Robert Nozick made astute comments on one of the most important philosophical problems: what are the obligations of parents and the rights of children? Nozick's comments show that he understood the causal principle of parental responsibility. Yet at the same time, Nozick does not seem to have cared about trying to solve the problem of children's rights and some of his later comments on the topic are inane.
Nozick's insights into the philosophical problem of children's rights can be seen in his commentary on John Locke's theory of homesteading. Locke was a staunch opponent of the ancient theory of parental ownership of children. He spent the whole of the first treatise arguing against Robert Filmer's Patriarchia. Whereas Filmer had argued for unlimited parental (patriarchal) power over children, Locke argued that parental authority has limits and children have rights.
Locke faced a major problem in opposing parental ownership: his own theory of homesteading logically implied that parents own their children. The homesteading rule states that the rightful owner of a resource is the creator or first user of it. Who owns the body of a baby? Since parents create their children, this implies that parents own their children. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick explains Locke's problem:
Locke must discuss Filmer in detail, not merely to clear the field of some alternative curious view, but to show why that view doesn't follow from elements of his own view, as one might suppose it did. … Ownership rights in what one has made would seem to follow from Locke's theory of property.
Locke tried to resist the implication of homesteading that parents own children. Although he was correct to deny parental ownership, unfortunately Locke's arguments for this conclusion were flawed. Locke's two arguments for why parents don't own their children were:
- You can only own something that you create if you control and understand everything about the process of creating it.
- God is the creator of all humans, therefore parents cannot be said to create their children.
Nozick showed that both these arguments fail. He pointed out that it is an impossible standard to hold that one can only own something one made if one completely understands it:
Surely most of what most of us do is to intervene in or originate processes whose complete operation we do not understand, yielding a result we could not completely design. (Who knows all of what physicists say is relevant to materials having the properties they do and to forces working as they do; and who knows what the physicists don’t know?) Yet in many such cases, Locke does want to say that we own what we produce.
Nozick also refuted Locke's fallback argument that God is the real creator of children, not parents, since this could be applied to everything and would therefore invalidate the whole concept of homesteading:
If the point is that God, far more than a child’s parents, is the maker of a child, this applies to many other things that Locke thinks can be owned (plants, nonhuman animals); and perhaps it applies to everything.
It is at this point in his commentary on Locke that Nozick makes two key insights into the problem of children's rights.
Nozick's First Insight: Locke Conceded That Children Are Ownable
Nozick shows that despite Locke's intention to defend and extend children's rights, Locke's argumentative strategy actually undermined them. By relying on the argument that it is really God who owns children, Locke was conceding the principle that the creator of a child owns that child, and merely shifting the debate as to who the rightful creator is. Locke was therefore unable to argue that human beings are not ownable. As Nozick explained:
Note that Locke is not claiming that children, because of something about their nature, cannot be owned by their parents even if these make them. He does not claim that something about people (who have not done anything unjust for which their lives are forfeit…) bars ownership in them by their maker, for he holds that God owns man by virtue of making him in all his exalted natural properties.
Nozick's Second Insight: Locke Denied Causal Parental Responsibility
Nozick pointed out that the arguments that Locke chose had the implication of denying that parents have enforceable obligations as a result of their causal action. If parents are not the cause of a child's existence, they cannot be held liable for a tort responsibility of putting the child in a state of peril as a result of creating them. Locke was forced to rely on a much weaker appeal to natural law to ground parental obligations. As Nozick explained:
Note that Locke’s strong denial that parents make their children, causing these beings, removes one base on which to found the responsibility of parents to care for their children. Thus Locke is reduced to saying that the law of nature requires such parental care (sect. 56), as a brute moral fact, apparently. But this leaves unexplained why it requires the care from the parents, and why it isn’t another case of someone’s receiving “the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to”
This short passage reveals a lot about Nozick:
- He understood the argument for a causal principle of enforceable parental obligations
- He realised that Locke's approach undermined this principle
What Did Nozick Argue About Parental Obligations?
Did Nozick agree that parents have enforceable parental obligations? Having identified the problem that Locke had created on this topic, Nozick avoided setting out his own position or defending it. One brief passing comment from his 1981 book Philosophical Explanations suggests he did think parents have such obligations:
The father, by abstaining from feeding the child, does cause and is responsible for its death, but not merely because he could have prevented it--he had a special responsibility to feed the child
This comment suggests that he disagreed with Rothbard's theory of the parent-child relationship (Nozick was influenced by Rothbard so almost certainly knew of what Rothbard had written on this). However, Nozick did not elaborate or provide any justification for this statement, he merely asserted it in passing. He does not specify whether he is arguing that the "special responsibility" of parents is an enforceable obligation or merely a duty of virtue. Most importantly, he does not explain whether he views this as a responsibility resulting from causal action or from voluntary agreement.
What Did Nozick Argue About Children's Rights?
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick set out four argumentative strategies one could use to argue against parental ownership of children:
- Arguing that children are unownable
- Arguing that homesteading does not apply to the case of assigning ownership of children
- Arguing that parents are excluded from this specific property right
- Arguing that parents are not really the creators of their children and therefore cannot homestead them
Nozick pointed out that Locke had prevented himself from arguing that children are unownable and had failed in his use of the other approaches. But Nozick declined to reveal his own solution to this problem or to explain where his own efforts at solving it faltered. He was content to give others the homework instead:
We have seen problems with Locke’s attempt to work 2, 3, and 4. The latter two being unpromising, someone of Lockean persuasion would have to work out a variant of 1 or 2.
Wasn't Nozick "someone of Lockean persuasion"? Why didn't he put forward his own answer? If he could not justify children's rights, why didn't he at least explain where he had got to and identify the challenges that he was unable to overcome?
In another passing comment in Philosophical Explanations Nozick did assert that children have rights:
even if the parents' only purpose was to produce a slave, and a slave's life is better than nonexistence, the offspring does not owe to his parents acquiescence in being enslaved. He is under no obligation to cooperate, he is not owned by his parents even though they made him. Once the child exists, it has certain rights that must be respected (and other rights it can assert when able) even if the parents' very purpose was to produce something without these rights. Nor do children owe to their parents whatever they would have conceded in bargaining before conception (supposing this had been possible) in order to come into existence.
But he declined to justify this assertion. Nozick never explained how or why children have rights. He never explained whether the rights of children are the same as those of adults.
In later years, the quality of Nozick's thoughts on the status of children seriously degraded. In stark contrast to his earlier insightful comments on how to refute parental ownership, The Examined Life (1989) contains half-baked and self-indulgent thoughts about children being an extension of their parents:
The children themselves form part of one’s substance … part of a wider identity you have.
The majority of his chapter on Parents and Children in that book is a series of speculations about ways he thinks the government could regulate inheritance laws to achieve various ends such as preventing wealth inequality. What a disappointment compared to his commentary on Locke.
Maybe Nozick Just Didn't Care
It is clear what John Locke was trying to say in his writings on children. He argued for children's rights. He argued for limiting the authority of parents. He argued against the idea that parents own their children. Locke made significant errors along the way, and Nozick's commentary on those errors is clever.
But what was Nozick trying to say? His own words in Anarchy, State, and Utopia on how he thought about philosophy are quite revealing:
One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through all of the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view to present to the world a finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe described the effect of this attitude on Nozick's writing:
The book was a series of dozens of disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures, puzzles, counterexamples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and philosophical razzle-dazzle
The result of his approach is that Nozick's work reads like a kind of intellectual showboating. He didn't seem to view it as his responsibility to contribute to solving the ethical problem of children's rights and parental obligations. Rather, it reads as if Nozick's exploration of questions concerning children's rights is just a game of making clever points, without trying to get to any resolution.
Hoppe's assessment of Nozick's writing on libertarianism could equally be applied to Nozick's comments on the ethics of parents and children:
Nozick did not claim that his libertarian conclusions proved anything. Even though one would think that ethics is--and must be--an eminently practical intellectual subject, Nozick did not claim that his ethical "explorations" had any practical implications. … He did not insist that his libertarian conclusions were correct and, for instance, socialist conclusions were false and accordingly demand their instant practical implementation … Rather, Nozick's libertarianism was, and claimed to be, no more than just an interesting thought. He did not mean to do any real harm to the ideas of his socialist opponents. He only wanted to throw an interesting idea into the democratic open-ended intellectual debate, while everything real, tangible, and physical could remain unchanged and everyone could go on with his life and thoughts as before.