocean, then it's on you to save him. You must do whatever you have to do to save this person from their fate, which would be to drown. You must throw him life jacket, or launch a dinghy, or throw down a rope, or jump in yourself. You must get him out of the water. And if you fail to save him and he were to drown, it would be on you because you pushed him in.

We all understand intuitively that if you push someone off your boat, then through your action you have put that person in danger and it's on you to get them out of danger.  If you don't save them and they drown, then that's murder. In these circumstances, the idea that “nobody owes you anything” is not true.

So there are circumstances in which you legitimately owe somebody something, even if you've never made a contract. The story of your friend on the boat is an example where there was no contract about who's going to save who from the ocean. But by pushing your friend in, you have put them in danger. It’s your fault and you have to fix it because you're the cause of the danger. You are responsible for that person's safety now that you've pushed them into the water.

The same logic applies to parenting. When you have a child, you bring someone into a situation of helplessness. By creating a new life you have put a child into a situation of mortal danger who never asked to be put in that position. You put them there as the parents, so it's your responsibility to get them out of that danger. You have to look after your children and give them everything they need to become fully independent, healthy adults with all of the faculties that they need to survive in the world and live their own life. That responsibility comes because you're the one who put them in that situation.

Parents do owe their children a huge amount. That's why it bothers me that Harry wrote this article to his daughter.

The Damage Of Divorce

The backstory to Harry writing this letter is that he went through a very acrimonious divorce with his first wife and had lost custody of his daughter. As far as I understand, Harry initiated the divorce and part of the settlement was that he did not have visitation rights.

Divorce is extremely detrimental to children. Statistically, parents divorcing is a risk factor for a whole range of destructive and self-destructive behaviours in children, such as depression, drug abuse, and self harm. It is also linked to poorer health outcomes in later life. That doesn't mean that it's inevitably going to lead to certain outcomes. You are not fated to a particular life from your childhood, but you do face additional, unnecessary challenges if your parents divorce.

Unless there is violence or physical danger, no child wants their parents to break up the family. My parents split up when I was very young. The break up of my family was one of the worst events of my life. Given this context, Harry’s letter to his daughter seems negligent to the point of cruelty. Parents owe their children a huge amount. Harry was not there for his daughter. He was not providing her with protection or a positive role model as a father.

From the child's perspective, if a parent is willing to give up custody to get a divorce (as Harry did) then this sends a terrible message to the child. Through his actions, Harry effectively told his daughter that his dislike for his wife was so strong that he was willing to give up seeing his daughter in order to get away from his wife. Therefore, his relationship with his daughter was less important to him than getting away. To add insult to injury, by leaving he left his daughter in the care of the same person that he judged so negatively. He wasn’t willing to suffer his wife, but he was willing to let his daughter do so alone. That's a tough message for a child.

Before he presumed to pass on any life lessons to his daughter in a public article, I think Harry could have communicated a lot more humility under the circumstances. He could have apologised for the mess of the acrimonious divorce, taken responsibility for his part in it (especially since he initiated it) and emphasised to his daughter that as an innocent child, she was entirely blameless in the break-up of her family. Without that kind of preface, any advice that he might see fit to offer would have fallen on deaf ears, if I were his daughter.

The Problem with Personal Liberation Movements

Harry was not alone in having a blind spot about his responsibilities as a parent. The problem with his approach goes to the heart of the postwar personal liberation movement, which Harry was a part of. A core weakness of theories of personal liberation since the second world war has been to view children as a barrier to liberation.

When it comes to consenting adults, removing barriers to personal freedom is ethically neutral. I accept the argument that people should be able to live lives of their own choosing and should not necessarily be constrained by traditions handed down to them. The important distinction is between traditions that others impose on you and responsibilities that you incur through your actions.

If you pursue personal liberation without a clear understanding of the obligations that you incur through your actions, then you can end up seeking liberation from the responsibilities of parenting. This is to imagine that the reduction of freedom that comes with parenting is somehow imposed on you (by tradition or someone else) and ignore the fact that it is a result of your own actions.

Now that I have a daughter, I can't just do whatever I want in life. I have to make choices in her interest. For example, I would like to continue our life of perpetual travel, but our daughter benefits from more stability, so we’ve chosen to limit our travel.

I appreciate Harry's message that nobody owes you anything when applied to consenting adults. But it is possible for people to owe you something through their actions, and parents certainly owe their children. In this context, Harry’s gift—coming from a father who was unable to see his daughter because of an acrimonious divorce that he instigated—must have been a bitter pill.

What I Would Write To My Daughter

If I wanted to give my own daughter a message that was a “gift” in the way that Harry did, I would write this:

I just want you to know from me, as your father, that you don't owe me anything. You never asked to be born into our family. When you grow up, I hope you will choose to spend time with me and share things with me about your life, your thoughts, and your dreams. But you don't owe me anything. We gave you life, but you are free. Your life is your own. It's yours to do with as you see fit.

You will encounter many people who try to convince you that you owe them something. People are going to try and convince you that you owe them something just because you were born in this country. They are going to put all sorts of labels on you, like being a citizen. They will expect you to take part in all sorts of rituals to do with the nation and politics. You'll have to navigate all those weird obligations that people try and put on you in your own way, and decide what is the best course of action for you. But I want you to know that you don't owe those people anything either. You're an individual. You are born morally free of any obligations. The only things that you owe are the obligations that you choose to take on through your own actions and choices.

Comparative Advantage Is Mind-Blowing

If you start a business, and if you are lucky, at some point someone will sit you down and tell you the most important lesson you have to learn. You must learn how to specialise. This means learning both how to focus on those tasks where you add most value, and how to delegate everything else. Stop trying to do everything.

Within the business, you must extract yourself from the day to day operations and focus on your responsibilities as the business owner. Within the market, you must stop competing in every way and focus on where you can add most value. This is an important piece of advice.

There is a concept from economics called comparative advantage that almost everyone thinks they understand, but most people misunderstand. When I studied economics, I thought I understood comparative advantage as soon as I learned about it, yet it took me years to realise just how amazing and significant its implications are.

Comparative advantage is the explanation of why trade is beneficial to both sides in any voluntary exchange. In the example of entrepreneurship, this concept explains why you must delegate or outsource tasks to other people effectively. You must trade with other people by purchasing their services for money, instead of you trying to be self-sufficient and doing everything yourself.

This theory proves logically why trade is always beneficial to both sides. But that is not all that it proves. It also shows why we all fundamentally rely on trading with each other for all the benefits of civilisation and economic development.

Most People Misunderstand Comparative Advantage

Most people who think they understand comparative advantage are mistaken. Most people think it means we should all find something that we can be the best at, specialise in that activity, and then trade with others who are the best in their respective fields. I'm the best at doing one thing and you are the best at doing another thing, so I should specialise in what I'm the best at and you should specialise in what you are the best at, and then we trade. That way, we both produce more, and through trade we both benefit more. So that's why trade is good.

In fact, that is not why trade works. That is not comparative advantage, it is absolute advantage, which is far less remarkable.

Comparative advantage is an amazing process whereby even if one person is the best at everything, it still makes sense to trade. Even if a Superman existed— someone who was the most skilled, most intelligent, and most physically adept at every single activity— he would still be better off if he specialised and traded with others. It would also benefit others to trade with him, even though none of them would not be as good as him at any activity.

This is counterintuitive: trade is beneficial even if you're not the best at anything and even if you are the best at everything.

Even Superman Benefits From Trade

Imagine that Superman and I get washed up on a desert island together. Superman is better at everything than me. Whereas it takes me four hours to gather some fruit, it only take Superman one hour. Whereas it takes me three hours to catch a fish, Superman can catch one in two hours.

So he's better at everything than me— he accomplishes any task faster than I can. But he will still be better off if he trades with me. If he specialises in the activity that he is comparatively much better at and I specialise in the activity that I’m least extremely bad at, compared to him.

In this example, Superman would benefit by relying on me to get his fish, in return for giving me some fruit. He could gather two portions of fruit and exchange one of them for a fish. I could gather two fish and swap one of them for some fruit. In this way, Superman would only need two hours for a meal of fruit and fish, instead of the three hours that he would have worked if he was self-sufficient. I would only need to work six hours for a meal, instead of the seven hours that I would have to work if I were self-sufficient.

So we both benefit from trading with each other compared to how we would have fared if we tried to do everything on our own. Superman benefits even though he can do everything better than me. I benefit from trading with Superman, even though I'm not as good as him at doing anything in particular.

Profound Implications

As an entrepreneur, this is why you have to specialise in activities where you add most value, and stop doing all the other things in your business that aren't the most important value-adding tasks.

As the owner of a small business, you can probably do many of the tasks in your business better than anyone else. You know your business better than anyone and you have the most experience of it, so you probably know how to do most things better than your employees or suppliers.

You could probably outperform most individual employees in completing a wide range of their tasks. When you notice that something is taking too long, the temptation is to step in and do it yourself, with the idea that “if you want something done properly you have to do it yourself”.

But it is madness for you to do such work yourself, because the overall outcome is so much better when you specialise on what you add most value doing. That way, you get to benefit of comparative advantage through the division of labour, with other people working together with you, focusing on the things that they are comparatively less bad at.

A profound implication of comparative advantage is that you don’t have to be the best at anything in order to make a positive contribution to a business, to society as a whole, and thereby to benefit yourself. You don't have to be the very best at anything, you just have to find ways that you can contribute by working together with others and focussing on what you are relatively good at.

Trade Is Indisputably Good

The concept of comparative advantage is logically indisputable. Its premises (e.g. we each have different skill levels) are so basic as to be self-evidently true. Once you understand the conclusion following from these premises, you realise that it must necessarily be true.

The insight has beautiful implications, because it shows that trade between individuals is not a war where the strong are just going to overpower and exploit the weak. The fact is that even the strong need the weak. Even those who are more skilled in every imaginable field are poorer when they try to be self-sufficient, compared to the benefits they gain by cooperating in trade with others.

We all need each other. We all benefit from trading and cooperating with each other. Trade is indisputably good, as a matter of basic logic.

Why We Love Each Other

Comparative advantage is the best explanation for why we love our fellow humans. Many philosophers have argued that humans are inherently social. They say that humans like each other, and therefore they co-operate and trade.

Only recently in human history have we come to understand that the truth is the other way around. We are better off together, and that is why we come to have affectionate feelings towards our fellow humans. Unfortunately, not all of us have yet come to understand that trade is positive, benign, and mutually beneficial.

Even grouches can come to appreciate their fellow humans, when they understand that they benefit themselves from voluntary exchange. Even a misanthrope can learn to be nice, interacting positively, and trade with others, because it is in his self interest.

I find the concept of comparative advantage mind-blowing, when I think through the implications. Everyone benefits from peaceful exchange, even those who are not the best that anything. We love each other because we are better off co-operating.

A Critique of Jordan Peterson's Parenting Principles

One of the chapters in Jordan Peterson’s popular book “12 Rules For Life” relates to parenting. The chapter is called, “Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Would Make You Dislike Them”. His main argument is that you mustn't be afraid to discipline your kids, even though they won't like it. As he puts it:

Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love.

Thus according to Peterson, if you fail to discipline your children, they will have a bad life because other people will punish them. How does his idea of discipline translate into parenting practice? 

Peterson recommends a series of principles for parents which sound reasonable and measured. However, there is a big difference between the title of each principle and how Peterson interprets them in terms of actions as a parent. As I will demonstrate, the way that Peterson interprets his principles does not at all follow from the principles themselves.

Use of Force

Peterson advocates using the least force necessary to enforce parental rules. This sounds reasonable. For example, if you've got a rule which is “don't hit or bite other kids”, then you should use the least force necessary to enforce that rule. That would clearly imply that as an adult, you should never hit your children because, if your child is hitting another child, the least force necessary to stop that from happening is certainly not hitting your child, or smacking, or anything like that. You can simply restrain your child. That is the least force necessary.

But that's not what Peterson thinks the least force necessary means. Peterson is a fan of physical punishment; he thinks it is important and that parents shouldn't shy away from doing it. He says that you should use the least amount of physical punishment which he thinks is necessary. However, he explicitly sanctions using physical violence against children. His arguments for this are frankly pathetic, especially coming from somebody who is a research psychologist who ought to know the literature on this subject, but who seems to have wilfully ignored it. For example, Peterson says, 

For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe.

Another example:

we should note that some misbegotten actions must be brought to a halt both effectively and immediately, not least so that something worse doesn’t happen. What’s the proper punishment for someone who will not stop poking a fork into an electrical socket? Or who runs away laughing in a crowded supermarket parking lot? The answer is simple: whatever will stop it fastest, within reason

Rather than be explicit in this second statement, Peterson leaves the reader to draw his conclusion for him, which is that parents must use corporal punishment on children. 

Yet his conclusion does not follow from his premises. His idea is to use the least force necessary, which is never spanking. In this example of stopping a child from running away in a parking lot, the least force necessary would be to restrain the child by the arm and stop them from running away. The least force necessary would not be to hit the child. In the example of stopping a child from sticking a fork in an electrical socket, the least force necessary would be to remove the fork from the child. Of course, you could also put childproof coverings on your electrical sockets.

One wonders what the parents are doing in his examples that allow such dangers to develop. What is going on beforehand that leads to a situation in which a child is repeatedly sticking a fork in an electrical socket? Where are the parents? Why does the child still have the fork? Why is it happening repeatedly? In order to bolster his case for parental violence, Peterson chooses dramatic situations of children acting out with no reference to parental responsibility in the lead-up to the problem. He does this because it is impossible to justify parental violence, so he must act as if parents have no role in creating the problem. Poor examples aside, the point is that Peterson is inconsistent with his own principle because at least force necessary is not corporal punishment.

The False Dichotomy

Peterson argues that the choice parents face is between either using physical punishment, or overlooking misbehaviour and leaving your child to their own devices. That's what he thinks the two options are for parents. On this view, either you neglectfully leave your child to run wild and stick forks in electrical sockets, or you discipline your child by physical punishment. This is a false dichotomy. 

Anyone can find non-violent alternative approaches to discipline within a few minutes of searching on the internet. I recommend Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) by Thomas Gordon and RIE, which is best expressed in the podcasts and books by Janet Lansbury. Peterson doesn’t provide a critique of these approaches, he simply ignores them. 

Peterson doesn’t address any of the arguments of academics or parenting specialists who advocate non-violent parenting, just as he doesn’t address any of the evidence on the harm of spanking. His book is written as if none of those arguments exist. Instead, he repeatedly resorts to rhetorical tricks to bolster his argument.  He says “it is wilfully naive to think that you don't need to use physical violence on kids” and he calls it “wrong. Too simple.” These rhetorical techniques are ways of trying to dominate the reader into agreement through fear. When Peterson confidently asserts that his opponents are the naive ones, many will believe him. Who wants to think of themselves as wilfully naive?

The reality is that Peterson himself is the wilfully naive to advocate physical violence in light of the massive amount of evidence on the harm of spanking. As Dr Noam Spencer explained, summarising 9 peer-reviewed meta-studies on the effects of spanking:

The empirical case against spanking is strong, and made stronger by the absence of any empirical case in support of spanking. There is not one well designed study I have seen that links spanking to long term positive outcome.

Spencer summarised the current state of research in the title of his summary article: “The Spanking Debate Is Over”. The empirical studies demonstrate clearly that spanking leads to negative outcomes including lack of impulse control, aggression, depression poor performance in school and worse health outcomes. 

Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor, he must be aware of these studies. He doesn't bother to refute them in this chapter or say anything about them. He just completely ignores them. This is either wilful ignorance or plain deceit by a psychology professor. Both are inexcusable.

Parenting As a Pair

Although there is much to criticise about Peterson’s advocacy of aggression against children, I agree with him about his principle that “parents should come in pairs”. Peterson emphasizes the fact that parenting is very stressful and that if you do it alone then you're more likely to lose your temper on your kids. He advocates empathy towards single parents, especially those who are single parents owing to circumstances out their own control. However, his point is that parenting is better when you do it in pairs. 

Peterson doesn’t go into detail about the evidence that supports this principle, but there is a wealth of empirical studies that show that children simply do much better in families that stay together. Long term statistical studies comparing the wellbeing of children raised in families that stay together versus children whose parents split up, show a clear benefit for children of having two parents.

Therefore, if you want to have kids you should stay together because it is important for your kids' wellbeing. I don't have any argument with that part of this chapter except to say that it's interesting that Peterson didn't focus on this more. It is a well-established finding that parents who break up have a detrimental effect on their child’s development, so if Peterson’s aim is to improve the wellbeing of children, why does he deal with this topic so superficially and yet focus so much on sanctioning the hitting of children? As we’ve already seen, all the empirical studies show that corporal punishment is detrimental to kids, so Peterson’s focus is doubly strange. 

He merely mentions that parents should come in pairs, but I think this should have been his main argument. It is the only argument that he makes about parenting that is clearly backed by the evidence.

Understanding Your Psychology As A Parent

Peterson argues that parents should “understand their capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful”.

When I first read this principle, I thought it was an injunction to self knowledge. I thought that Peterson was going to argue that if you want to have kids, you've got to be aware of your own dark side and you have to be conscious of it. As a parent, you will be in a position of enormous responsibility. You must be aware of your capacity for aggression and you must control it.  You must be aware of your potential to act out, and you must not do so. You can control it. We all have the capability of acting with extreme violence. We all have the capability of assaulting others every day and yet we don’t. We can control it. That's what I thought he was going to say. But his argument is very different.

Peterson’s argument is that as a parent, you have to be aware of the fact that your kids might annoy you. Therefore, don't let your kids do anything that might annoy you because you're such an angry, vengeful person deep down that they will trigger you. In other words, Peterson thinks it is not the responsibility of the parents to stop themselves from acting out. His argument is the children must behave themselves because otherwise they're going to trigger the parents to act out. In Peterson’s mind, it is the children’s responsibility to be extremely well behaved in order not to annoy the parents because otherwise the parents will take it out on them. 

This is a bizarre inversion of responsibility by Peterson. Why is the onus on the children to be the more responsible ones? Given that the adults are supposed to have more capability of managing their emotions, Peterson has responsibility backwards. He thinks kids should be more adult than the adults! Peterson talks a lot about personal responsibility in his book, but he believes children should take responsibility for managing their parents feelings, not the other way around.

I agree with Peterson that we all have the capability of being vengeful and deceitful. Peterson’s conclusion from this that children should take responsibility for their parents feelings makes no sense. Rather, the obvious conclusion is that parents have a responsibility to control their aggression and be  vigilantly aware of their capability to act out. 

Peterson often advocates taking personal responsibility, and I agree with that aspect of his work. But taking responsibility also means taking responsibility for your feelings. Peterson is right when he states that we are all capable of being vengeful and that we all have a dark side. But that is not an excuse for putting the responsibility on your children to be more adult than you. His idea that children must behave because parents can't control their own dark side gets responsibility the wrong way around.

Behaviourism

Throughout his comments on parenting, Peterson advocates a psychological approach called behaviourism. He praises B.F. Skinner  (the most important psychologist in the behaviourist movement) for having worked out how to get the behaviour you want using techniques based around punishment and reward. Peterson’s essential argument is that parents should use punishment and rewards on children in order to train them into positive behaviours. 

Within psychology as a whole, behaviourism has a controversial reputation. There are many criticisms of the approach, ranging from ethical issues to critiques of Skinner’s original overblown claims for how effective behaviourism can be. Particularly with regard to children, there are well known negative effects of behaviourism because the approach pushes children to be extrinsically motivated. Behaviourism trains kids to merely try to please reward givers, rather than internalizing values for themselves. Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished By Rewards” provides a summary of these criticisms. It is therefore questionable that Peterson uncritically advocates Skinner as an authority for parenting ideas, as if this were uncontroversial. He doesn’t bother to offer any defence of behaviourism or acknowledgement of the criticisms. 

Behaviourism’s main application has been in training pets. Nobody has to have kids. If you're going to have them, then it's immoral to treat them as if they are pets. That is what Jordan Peterson is advocating. 

Peterson has a problem: his core message to parents is to advocate the use of physical punishments and yet none of the main theories of child development lend any support to the use of violence on children. I think this explains why he has chosen to rely on behaviourism, despite the fact that Skinner didn’t really focus on child development and behaviourism has a distinctly controversial reputation, especially with regard to children. But behaviourism can be used to justify punishments and rewards.

Peterson’s Psychology

Peterson’s descriptions of his interactions with children are quite revealing about his attitude towards them. Peterson is a psychologist who often speculates on the motivations of others, so it's reasonable to point the camera back to him and explore his attitudes and beliefs about children. Here is a telling anecdote from his book:

I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping. I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O—that was his philosophy. He had already concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad, then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for him if I had.

I presume Peterson was trying to be funny in making that comment about throwing a toddler thirty feet, but there is a definite seriousness underneath his dark joke about assaulting a child. He fantasises about doing an extraordinarily vengeful act to a small boy. I don’t find that amusing.

I'm aware that Peterson didn't assault the toddler and that this was merely a fantasy. I'm also aware that it was probably supposed to be a joke, but Peterson argues that it would have been better for the boy if he had been thrown. What are we to make of that? Peterson supposedly advocates the principle of “mimimim use of force on kids”. Is his fantasy of throwing a toddler 30 feet down a field supposed to demonstrate his minimum-use-of-force thinking?

Why did Peterson let this child repeatedly step on his daughter's hands in the first place? Surely the minimum use of force would have been to remove the child’s foot as soon as Peterson saw the boy moving towards his daughter's hands on the climbing frame. If necessary, Peterson could have lifted the boy off the climbing frame altogether (the boy was only 2 years old). Perhaps there would have been as a discussion to be had with the boy’s parents, which Peterson could have had. 

Peterson was the responsible adult in the situation and he failed to act in a timely way to diffuse the conflict. He cites the situation to show how aggressive the boy was (which he was), but this situation was also an example of failure on Peterson’s part to protect his daughter and stop the boy “repeatedly” stepping on her hands.

Peterson often writes about the importance of establishing dominance. He writes openly about how he sees parenting as a battle of dominance and how important it is to immediately respond to any challenge. For example, he writes that “anger crying is often an act of dominance and should be dealt with as such”. 

He argues that since we evolved over millennia in dominance hierarchies, it is necessary to recognise the reality of such hierarchies within families. This means that when children challenge parents for dominance, parents must win the challenge. He uses phrases like “I prepared for war” when describing his approach to winning dominance over children. When describing how he made his son eat some food, he writes:

I poked him in the chest, with my free hand, in a manner calculated to annoy. He didn’t budge. I did it again. And again. And again. Not hard—but not in a manner to be ignored, either. Ten or so pokes letter, he opened his mouth, planning to emit a sound of outrage. Hah! His mistake. I deftly inserted the spoon.

It sounds to me as if Peterson enjoys asserting dominance over little kids.

Evolutionary Psychology

Peterson’s justification for his emphasis on establishing dominance is that he thinks it is important to recognise the findings of evolutionary psychology. We are products of evolution and ignoring our nature is unrealistic. The fact that we evolved in dominance hierarchies means that we can’t avoid them and should therefore assert them as parents.

Even if we accept the idea that humans necessarily live in dominance hierarchies, this only implies that parents have a leadership role to play. Children require leadership and look to their parents to provide it. But being a leader does not necessitate the use of violence or aggression to assert that role. The fact that we evolved in a dominance hierarchy isn't excuse for abusing your leadership role. It’s not an excuse for hitting your kids, and using euphemisms like spanking doesn’t excuse it either. Good leaders do not rely on violence. You do not need to hit children; to do so is an unjustifiable act of aggression. 

Peterson’s emphasis on evolutionary psychology is also highly selective. He cites it in support of his ideas about dominating children but ignores the findings of evolutionary psychology that would inform other parenting decisions. For example, there are very good  arguments for co-sleeping from evolutionary psychology. In our pre-history, babies never slept alone. It would have been incredibly dangerous to leave babies to sleep alone when we were in the hunter gatherer stage of our evolution (which was for the majority of our evolutionary development as humans). All children would have slept in the same place as their parents. But Jordan Peterson is certainly not an advocate of co-sleeping. He thinks children should be left to cry it out, and trained not to disturb their parents at night.

Peterson’s advocacy of aggressive parenting is not a result of following evolutionary psychology, rather he uses evolutionary psychology to support only those arguments he wants to make, and ignores implications that don’t support his arguments. 

Rationalising Violence Against Children

Of all the parenting issues that Peterson could have chosen to highlight as his main concern, he chose to advocate more physical discipline. His main argument on how to be a better parent is don’t hold back on corporal punishment. 

There are many problems facing children that Peterson could have chosen to focus on to improve the quality of parenting. Parents who break up their family have a lasting detrimental effect on their kids. Peterson mentions this, but only as minor topic. He totally ignores many other pressing concerns for the quality of parenting today. What about neglect? What about the huge number of kids who grow up without dads? What about the fact that school is often little more than a prison for children where they must stay for over a decade? What about the still widespread problem of child sexual abuse? What about barbaric practices such as circumcision? What about the epidemic of giving children drugs like Ritalin because they are so bored out of their minds in school that the only way to get them to conform is by giving them drugs? What about the huge amount of time that kids are stuck in daycare and the lack of time that parents spend with their kids?

Peterson didn’t tackle tackle any of these issues. He chooses to focus on making an argument for why you should immediately counter any testing of your or authority by your children with old fashioned discipline, including corporal punishment. He's chosen to focus on that because he argues a false dichotomy that as a parent you either spank your child and as a disciplinarian parent, or you leave your child to their own devices and they become dangerously antisocial.

Peterson doesn't say so explicitly, but we can infer from his arguments that he spanked his own children. He defends spanking extensively and doesn’t state anywhere that he has changed his mind or learned anything new since he was a parent himself. He is a psychology professor who discusses the topic of spanking without a single mention of the many studies that have demonstrated the harm that it does. The most charitable interpretation of this omission is that he is wilfully ignoring all of the evidence on the detrimental effects of spanking.  

Peterson’s advocacy of disciplinarian parenting are probably a post-rationalisation of his own parenting practices, and perhaps an excuse for what his own parents did to him. He probably thinks that he turned out fine, and that he has great kids, therefore everything he did was great, and therefore spanking is probably good too. In writing a long excuse for his own behaviour as a parent instead of focussing on the real problems that children face, he has done children and parents a disservice.

Conclusion

Peterson is the most intelligent and well-argued advocate of aggressive parenting that I’m aware of. Yet he makes no valid arguments for the use of aggression in parenting. He can’t, because there are no good arguments for using aggression on children.

To make his defence of corporal punishment he had to ignore all the research literature on the bad effects of spanking. He had to rely on a controversial and outdated school of thought in psychology (behaviourism) as the only authority he could appeal to in trying to justify his aggressive style of dominance assertion against children. He had to ignore the entire field of child psychology, none of which supports spanking or aggressive parenting. He had to cherry-pick ideas from evolutionary psychology that seem to support aggression, whilst ignoring evolutionary psychology when it leads to promotion of practices such as co-sleeping. His arguments are so weak that he resorts to rhetorical techniques like asserting that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong and holds views that are “too simple”.

Peterson’s chapter on parenting is called “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them”. But that is a mealy-mouthed way of stating his views. He should heed his own advice and take responsibility for his views, which means not using the passive tense. His chapter should be titled “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Dislike Them Doing”, because that's what he is really saying. When you put it like that, it amounts to merely saying “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Don't Want Them To”, which is neither deep nor enlightened. It is merely a sophisticated excuse for indefensible aggression against children.

Let Go Of Your Baggage

Without all this stuff to distract you, you are forced to search a little deeper to find out what the fuck it is you want to do with your life. Sometimes that leaves you staring into an abyss. Your shit isn’t going to fill the abyss, it will merely obscure it.

Chris Thomas

Physical Baggage Is Emotional Baggage

In 2015 I sold almost all my possessions to pursue a travel lifestyle. Getting rid of all my stuff got harder, the closer I got to my goal. It started to become less about practical matters and more about the emotional side of my possessions. I left the most difficult things until last.

Extreme decluttering forced me to clarify for myself what my possessions mean to me. I kept things because of psychological needs, not just practical ones. If you want to declutter, pretty soon you get to the point where you're pushing up against emotional baggage.

I hope that my experience with letting go will inspire you to reflect on your relationship to your stuff, so that you can get rid of any emotional baggage that is holding you back from achieving more freedom.

Don't Let Your Stuff Own You

A long time ago I bought some skiwear. I used it a couple of times and enjoyed skiing. But skiing is very expensive, relative to other kinds of holiday that I enjoy, so other trips almost always took priority over skiing. Then I got together with Hannah, who doesn’t enjoy skiing, so there was even less incentive for me to ski.

That skiwear took up space in my wardrobe for years, unused. Whenever I saw it, I found myself thinking, “I should go skiing again.” I wanted to “get value” out of my past purchase of ski stuff. I had spent a lot of money on it, and I had a nagging feeling of guilt about not using it enough. Owning the skiwear made me feel bad.

You can get the skiwear effect from any purchase. Every time you buy something, a part of your brain starts to post-rationalise your purchase. You think that you ought to do something with your possessions, in order to justify the fact that you spent money on them. Instead of deciding that you want to do something and then spending the money to do so, you can end up determining your activities on the basis of your past purchases. Over time, your stuff can come to own you.

The Victorian poet William Morris said that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. The problem with that idea is that all your stuff is potentially useful. My skiwear was useful (for skiing). But it was more useful converted into cash than it was cluttering up my wardrobe.

I suggest—unpoetically—that you should not have anything in your life that isn't much more useful or beautiful than its storage and maintenance requires. These days I only keep possessions if the benefits are much more significant than the mental and financial maintenance costs.

Owning lots of stuff limits your psychological freedom. Don’t let the fact that you bought something in the past determine how you spend your time now. If your stuff does not bring you fulfilment now, get rid of it.

Close The Open Loops

I used to have cardboard boxes in my cupboards, filled with all sorts of unused junk that I intended to sort through “one day”. These boxes contained old home videos on VHS, even though I hadn’t owned a video player for over a decade.

I kept an ancient collection of audio cassettes—music that I had bought years ago and mix tapes that I had made. I kept these tapes even though I hadn’t owned a cassette player for nearly two decades.

I had old floppy disks, left over from the 1990s, with god knows what on them. I have not seen a computer that can read floppy disks for two decades, but I kept these, “just in case”.

When I packed away stuff in boxes, it was out of sight, but there was an open loop left in my mind. I had not made the decisions about what to do with all this old clutter.

Extreme decluttering involved making all these decisions. I made the choice about which videos and disks I wanted to digitise, and got it done. I said goodbye to the old cassettes that were never going to be played.

Storage gives you a great excuse for avoiding decisions. If you have cupboard space to fill with crap, you don’t have to know why you own it, what you are going to do with it, or whether it can ever serve any purpose in your life.

Having unsorted stuff is a drain on your mental energy, even if you never look at it. Make the decisions, clear the decks, and free yourself of the mental baggage.

Give Back What Is Not Yours

One of the boxes that I procrastinated about decluttering was filled with other people’s stuff. Some of this stuff belonged to people that I had broken contact with. Giving back their stuff would involve initiating contact of some kind. I didn’t want to open a dialogue. I thought that giving things back might be misinterpreted. At the same time, I did not consider it right to sell or throw away things that didn’t belong to me. So the box languished in my cupboard, and I avoided thinking about it.

In the end, I decided to simply give back everything that was not mine, without fanfare. It is not within my control how anyone else interprets my actions. It is within my control to do what I consider the right thing for my own peace of mind. So I just stopped worrying about how my actions might be interpreted. I gave back things that belonged to others, and I felt better for doing so. That box was emotional baggage. I feel much freer having taken care of it.

Let the past be done. Give back what is not yours, or throw it away— do whatever you think is right. Let others have whatever interpretations of you they want. Other people’s opinions of you are not your business.

Acknowledge Mistakes

I used to buy a lot of books, resulting in many unread books on my shelves. As long as I held on to those books, I could keep telling myself that I would read them “someday”. I avoided admitting to myself that I had wasted money buying them too hastily.

This was an example of me avoiding getting rid of some stuff because I would have to acknowledge mistakes that I had made in purchasing it. Acknowledging rash purchases would give me minor discomfort in the moment, so I avoided it.

I chose to stop procrastinating and sell those books. The payoff in the long run has been clearing all that clutter from my life. The great thing about acknowledging your mistakes is that you put them behind you and move on. I feel lighter and more free, whenever I let go of the baggage of past mistakes by acknowledging them and moving on.

Accept Loss

When we first moved into our flat in Brighton, I bought various pieces of ergonomic furniture which I assumed we would use for many years to come. When our plans changed, and we decided to pursue a life of travel, I discovered that the resale value of the furniture would be far less than I had imagined. I felt reluctant to sell these items at such a loss, so I procrastinated.

This way of thinking is called the fallacy of sunk costs. If you buy an asset that subsequently goes down in value, and you avoid selling at a lower value because that would acknowledge the loss, then you are only kidding yourself.

Treat the past as done, behind us, finished. The only relevant question is whether it makes more sense to keep an asset now, or sell it. If it is not worth keeping now, the rational course of action is to let it go.

Clearing out all your stuff forces you to recognise losses, which hurts. On the bright side, it also forces you to put all that stuff behind you and move on.

Challenge Your Customs And Assumptions

Before I started decluttering, it never occurred to me that I could get rid of some possessions. For example, I never considered it an option to get rid of my books because… that’s just not what I thought one does with books. Books were almost sacred objects to me.

Both my parents collected hundreds of books. I learned from an early age to treat books as treasured possessions. I grew up respecting books as the main repository of knowledge within society. They were the tool by which knowledge got handed down from one generation to the next.

I still value books very highly, but I have learned to challenge my custom of treating them as sacred. The ideas in the book are what matter, not the paper that they are printed on.

A digital file can be a far more enduring way to store and transmit knowledge than paper, because it can be backed up, shared, or copied. If I want to share a rare book with my children in future, it will be much easier to give them my scan of it.

It was uncomfortable challenging my assumptions. When I first thought about destructive book scanning, I felt like I was contemplating a crime. It was a strange sensation cutting the covers off previously sacred objects.

Extreme decluttering is an unconventional lifestyle. If you do it, you will end up breaking some of the customs regarding possessions that are held by your family, friends and social circle. You can do things differently. Some people might be surprised, or disapprove, but so what.

You may not have the same assumptions about your book collection as I did. But I bet you have some unchallenged customs or assumptions preventing you from decluttering. If you are finding it hard to contemplate getting rid of some of your stuff, challenge your assumptions. Let go of any outdated customs.

Let Go Of Your Status Symbols

Another obstacle to getting rid of all my books was my concern about what others think of me.

I took pride in having read a lot of books. Reading books takes some discipline. Finishing a book is an accomplishment. But keeping books was not just a matter of personal pride, it was also an exercise of vanity on my part. The books on my shelf were trophies.

I regarded books as a kind of status symbol. My collection of books was not just for my own reference, they were also to show off to people who came to my apartment. My collection proclaimed “look at all the books that this guy has read!”.

I’m telling you a lot about my relationship with books, as these formed such a big part of my personal possessions and I had a lot of emotional baggage attached to my book collection. That’s were I wanted to “make an impression” through my possessions.

Your status symbols could be different. There are many things that you might own in order to impress other people, or communicate a message about the kind of person you are. I’ve never been interested in cars, but I know that a lot of people use cars as status signifiers, in the same way that I did with books.

What I have found is that the pursuit of my own dreams—a life of travel with Hannah—has enabled me to let go of my preoccupation with “making an impression” through the stuff I own. I still confront my ego sometimes, but it no longer shows up through stuff. I don’t care what people think about the fact that I don’t own any books. I have more important things to do.

Find a purpose for your life and pursue it relentlessly. Doing so will help you to forget about insecurities and preoccupations that are getting in the way, like what others think of you.

Decide What Your Life Is About

The hardest object for me to get rid of was a beautiful, vintage Fender Stratocaster guitar. I had owned that guitar since I was a teenager, when I played in a band. The Strat travelled with me to university, and then afterwards to all the various flats that I lived in. I took it with me wherever I moved to, even though I stopped playing regularly during my University years, and very rarely picked up my guitar afterwards.

I got a PhD, became an entrepreneur and built a business. During many years of hard work, the Stratocaster was a reminder of times that I had been more playful. I did not have the energy for creative improvisation. I missed that aspect of life. I didn’t want to sell the guitar because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I didn't play any more.

When I sold my business and retired early, one of the first things I did was get back into playing my guitar. I attended a Jazz school, where I learned to play a style of music that I'd never tried before. I learned new tunes and did a lot of improvisation. I joined jamming sessions and played live gigs in a pub every Friday night for a summer.

I also found other creative outlets for play. I attended comedy improvisation courses and performed in some comedy improv shows. Making a podcast and writing books are also my creative pursuits.

When we decided to sell everything and adopt a life of travel, I knew that it would be impractical for me to take the Stratocaster with me. It is notoriously stressful taking musical instruments on planes. I would have had to carry an additional flight suitcase, and that old guitar was made of heavy maple wood. I would also need an amp. All these obstacles were surmountable, but I knew that it was only worth taking the guitar if I was going to play it every day, as an integral part of my life.

I loved the idea of playing. But, uncomfortable though it was to admit it, I knew that I loved the idea, not the the reality. I did not have the same hunger for playing my guitar that I have for writing, podcasting, travel, my life with Hannah, starting a family, and all the other things that I am wildly enthusiastic about.

Extreme decluttering has forced me to ask myself: what do I hunger for? What am I enthusiastic about? It is a vulnerable feeling to admit these things to yourself, and go for them, dumping everything else.

It is much more comforting to be mildly interested in a thousand pursuits, and keep all the crap associated with them. If you have a guitar, and play it once a year, you can think of yourself as a guitarist.

I know what it feels like to be afraid to commit to being wildly enthusiastic about something. It is easy to forget that you have the freedom to change your mind. I sold my guitar and said goodbye to that pursuit, to focus fully on the things that are most meaningful to me. But I can always change my mind. If, in two years, I decide that playing guitar every day is a really important goal for me, I’ll just buy a guitar.

Don’t keep all your clutter to avoid deciding what you are enthusiastic about. And don’t keep it just in case you change your mind. If you are not passionate about skiing every year, sell your skiwear. If you are not passionate about playing that guitar every day, sell it.

You can experience and achieve a huge amount in life, but not all at once. A rich life is lived as a series of focussed pursuits. Extreme decluttering forces you to commit to wanting only a few things in your life at any moment, but wanting them with wild enthusiasm. Give up on all those other things that you are semi-committed to, but not wildly enthusiastic about.

Stop pretending that you can do a thousand things at once in life. Then you can allow yourself the courage to do something truly remarkable with it.

An Alternative to “Waiting For” in GTD

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a brilliant and life-changing methodology for productivity, but one idea in the original book doesn’t make sense to me: the context “waiting for”.

At the heart of GTD is the method of always defining the next action on a project, in order to keep things moving. One context of actions suggested by Allen is called “waiting for”. This context is used to categorise those times when you are waiting for somebody else to do something. For example, an action called “hear back from John about project proposal” might be categorised as a “waiting for” kind of action.

The problem is: “waiting for” is not an action. You can’t do waiting. It’s a kind of inaction. This means that it doesn’t really fit with the whole GTD method of defining action contexts by what you do.

I suggest the alternative is to create a “follow up with” action that you schedule for some time in the future. If you are waiting for John to get back to you about a project proposal, create a deferred task called “follow up with John about proposal” (context could be email or phone). When the task shows up, if you’ve already heard back from John then you can just delete the task. Otherwise, you have the correct next action for yourself.

This alternative seems more in line with the underlying philosophy of GTD to view all your projects in terms of your own responsibilities and next actions.

How To Check If Your OmniFocus Projects Have An Evernote Page Automatically Using Keyboard Maestro

Large projects usually have both a series of tasks associated with them and some kind of documentation. I use different applications to work with these two different kinds of project information because each application is designed specifically for one thing and is the best tool for that job. OmniFocus is great for task management but not designed for documentation. Evernote is great for documentation but not as good at handling tasks as a dedicated task management app like OmniFocus. 

Using two applications to handle project information creates a problem though. How do I tell if I have documentation for all my projects in OmniFocus? Or, how can I tell if I have an OmniFocus project for all my Evernote project pages. I have to compare the list of projects in OmniFocus and the list in Evernote to see what is missing.

MIT has a very nice webpage for comparing lists here. Using this webpage, the workflow is as follows:

1. Select all live projects in OmniFocus and export the list to the MIT webpage

2. Select all live projects in Evernote and export the list to the MIT webpage

3. Compare the lists and see what is missing from either list.

That sounds simple, but is quite time consuming and requires a lot of individual steps. For this reason, I wrote a macro in Keyboard Maestro to do it all automatically. In case you are interested, each step is outlined below:

The First Extreme Saver

Extreme Saving is one of the four approaches to achieving financial independence that I wrote about in my book Job Free. The idea is to save the majority of your income (ideally more than 75%) so that you can retire early within 10 years. Some blogs advocating this approach are Early Retirement Extreme, Mr Money Mustache, Go Curry Cracker, and Root of Good.

The modern extreme saving movement started with Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s influential 1990s book, “Your Money Or Your Life”. However, the concept of extreme saving much older. In fact, there were extreme savers in Victorian times. 

Samuel Smiles was a bestselling Victorian author whose books encouraged ordinary people to live frugally and save, in order to secure a better future. In the nineteenth century, saving was the main way that ordinary people could free themselves from poverty and live a better life. Smiles did not come from a wealthy family, he was a self-made man. This is how he wrote about saving in 1875:

There is a dignity in the very effort to save with a worthy purpose… It produces a well-regulated mind; it gives prudence a triumph over extravagance; it gives virtue the mastery over vice; it puts the passions under control; it drives away care; it secures comfort. Saved money, however little, will serve to dry up many a tear—will ward off many sorrows and heartburnings, which otherwise might prey upon us. Possessed of a little store of capital, a man walks with a lighter step—his heart beats more cheerily. When interruption of work or adversity happens, he can meet them; he can recline on his capital, which will either break his fall, or prevent it altogether.

Samuel Smiles not only considered saving the best way for individuals to better themselves, he also saw it as a social good. A saver not only helps themselves but, through their actions, leads to the betterment of society as a whole. Smiles outlined the positive social role that savers play:

It is clear that man would have continued uncivilized but for the accumulations of savings made by his forefathers,—the savings of skill, of art, of invention, and of intellectual culture. It is the savings of the world that have made the civilization of the world. Savings are the result of labour; and it is only when labourers begin to save, that the results of civilization accumulate. We have said that thrift began with civilization: we might almost have said that thrift produced civilization. Thrift produces capital; and capital is the conserved result of labour. The capitalist is merely a man who does not spend all that is earned by work.

Modern day extreme savers emphasise that achieving financial independence is not easy. It requires significant lifestyle changes and the right mindset. Samuel Smiles told his readers the same thing back in Victorian times. As he put it:

Thrift is not a natural instinct. It is an acquired principle of conduct. It involves self-denial—the denial of present enjoyment for future good—the subordination of animal appetite to reason, forethought, and prudence. It works for today, but also provides for tomorrow. It invests the capital it has saved, and makes provision for the future.

Smiles was writing for the growing literate working class, not for rich people. He was a bestselling author, so his ideas were adopted by many and considered mainstream. Yet his recommendations about saving were far more ambitious than you might expect. He cites a recommendation that coal workers should be saving 40% of their income. He discusses whether the general advice save half your income is “perhaps” too ambitious. Half your income!

This was in the nineteenth century, when real incomes were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Yet how many people today achieve anywhere near the levels of extreme saving that Smiles advocated? People took saving a lot more seriously back then.

Samuel Smiles’ book, Thrift, outlines his whole approach and is easily available online in kindle format. If you want an explanation of the modern extreme saver movement, check out my own book Job Free.

Digitize Everything

We live in a period when many physical objects are being replaced by software and digital data. Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and founder of the X-Prize, summarised the process in his book, Abundance:

Just think of all the consumer goods and services that are now available with the average smart phone: cameras, radios, televisions, web browsers, recording studios, editing suites, movie theaters, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of medical devices, maps, atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, translators, textbooks, world class educations, and the ever-growing smorgasbord known as the app store.

Cumbersome objects like these used to clutter up our homes. Now you don’t need to own any of those things. You can replace them with apps on your smartphone, and data in the cloud.

My approach to decluttering has been to jump on this dematerialization trend and push it as far as I can with my own possessions. Technology has made it possible to get rid of the majority of my physical possessions, whilst losing none of the benefits of owning them.

One of the major reasons I kept possessions was because they had meaning for me. Meaning is ultimately information. And information can be stored digitally, requiring no space in my luggage. My old paper journals were important to me because of the ideas I had written down in them, not because of the paper that those words were written on. By scanning my journals, I captured the information in them, moved that digital data into the cloud, and shredded the original notebooks.

This is a key strategy I used for extreme decluttering: I identified the meaning I attached to each possession, worked out how to digitize it, and then moved that information into the cloud. I scanned all my old photo albums. I digitised all my music and movies. I replaced all my paper books with a digital library. I got rid of the physical possessions but kept all my valuable data.

You can declutter to a far more radical extent if you replace your physical possessions with software and data. By digitizing as much as I could, I made many of my physical possessions redundant. It’s no sacrifice to get rid of redundant objects. In fact, it is a relief.

Replacing physical things with software has increased my quality of life. Dematerialization is a process that everyone is gradually adopting anyway, whether they are aware of it or not. I am just doing it more consistently. I recommend that you embrace the trend.

Three Ways To Delegate

Delegation is a vital skill for entrepreneurs to master. If you want to grow your business, you can’t just hire people and tell them to get on with it. You need a framework for delegation.

Derek Sivers tells an instructive story about the perils of delegation gone awry in Anything You Want, his autobiographical account of the founding of CDBaby. He delegated total responsibility for the creation of an employee bonus scheme at CDBaby to his own employees. He realised later that the resulting scheme was wiping out all profit in the business. When he amended the scheme, he faced a huge conflict with employees.

Although entrepreneurs agree about the importance of delegation, there are widely differing views on the best way to delegate. This article explains the three main approaches and outlines the pros and cons of each.

The "Operations Manual" Approach to Delegation

The Operations Manual approach to delegation is described in Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited. This approach is geared towards the kinds of small businesses that Gerber spent many years advising. This method of delegation involves creating explicit and detailed instructions for work procedures that you expect your employees to follow. You tell them not just what you want done, but also how you want them to do it. Your instructions are codified in an operations manual or similar document.

In his book, Gerber describes an experience he had visiting a hotel where he noticed the great customer service. He asked the hotel manager how he had achieved this level of quality in service. The hotel manager showed him a detailed operations manual, which included well-defined procedures for all tasks, down to order in which the cleaning staff should clean each item in a room.

The idea behind this approach is to treat your business as if it were a franchise prototype. As the business owner, you try to get yourself out of the operational role as quickly as possible, in order to give yourself maximum freedom to grow the business and step away from it in future.

The operations manual approach works best with inexperienced employees who are willing to learn how things are done and to follow detailed instructions given to them. Since you want everyone to be working in line with your operations manual, you hire people willing to learn and follow your way of doing things. Experience in other ways of doing things could even be seen as a liability. Gerber recommends hiring inexperienced people in The E-Myth Revisited.

The advantage of the operations manual approach is that your business is highly scalable. The strategy of designing your business as if it were a franchise prototype makes it easy to increase production, doing more of the same.

The down side of this approach is that it can easily become outdated, because it is dependent on detailed prescriptions for all actions. Flexibility and adaptability are not built into a centralised system. You can codify all your procedures in an operations manual, but the business will grow and change. Innovation by staff members is deliberately stifled in this approach, which prevents you from benefiting from employee knowledge about what can be improved. Anyone adopting this approach has to implement feedback mechanisms to try to get some of that knowledge back into the centralised plan, such as asking staff for their suggestions as to how to improve procedures. But such feedback mechanisms tend to be cumbersome and bureaucratic.

You can try to mitigate the downside of this approach by involving employees as much as possible in the creation and updating of your procedures. I did this in my business by using a wiki-based operations manual, as I describe in my book Becoming An Entrepreneur. Everyone could edit any page in the manual and contribute to standardising the procedures. I found that with this adjustment, the operations manual approach to delegation worked very well with inexperienced employees. 

The ROWE Approach to Delegation

The Results Only Work Environment (or ROWE) is a totally different approach to delegation. This kind of delegation involves giving your employees clearly defined outcomes to reach, and leaving it to their discretion as to how they reach them. What really matters to the entrepreneur is the results of an employee’s work. The way that the employee achieves those results should be irrelevant to the entrepreneur (as long as they don’t do anything that is in conflict with the interests of the business or that creates any problems). Consequently, according to the ROWE approach, the best way to get things done is to provide very clear targets or business goals, and then leave your employees completely free to achieve those results in their own way.

If you accept the logic of this approach, you shouldn’t care what time your employees come to work, or whether they work from home. The only thing that the entrepreneur should concern themselves with is the employee’s productivity. What matters is the quality and quantity of completed work by each employee. If the employee does better work at home in their pyjamas, so be it.

Advocates of the ROWE approach also see a benefits to entrepreneur’s work from adopting this approach. This method of delegation forces the entrepreneur to provide very clear goals for the business. In the operations manual approach, it’s possible for an employer to get bogged down in telling staff what to do and lose sight of their own job—to provide vision for the business. ROWE forces the employer to think about what needs to be done rather than the minutiae of how to do it.

One of the aims of the ROWE approach to delegation is to incentivise employees to find more efficient ways of working. By giving employees the opportunity to benefit from efficiency gains, they are encouraged to seek out faster, easier ways of reaching their own targets. This reflects an underlying insight that employees are likely to be more aware than managers of potential efficiency gains in their own workflows, because they are the ones doing the work. The aim of ROWE is to encourage improvements to efficiency at the most distributed level possible.

Ricardo Semler is a famous proponent of this kind of approach.  He implemented ROWE principles throughout Semco, his corporation in Brazil. He has described his approach in two books Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend. The term ROWE was coined by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson— two human resources executives who implemented these principles within the Best Buy corporation during the 2000s. They describe their journey in their book Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson describe how they adopted a similar approach in their company Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) in their book Rework.

The downside of the ROWE approach for the entrepreneur is that there is no clear mechanism to translate efficiency gains by individual employees into productivity gains for the business as a whole. Employees will always benefit from the greater flexibility. Increasing employee satisfaction certainly can benefit the business. However, more satisfied employees do not necessarily become more productive employees.

Efficiency gains can simply lead to employees finishing their work in less time and having more leisure time. This is exactly what Tim Ferriss suggests that employees do in his book, The Four Hour Work Week. He encourages employees to strive for the freedom to work at home so that they can take advantage of their own productivity gains to free up some of their employee time for personal projects. This means that all efficiency improvements are translated into higher effective wages for the employee. This higher wage might benefit to the business (by attracting better employees and improving retention) but it doesn’t necessarily lead to more productivity.

ROWE can only lead to greater productivity if employers are able to increase employee targets in line with increases in efficiency. This is going to be a difficult judgement call, since the employer gives up all detailed knowledge of working practices in a ROWE. It is interesting to note that Best Buy—which was the model example of a ROWE implementation—has since scrapped ROWE and gone back to previous working practices. 

The Outsourcing Approach to Delegation

The third approach to delegation is to avoid employer-employee relationships as far as possible and outsource work to external contractors instead. This model of delegation works by outlining your desired outcome and then negotiating with an external contractor for an agreed price, timescale, and other conditions, to achieve the outcome. 

In his book How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, Harry Browne described his own implementation of this approach. He hated the bureaucracy involved with employing people, so he decided to arrange his business entirely using independent subcontractors.

Like the ROWE approach, the outsourcing model of delegation is focussed on outcomes and leaves it up to the person undertaking the work to identify the most efficient way of achieving the goal. This kind of delegation also incentivises the entrepreneur to create clear and explicit business goals.

Outsourcing has one significant advantage over the ROWE: with outsourcing there is a mechanism to translate efficiency gains by individual workers into productivity gains for the business as a whole. That mechanism is market competition. If the independent contractor does not pass on some of the efficiency gains to their customer in a lower price, then they run the risk of being uncompetitive relative to other subcontractors. In fact, this mechanism works for both sides, since it also means that the subcontractors will have to capture some gains in the form of profit in order for it to be worthwhile for them to innovate in the first place.

The cost basis of outsourcing is different from employing people. The entrepreneur gets to keep fixed costs as low as possible because he only employs people on a contract basis. He may have additional search and transaction costs when finding people to do the tasks (although the internet has reduced these costs significantly). The independent contractors may also be more expensive than employees because they need to charge more (since they don’t have the security of a fixed paycheque). However, the entrepreneur is also likely to get more skilled specialists by outsourcing, since he is not trying to fit a limited set of existing employees to a diverse range of tasks that need to get done.

If you accepted the logic of ROWE, then outsourcing is just a more consistent version of that approach. If you believe that people work better when they have autonomy, then why not work with people who have full autonomy (external contractors) and avoid hiring employees altogether? Hiring external contractors to achieve specific tasks is the ultimate version of ROWE.

I have had very positive experiences with independent contractors. I prefer the Harry Browne approach of relying on outsourcing instead of fixed employment contracts wherever possible.

Automation: An Alternative To Delegation?

Automation is one alternative to delegation that is becoming more feasible for many tasks. The act of delegation requires you, as delegator, to clearly identify your desired outcome. The Operations Manual approach also requires you to identify a detailed workflow for the work. Once you have clearly specified the task, you may be able to delegate it to a computer and avoid having to deal with human delegation altogether.

Automation is much easier now because there are so many applications available now to help with basic tasks. To take a simple historical example, typing on a typewriter used to be a slow and cumbersome process. Errors were not easy to correct and often involved restarting an entire page. Consequently, it made sense for any skilled professional to delegate typing tasks to an assistant. The professional would dictate a letter and give it to a secretary to type up. Very few people do this now, since word processors make the process of typing faster and easier than before. Even if you prefer to dictate a letter, personal computers can do a fairly good job of voice recognition and automate the transcription process for you. The job of typist has been effectively automated.

Over time, this kind of automation removes the need to delegate more and more simple tasks. This is the ultimate goal of the Operations Manual approach to delegation: specify the task so well that you can get a computer to do it automatically.

Choosing Your Approach to Delegation

If you need to delegate simple tasks to be done in exactly the way that you specify, it makes a lot of sense to adopt the Operations Manual approach to delegation. This approach will also likely inform your hiring strategy and you will tend to employ inexperienced, enthusiastic people at the start of their careers who are willing to learn your way of doing things. Consider automation as the final goal of this kind of delegation.

Alternatively, if you want to benefit from expertise that you don't have, it makes sense to delegate work to people in a way that gives them maximum autonomy. The ROWE concept is one way of implementing this approach. But if you accept the logic of the ROWE approach, then a more consistent implementation of the concept is simply to outsource work to external contractors, and avoid hiring employees altogether.