Show 058 is a follow-up to last week’s show on children’s rights. This time around Arthur gives us his two cents on the topic. He starts the discussion by going to the heart of the issue, the basis of rights, and identifying the facts of reality that give rise to them. In order to prevent any rationalistic view of rights (the idea that rights exist as some kind of other-worldly entity/Platonic form), he examines and makes the context clear.
After a thorough and thought-provoking analysis, Arthur considers how children rights differ from those of adults. He discusses how children are dependent on their parents to survive since their rational faculty is not fully developed, and what implications this has for rights. Acknowledging that the fine details are not for philosophy to answer (but rather the philosophy of law), he gave his general views as to what rights children have and how the law should protect them.
This was an excellent and entertaining show, so I hope you check it out. If you have any comments, feel free to post here or join us next week on TalkShoe.
Also, I just wanted to note that there is now a talkObjectivism facebook group. If you like the show, join up!
The ol’ philosophy of law punt, an AR classic.
Here’s the problem: Ayn Rand spells it out in black and white. If you’ve got a fully developed rational faculty, you are (presumably) not dependent on your parents and therefore are morally entitled to full adult rights. But how to put this into law when each person is different? Some people might qualify at a much younger age than other people. Some full grown adults might very well not qualify depending on whatever sort of mental abnormalities they’ve been born with.
So if different people become morally entitled to their full adult rights at different ages, any law that creates a single age (such as 18) for legal entitlement to full adult rights is going to deny certain people their rights and is therefore unjust.
What other option is there for the philosophy of law to come up with? Perhaps each person could contest individually their claim to have developed their rational faculties to the point of moral entitlement to full adult rights in court. Who would have the burden of proof in such a case? What if the parties didn’t have the money to finance the lawsuit?
Ayn Rand left it to the philosophers of law to invent rules that would be consistent with Objectivist philosophy. To my knowledge that has never actually been done. Maybe you guys will be the ones to do it.
Thanks for the comment.
I would need to think about this for a little before I answer. I know I don’t have a law degree but I could come up with my two cents on this.
I’ll let this post speak for itself: http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?showtopic=10911
I agree with the post to which Brandon links. An approximation is not arbitrary.
Yes, we want predictability in our laws and yes, an approximation is better than nothing when the right answer is too difficult to know or measure.
But an approximation requires a compromise; a compromise between Objectivist moral principles and pragmatism. We say to the rational 15 year old “sorry, but we must compromise the rights entitled to you as a matter of Objectivist moral principle in order to have a workable solution, we hope you understand.” And I’m sure he does.
But does Objectivism allow for compromise between its moral principles and working solutions? To my knowledge, AR never wrote that it did, preferring to punt on the issue altogether. Some of her fans since then have suggested compromise is acceptable and I think they are correct to do so.
The simple fact is that there isn’t a compromise involved here because there is no moral principle that says “this is the age at which a person becomes responsible for their actions”–and no way to derive such a principle, either. Instead, a broad abstraction, justice, is being applied to a particular concrete problem, namely that due to the way humans mature, there may be times when someone could legitimately be said to not be responsible for their actions.
There are probably a number of ways to approach this problem, and having an age limit is one such way that works reasonably well because it is objective and straightforward, i.e. you can tell exactly what the law is and what it covers. Should you wish to experiment, you could adopt a different plan, such as making the parents liable for the child’s actions until they voluntarily surrender their power of attorney or the child sues for it. This might work better because it allows for a broad range of possible results, and the complexity of suing for adult status may act as a good “bar” to measure competency.
On practical grounds, it’s probably wise to oppose age limits on things like purchases of alcohol or cigarettes simply because I’ve never seen that any such law actually accomplishes its stated end and weak laws simply weaken the country’s jurisprudence.
Jennifer,
You make some really good points. I really like:
“On practical grounds, it’s probably wise to oppose age limits on things like purchases of alcohol or cigarettes simply because I’ve never seen that any such law actually accomplishes its stated end and weak laws simply weaken the country’s jurisprudence.”
It goes along with parents should rase there kids not the government. Also allowing a child to drink could be enforces under laws for abuse and neglect.
But since I have no background in law, I am just stating my thoughts on the issue.