i read rothbard's essay on children and i still dont get the fundamental viewpoint. if the mother and the father created the fetus and the mother owns the fetus in her body how is it that she loses her rights to the fetus when he/she is born and becomes only a "guardian". for if the fetus has the future prospect of self-ownership, why is it only out of the womb that this future self-ownership gives him natural rights and only entitles the parents to simply custodianship.
i still dont get rothbard when he says that children can run away any time they want. so if my baby figures out the launch control of the lambo then i lose my child.
please answer then
1. what rights do parents have?
2. when do children have self-ownership?
3. how is it the fetus in the womb at the whim of the mother, if he/she has prospect of future self-ownership
p.s. im not a father and i dont have a lambo.
garegin:i read rothbard's essay on children and i still dont get the fundamental viewpoint. if the mother and the father created the fetus and the mother owns the fetus in her body how is it that she loses her rights to the fetus when he/she is born and becomes only a "guardian".
Simple: it no longer resides in her. While it resides in her, she controls is because she controls her womb. When it is born, it is an actualized, separate, autonomous being.
garegin:nd the mother owns the fetus in her body how is it that she loses her rights to the fetus when he/she is born and becomes only a "guardian".
The woman does not own the fetus while its in her body. Internalizing an object is not an automatic grant of ownership: me swallowing a stolen watch, for example.
garegin:i still dont get rothbard when he says that children can run away any time they want.
So you think its a parental right to lock a child in the basement if they try to move out? At what age does the parent lose this right? 21? 18? 16? 12? 8?
garegin:2. when do children have self-ownership?
When they demonstrate their desire to express their self-ownership by emancipating themselves. It might be at 14, or it might be at 28.
garegin:please answer then
You already have the answers, you just have an unfounded fear of the implications.
garegin:p.s. im not a father and i dont have a lambo.
haha
i dont have an unfounded fear of the implications. i have no objections of my or anyones children leaving their parents.
"The woman does not own the fetus while its in her body. Internalizing an object is not an automatic grant of ownership: me swallowing a stolen watch, for example."
Please explain. a woman does NOT own her fertelized egg?
garegin:Please explain. a woman does NOT own her fertelized egg?
You have to look at this with a more nuanced understanding of ownership. The problem really does lie in the terminology.
To say a woman does not own her baby is to imply that another person can dispossess her of it legally, which they can not do as it is kidnapping. But to say that the woman owns her baby is to deny its obvious self ownership and to imply she has the right to abuse it.
So the term guardianship is used a substitute.
The woman has a claim to the baby that is stronger than any challenger, except one. The only person who has a stronger claim of ownership over the baby is the baby itself.
So the woman and the baby can not be separated by kidnapping, but they can be separated if the child chooses to emancipate himself.
What I REALLY don't get is the statement "parents have no positive obligations to their children". Rothbard essentially blurts out "you can create a child, but you can't physically beat it or torture it, but you don't have to feed it either" ???
Irish Liberty Forum
1. Custodial. As soon as the child expresses the will to leave, these dissipate and the child is an absolute self-owner.
2. As soon as it develops the physical characteristics that make rational thought possible (I think it's the cerebral cortex), it is a self-owner and comes into its natural rights.
3. She can abort it before 2.
I don't essentially take self-ownership as axiomatic, but it's the necessary corollary of my own ethical viewpoints (the natural right to liberty.) You should check out Hoppe if you want to see an extension of Rothbard's own principles (I think in the essay How we come to own ourselves.) Also give Rasmussen's and den Uyl's Liberty and Nature and Norms of Liberty a read.
-Jon
To darkness I condemn you...
wow. this is news to me. i thought that (according to block) mothers have unlimited abortion leeway. now she has to check with doctors if the fetus has a developed cortex?
Well, if you had a positive obligation to feed it, what if you can not feed it? An obligation would mean that the child has a right to be fed by you whether you are able to or not. Rights must hold under all circumstances not only in sunshine environments. There is no right to life or food or work or wathever. There is a right to selfownership and all other rights have to develop from there.
Beating and torturing is an action and therefor initiation of aggression, not feeding is not a physical action.
Does that make sense?
In the begining there was nothing, and it exploded.
Terry Pratchett (on the big bang theory)
I would not agree.
The mere will is not sufficient, the act of leaving is. And, point two is absurd, the woman has every right to get rid of something that she does not want and so becomes parasitic to her. My religious thoughts on that are different though, but that is my private opinion. Once a child is born, hence does not live parasitic on the mothers body, things change. Now, the Mother, not the father, so it is not a question of parents at all, is free to do whatever she decides to do with one exception, she is not free to initiate aggression. Given that a child can not support itself, it depends on the support of others, but that does not mean it has a right to be supported. It has only a right to not be aggressed against.
The rest is outside the law. Yes I feed my children, yes I love them, no I do not kick them out of my house ever. But that has nothing to do with a law that forced me to do so.
No she does not have to check with anyone. See my answer to Jon.
Rights and moral and ethics are different things to a libertarian. The basic right everybody has is the right on his own property and the right to defend himself in cases of initiating physical aggression against him.
Any other "law" or right must be logical derived from this, else it is not valid in the libertarian, ok, Rothbardian sense.
Block is not a philosopher, he is an economist who has some knowledge of the subject. To address why one is a self-owner, one must take into consideration certain aspects of the being in question. Both Aristotelian and Kantian ethical theories (and anyone that deserves being taken seriously) premise morality on rational agency. The potential for rationality requires the development of that physical feature. I might be wrong on which trait causes its emergence, but that's the gist of it.
Um, action minus will is not action at all, so that's utterly bizarre.
As to point two, you're just taking self-ownership as an absolute and not addressing that in virtue of which it arises. You're conflating absolute with "holds in all circumstances". Well, that is wrong. Morality can be absolute for all rational agents, but it does not hold for a rock. Rights can hold under all circumstances where social life is possible, but not in emergency situations. They're absolute in their given context.
Yes, I take self ownership, in the realm of law, as absolute. and "holds in all circumstances" points to the law, which I was talking about. Law is in the realm of humans, not rocks. So to clarify this, law "in the realm of humans" must hold under all circumstances and must hold for every human being. And I agree, rights can only hold under circumstances where social life is possible, because law is about social life nothing else. Social life is the category in which law is existent.
I am a fan of the scholastcs though and admit, that there are different laws (eternal law, maybe divine law :-) yet they are not in the category of human life, but in the category of believes and religious faith, which I not only accept but live. Yet, this part of my life can never be made into a law for every human being, because this would mean a group was going to decide about what is right or wrong.
Well if you believe rights only hold in conditions where social life is possible, you agree with me that they do not hold in all contexts, yet they are still absolute. I guess this is why one could say a mother has a right to abort a foetus when it endangers her life, even if it has developed past the point I mentioned.
I am not sure if I would follow that way, yet :-).
Personal I am completly against abortion, because my christian understanding looks at a human being as a unique creation of god. Without going into the details here.
What I am against is, that my faith or, for that matter the faith of anyone else, is a valid argument in a free society (in the literal sense not the Popperian sense) to set any laws. As a christian I can try to convince others to accept for their own living an ethic different from the minimum required for all men.
I am short of time right now, so these are more impulses rather than arguments.
The way I think about the free society is like in the old testament. There is a "convenant" with all human beings whose symbol is the rainbow, and there is another convenant for those that have faith in this religion.
Thus, there is a minimal "ethic", based on the natural law that must be obeyed by any living human, like the laws of mathematics, and than there are policies and rules that go beyond that when it comes to belivers in whatever religion.
have a great weekend
Yes. rights account for that minimum that is necessary to insure conditions for social life. Abortion is tricky though, because more than just being a matter of one's personal moral character, it has to do with rights as well.
let's say we live in a society where parents do not have an obligation to feed their kids, but what's going to happen if the kids DIE because from hunger.
Shouldn't the parents be punished for letting their kids die from hunger? if not..
then who should be held accountable for letting the kids die from hunger?
Exactly right. Creating a human being incapable of self-care and then letting it die from hunger seems like murder to me.
No one is accountable. If you die of hunger who is to blame? Nobody aggressed against you. Can't you see that this is exactly the road that leads to group rights? A child is usually not able to survive on its own. Yet, if you ever have seen a street child gang in say Romania, you would know that a child can perfectly "survive" if it is older than, say 5 years. As long as a child can not survive on its own, it depends on the support of others, usually the family. But, what if the family can not support the child? Are you as a mother oblieged to face your own death to support your child? Certainly not.
The point here is to leave ethics outside the law. You are perfectly free to sacrifice yorself for whatever reason seems appropriate to you, but you are not free to aggress in putting your moral standards over everyone.
There is no right to life, work, education etc. etc. There is only one right that any human being has, the right to property in the self and, following out of this right, the right to defend against initiated aggression. that is it.
The rest follows logical out of this.
Ludwig von Mises Institute | 518 West Magnolia Avenue | Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528
Phone: 334.321.2100 · Fax: 334.321.2119
contact@Mises.org | webmaster | AOL-IM MainMises
Mises.org sitemap