The Theory of Voluntary Parental Obligations Cannot Hold Fathers Responsible for Their Children

Almost all recent philosophical writing on parental obligations is only comprehensible if you understand that it is written from the starting premise that abortion must be valid. The legitimacy of abortion is taken as a given, and all arguments concerning parental obligations or children's rights are made to conform with this assumption.

The fact that most people who write about the philosophy of the family hold the validity of abortion as a core value and starting premise explains the appeal of the theory of voluntary parental obligations. This theory has a big advantage for pro-choice advocates: it is the only theory which is compatible both with abortion and also with parental obligations. This seems to offer the promise of justifying two incompatible positions together.

If you accept the premise that abortion is valid, logically you cannot accept parental obligations, since the two positions are contradictory. Some pro-choice thinkers straightforwardly accept this inference and therefore deny that parents have any obligations. This was the position that Murray Rothbard and Williamson Evers took. Although I believe they were incorrect, at least their position was logically consistent.

However, many pro-choice thinkers do not want to accept the logical implications of denying parental obligations. Rothbard was honest enough to acknowledge that if you deny parental obligations, it logically follows that parents may legitimately starve their children to death. Although many pro-choice thinkers want a theory that justifies abortion, they do not want that theory to also justify abandonment or neglect.

But the theory of voluntary parental obligations seems to offer pro-choice thinkers a way to have their cake and eat it too. If parental obligations are acquired by voluntary acceptance, then it follows that abortion is valid. A woman can choose not to accept parental obligations, therefore she can legitimately abort a child. However, once a parent has volunteered for obligations, then they cannot later abandon or starve their children. So the theory promises compatibility with abortion but not with abandonment or negligence. This pair of positions is what most pro-choice thinkers want to hold.

However, there are many problems with the theory of voluntary parental obligations. One of the biggest problems is this: If parental obligations only come from voluntary acceptance, then there is no way to hold men responsible for any children that they father. Any man who becomes a father can simply declare that he did not intend to or does not want to have children, and the theory of voluntary obligations would imply that he is free of any enforceable claim on him for parental care.

The advocates of the theory of voluntary obligations are reluctant to accept this clear consequence of their theory. Elizabeth Brake is notable as the only advocate who accepts the logical consequence that men do not acquire obligations to a child by fathering the child. She tries to find a workaround to hold men liable towards the women they impregnate. Her argument is that since pregnancy creates costs to a woman, a man can have some liability for his role in causing her to be pregnant. This argument only relates to the mother and still leaves the child without any claim against the father for parental obligations.

Other advocates of the theory adopt contradictory arguments to maintain that obligations are always voluntary but nonetheless argue that reluctant fathers have obligations even if they do not volunteer for them.

Roderick Long has put forward a mess of double standards in an attempt to provide a theory of parental obligations that would somehow achieve three conflicting aims. On the one hand, he wants reluctant fathers to be on the hook for parental obligations as a result of having sex. On the other hand, he wants reluctant mothers not to be on the hook for parental obligations as a result of having sex (because he wants abortion to be a legitimate choice). And to complicate things further for him, he also doesn't want to legitimise abandonment after birth.

These conflicting aims led Roderick Long to a bizarrely inconsistent theory of parental obligations. He argues that whether a father has any obligation to his child is entirely the choice of the mother, but if the mother does wish it, then the father is positively obligated to provide care based on the father's tacit acceptance of obligations via his action of having had sex. On the other hand, a mother has no positive obligations to her child based on her action of having had sex, but rather if the mother chooses not to have an abortion then this is tantamount to voluntarily accepting the positive obligation not to abandon the child once born. Go figure.

Joseph Millum is another advocate of the theory of voluntary parental obligations who nonetheless tries to argue the contradictory point that reluctant fathers are still obligated even if they don't volunteer. His argument is that social conventions dictate what constitutes tacit voluntary acceptance. In his view, abortion is socially accepted but being a deadbeat dad is not. Similarly to Roderick Long, Millium argues that women can decline parental obligations via abortion but men always tacitly accept the potential of parental obligations by the act of having sex. So men have obligations even if they didn't want a child but women do not. Millum thinks that an explicitly double standard like this is fine as long as it is in line with social conventions, since that is what counts for him.

Why Fathers Have Obligations

There is a theory of parental obligations that has no problem explaining why fathers are accountable to their children. According to the causal theory of parental obligations, this is why parents have obligations:

1. Parents are those who voluntarily make their gametes available for fusion, usually through consensual sex or sometimes through artificial means.
2. A forseeable outcome of making your gametes available for fusion is the creation of a child.
3. A consequence of the act of creating a child is that the child is in a state of peril.
4. Therefore parents are responsible for the state of peril of their child. This creates a positive obligation as a tort to get the child out of peril. This means raising the child to the self-sufficiency of adulthood.
5. Since the obligation results from the consequences of the parents' voluntary actions and not their intentions or agreement, parents still have obligations even if they didn't intend to create a child or do not want to be parents (with some exceptions).
6. Since both parents made their gametes available, both are jointly and severally liable for parental obligations.

Parents have obligations to their children as a result of their actions, not their declared intent. This account of parental obligations is entirely consistent and non-contradictory. It obliges both mothers and fathers. It presents a challenge for most writers on this topic though, because accepting the logic of the argument would force them to reassess one of their most deeply held premises: the assumption that abortion is justified.

Why Libertarians Mistakenly Think Parental Authority is a Homesteaded Property Right

If you put an individual in a state of peril, you have a positive obligation to get them to safety. Not only must you take whatever reasonable actions are necessary to save them, you may also undertake these actions without their consent, if your actions are justifiable in fulfilment of your obligation. For example, if you push someone into a lake who cannot swim, you must get them out before they drown or you will have committed homicide. If you need to pull them back onto land, you must do this even if they are so panicked that they flail around and attempt fight you off while you do so.

This basic principle provides a clear logical grounding for both parental obligation and parental authority. If you accept that parents have a causal responsibility for the peril that children face as a result of creating them, then it is easy to understand why parents are justified in having authority over their children to undertake whatever steps are necessary to get them out of peril. In the case of children, peril ends when the child becomes a self-sufficient adult. So parents are obliged to undertake whatever care is necessary for a child to grow into a self-sufficient adult. This causal theory not only explains what parental obligations are, but also specifies which individuals are obligated to care for each specific child.

However, most libertarian theorists do not view parenting in this way because they have denied the existence of all positive obligations except those agreed to voluntarily (i.e. by contract). When it comes to parenting, this has resulted in libertarians either denying that children have any enforceable claim against their parents for care (as Rothbard and Evers did) or arguing that children only have a claim if parents voluntarily commit to assuming obligations for their children (as Steve Horwitz and Roderick Long did).

This has left libertarians with a big problem when it comes to explaining why parents have authority over their children. In the absence of a theory of obligation explaining why specific parents must care for specific children, what gives any particular person the right to claim parental authority over a child? Also, without a theory of obligation, why should any particular person have the right to act paternalistically towards that specific child?

Libertarians have attempted to solve this problem by applying the concept of homesteading to parenting. Their line of argument is as follows:

1. There are no positive obligations, so people only have the role of parent if they voluntarily choose to assume it. All parents are volunteers.
2. For any given child, there could be competing claims to act as the parent of the child, since multiple people could volunteer for the role. This could lead to conflict.
3. Libertarianism solves the potential for conflict arising from rivalrous claims by assigning a property right using the principle of homesteading. The rule used is that the property right justly belongs to the first person to perform whatever acts are necessary to make a claim.
4. Therefore, the solution to who gets to parent a child is to consider parenting as a property right and identify the acts necessary to claim it.

Opinions differ among libertarians on various details, such as what act constitutes homesteading a baby. But all proponents agree on the basic proposition that parenting a child is a rivalrous good and homesteading is the rule used to allocate it.

Those who argue that parental authority is a homesteaded property right imply that parental obligation comes attached to the homesteading of that property right. This is because– according to this theory– everything to do with being a parent is a homesteaded property right. The idea is that one homesteads a bundle of rights associated with the role of parenthood, such as the right to exclude others from parenting the child and the right to exert paternalistic authority over the child.

However, if you accept that parents have causal obligations, then the concept of homesteading parental authority as a property right is nonsensical because parental authority derives from parental obligation. Parental obligation is antecedent to parental authority. Parental obligation provides both the justification of parental authority and the criteria to set limits on it. Therefore parental authority can only be secondary to and derived from obligation. It is only because libertarians do not understand this that they invented the idea of parenting as a homesteaded property right.

The entire theory of homesteading parental authority has been adopted by libertarians because they do not have a causal theory of parental obligation. If they had such a theory, it would be self-evident that the idea of homesteading a child is absurd.

The Idea of "Voluntary" Parental Obligations Is a Social Contract Theory

In an earlier post I described three theories of the relationship between parents and children:

1. The Theory of Parental Ownership: parents own their children as property.
2. The Theory of Parenting as Charity: any care that parents provide for their children is a result of the parents voluntarily choosing to be "good samaritans".
3. The Theory of Parental Responsibility: parents have enforceable obligations resulting from the creation of peril.

This post introduces a fourth theory of the relationship between parents and children: the idea of "voluntary" parental obligations. This fourth theory accepts the legitimacy of enforceable parental obligations, but argues that these obligations can only be voluntarily assumed. So parents do have enforceable obligations, but only if they have voluntarily agreed to them. Let's look at the two lines of argument used to justify this theory.

Argument 1: There Are Only Two Sources Of Obligation

The main line of argument for this theory is as follows:

1. Enforceable positive obligations can only arise from two sources: voluntary agreement, or as restitution for having committed an act of aggression.
2. Creating a child is not an act of aggression.
3. Therefore, parental obligations must be a result of voluntary agreement.

This argument was made by Judith Jarvis Thomson and has also been made by Elizabeth Brake. A voluntary agreement that gives rise to obligations is a contract, so this can be called a contract theory of parental obligations. Contracts can either be explicit or implicit.

Argument 2: Adoptive Parents Prove That Parental Obligations Are Voluntary

There is an alternative line of argument for this theory, which runs as follows:

1. Adoptive parents have the same obligations as biological parents.
2. Adoptive parents become parents by voluntary agreement.
3. Therefore parental obligations arise from voluntary agreement.

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

The Problem: Who Is The Agreement With?

The problem for the theory is that any agreement or contract made by the parent cannot be with the child, since children cannot make valid contracts. Before the child comes into existence there is nobody to contract with, but even after the child has been created he cannot consent to contracts until he is an adult.

All theorists who have discussed this idea acknowledge that children cannot consent. Given that the contract is not with the child, it must be argued that parents are contracting with someone else. If parents were simply to declare to themselves that they choose to accept obligations, that would not create any kind of enforceable claim against them. They could change their minds at any time and nobody would be able to argue otherwise. So who are the parents contracting with?

Theorists attempt to resolve this problem with the following argument: by volunteering to be a parent, one makes an implicit contract not with the child but with society at large (i.e. with all other adults). By voluntarily taking on the role of parent, one commits oneself to society at large to assume obligations towards the child.

A Social Contract Theory

As should now be clear, the theory of voluntary parental obligations is a social contract theory. According to the theory, parents are making an agreement with society at large that obliges them to care for their children. It is not the child who has an enforceable claim on the parents, rather it is "society" that has the claim. Joseph Millum, a proponent of this theory, summarised the argument in his book The Moral Foundations of Parenthood:

parental responsibilities are acquired through the performance of certain voluntary acts that signify the taking on of parental responsibilities… Social convention determines both which acts have this significance and exactly what responsibilities are taken on … the core of parental responsibilities is the provision of certain goods that all children are owed as a matter of justice. Parents provide these goods on behalf of society.

The Libertarian Critique

Libertarians deny the validity of positive obligations to society at large. According to libertarianism, individuals only have negative obligations to society at large. An individual can have positive obligations with specific individuals arising from contract, tort, or restitution. But such positive obligations are not with society at large.

Therefore, the idea that parents contract with society at large should be viewed as a self-refuting idea by libertarians. Indeed for some it is: Williamson Evers and Murray Rothbard rejected this theory on these grounds.

As a side note, Evers and Rothbard went further to assume that all theories of parental obligation must be based on the illegitimate idea of social contract, so they thought that this refutes the idea of positive parental obligations as a whole. I argue that they were incorrect in that broader second conclusion. However, their first conclusion– that any theory based on the idea of a contract with the rest of society must be invalid– clearly follows from basic libertarian principles.

Libertarian Social Contract Theorists?

Some libertarians apparently didn't get the memo about the problem with social contract theories. They argue that this is indeed the basis of parental obligations. Steve Horwitz provided a version of the argument:

parental obligations come when parents engage in the positive act of treating the child as theirs by asserting their parental rights … “Treating the child as theirs” is a kind of public declaration of the exercise of parental rights … You can think of taking a child home from the hospital as analogous to homesteading: you are declaring to others (not to the child) that this child is yours and that you thereby accept the responsibilities to care that come with exercising those parental rights … accepting parental rights but refusing to accept the corresponding obligations to care for a helpless child is form of breach of contract. Again, the contract is not with the child, but with “the rest of us.” Given the helplessness of infants, someone has to provide that care and those who act in ways that exercise parental rights simultaneously announce their willingness to accept the obligation to care.

Walter Block advances a bizarre version of social contract theory as the basis of voluntary parental obligations. Whereas Horwitz put forward the idea plainly, Block uses extremely convoluted arguments that ultimately reach the same destination, whilst simultaneously denying that he has done any such thing.

Block asserts that parents cannot withhold care from children as they would be committing a kind of forestalling against other potential caregivers. His justification involves a lot of hand-waving about the rules of homesteading and the rules determining what constitutes abandoning something. He repeatedly denies that any positive obligations are implied in his argument, which seems like sophistry to me. Ultimately his argument amounts to this: if you choose to parent a child, you voluntarily take on an obligation to care for the child or else immediately inform everyone else that they can parent him instead. According to Block, this is because you are homesteading the child and this makes you bound by various rules governing homesteading and abandonment. However, the obligation you have is to the rest of society and not to the child.

Conclusion

Here are the key features of the theory of parenting as a voluntary social contract:

1. Parents only acquire obligations to their children if they choose to do so voluntarily.
2. Parental obligations are a result of agreement or contract. This can be a tacit agreement or implicit contract.
3. The contract is between the parent and the rest of society, not with the child.

The dependence on the idea of social contract is not the only problem with the theory of voluntary parental obligations. There are many other problems with the theory that refute it. I will address these in a future post.

You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations

The theory of parental responsibility is a simple idea with profound implications. Parents are causally responsible for placing their children in a state of peril, as a result of having created them. This is why parents have enforceable positive obligations to their children. The obligations are to remove the peril by raising the children to the self-sufficiency of adulthood. One of the mind-blowing implications of this idea is that parents cannot legitimately give up or pass on their obligations.

Imagine the following scenario: I am your neighbour and I have decided to make a huge bonfire in my garden. The fire begins to burn out of control, at risk of spreading and setting fire to your house. I call the fire brigade, who arrive before the flames have reached your house. I decide I am not enjoying this stressful situation, so I leave the firefighters to their work and walk off. Despite their efforts, the firefighters fail to contain the blaze and you return home to find that your house has been burned down.

When you confront me about what I have done, I make the following argument in my defence:

Yes, I may have started the fire that created the risk to your house, but I called the fire brigade to deal with it, so I passed on the problem to them. When I left, your house was untouched. If the fire brigade didn't stop the fire from reaching it, it is their fault. As soon as I passed the problem on to them, I wasn't involved anymore. If you have a problem, you should take it up with them.

Clearly this is not a legitimate argument. You would be right to object that I am the one who caused the problem in the first place. Regardless of whether I sought help to address the problem, I am still ultimately responsible for creating the risk to your property. Even if some kind of negligence on the part of the firefighters contributed to their failure to stop the blaze, that might imply some additional liability for them, but that surely would not get me off the hook for my role in creating this mess.

Here is another scenario: I push you into a lake and you cannot swim. I am also unable to swim, so I could not rescue you myself even if I wanted to. However, my inability to swim does not mean that I am free of any responsibility to you for your predicament. As the one who pushed you into the lake, I am obliged to get you the help that you need, otherwise I will be responsible for homicide. I must find help, such as a lifeguard or some volunteer willing to jump in to save you. And if the lifeguard or volunteer tries and fails, I am still responsible for your peril. I don't get to just walk off. I'm not off the hook for the problem I caused just because I asked someone else to try to sort out the problem for me. It is still my fault that you are drowning.

The important point about these scenarios is that I do not lose my obligation to you, even though I delegated actions to someone else. Although I can legitimately engage an agent to act on my behalf, I am still ultimately responsible for the obligation. Regardless of any agreements I make with my agent about what they will do for me, that doesn't change the obligation that I still hold to you because you never agreed to release me from my obligations. The same logic applies to parental obligations towards children.

Unintended Parenthood

Applying the principle to cases of unintended parenthood shows that parental obligations cannot be simply given up. The principle is that obligations can be incurred for the consequences of one's actions if those consequences were reasonably foreseeable, regardless of whether the consequences were intended or not.

Even if I did not intend to let my bonfire get out of control and burn down your house, I'm still responsible if that happens. Furthermore, even if I did my very best to stop the fire once it got out of control, I'm still the one who created the risk of an enormous bonfire in the first place. I'm still responsible.

The same logic applies to parents who did not intend to have a child. Parents cannot absolve themselves of obligations on the basis that they never wanted to have kids, nor on the basis that they actively tried to prevent this outcome by using contraceptives. If you take actions that could result in the existence of a child (i.e have consensual sex) then you are responsible for the child, even if you didn't intend it or want it. As Nathaniel Branden put it;

The fact that the parents might not have desired the child, in a given case, is irrelevant in this context; he is nevertheless the consequence of their chosen actions–a consequence that, as a possibility, was foreseeable.

Even if one parent is willing to raise the child alone, the willing parent cannot legitimately offer to be a single parent and to relieve the reluctant parent of all obligation. This cannot be done since the obligation is to the child, not the other parent. Parents are jointly and severally liable to their children. The children have legitimate claims against both parents to fulfil parental obligations. In fact, what the willing parent in this scenario would effectively be "offering" is to collude in denying the child his legitimate claims on one of his parents. Regardless of whether or not the unwilling parent accepted such an offer, it would not relieve his or her enforceable obligations to the child.

Parents Who Give Up Their Child For Adoption

Parents cannot absolve themselves of their obligation solely by passing on responsibility to an adopter, because a parent's obligation is to the child. Since a child cannot contract, the child cannot be said to have agreed to give up his claim on his parents. Therefore, parents who give their child up for adoption cannot rely on this act removing their obligation under the objective rule of creation of peril.

If I push you into a lake, my inability to swim does not mean that I am absolved of my responsibility to save you from drowning. I must find someone to rescue you on my behalf. Similarly, if parents cannot raise a child, they must find someone else to do so. But this does not absolve them of obligation for the child's peril.

If parents give their child up for adoption, this act should rightly be construed as delegating the responsibility to the adopters to fulfil the obligation on their behalf. The biological parents still remain the ultimate obligation holders. Therefore, if the adoptive parents were to mistreat the child, the biological parents could share liability for this crime since they still have enforceable positive obligations to the child.

As I have argued elsewhere, a victim of rape does not have parental obligations and so may legitimately give up a resultant child for adoption. However, no parents who have obligations can legitimately lose those obligations with adoption.

Although a biological parent cannot absolve themselves of parental responsibility by giving up a child for adoption, there are some circumstances when they can legitimately pursue adoption as a form of delegating responsibility. If the parents are objectively unable to look after a child (for example, owing to debilitating or terminal illness) then it would be a legitimate act of fulfilling parental obligations to delegate responsibility to an adopter. If for some reason the parents are demonstrably incompetent to look after themselves, let alone a child, then it would be legitimate to delegate responsibility to adopters.

Even in such cases, the biological parents do not absolve themselves of enforceable obligation. Calling on adoptors is like calling the fire brigade to put out my bonfire or calling a lifeguard to save someone I pushed into a lake. The actions of such rescuers do not absolve the person who caused the peril from their ultimate responsibility.

Given that a child can never be said to consent to adoption, the biological parent has never really lost their obligation, but rather they have effectively instructed an agent to fulfil the obligation on their behalf. If the adoptive parent failed to fulfil obligations on behalf of the parent, the child would arguably still have an enforceable claim against the original parent for having failed to fulfil their obligations.

Whether it is legitimate or not, some parents do in fact give up children for adoption, and it may well be in the best interests of the children for everyone to support this process even in cases where the delegation is not justified. Supporting adoption does not change the fact that the biological parents are failing to fulfil their valid obligations, but adoption may just be the best way to address a bad situation and ensure that a vulnerable child receives care.

Many have argued that is best to recognise the institution of bankruptcy, even though they also think that it is wrong to default on debts that have been voluntarily incurred. In a similar way, I do not think that the practice of adoption should be banned even in those cases where it is a clear dereliction of parental duty, but that does not imply that it is legitimate for parents to fail to fulfil their obligations.

Even if adoption is in the best interest of the child, it is also in the best interest of the child for the unfulfilled obligations of the biological parents to remain actionable in case the child needs them. This could involve financial support, forced heirship, or other ways in which a biological parent's obligations could be enforced.

Gamete Donors/Sellers

Since parents cannot legitimately pass on their obligations, the practice of gamete donation/sale must be illegitimate. Gamete donation/sale involves an unjust abdication of parental obligation by the gamete owner.

As has been argued by James Lindemann Nelson and Rivka Weinberg, making one's gametes available is the crucial act necessary to create a child. Therefore, those who make their gametes available are the parents of any resultant child. In most cases the parents are simply those who made their gametes available through having sex. In the case of gamete donation or sale, the sperm or egg donors/sellers are parents. They may have used other means than sex, but they are nonetheless the ones who made their gametes available.

This means that gamete donors/sellers are parents who are not fulfilling their obligations to their children. It would be wrong for me, as your neighbour, to start a huge bonfire in my garden that I know will endanger your house, and then walk off knowing that I have created a risk to you. Similarly, it is wrong to take actions that you know will create a child who is in peril and then remove yourself from any responsibility for the peril that the child faces.

This is the most wantonly irresponsible kind of parenting, since the parents deliberately cause the creation of children whilst never having any intention of fulfilling their obligations. They do not even have any involvement in ensuring that the adopters are able to fulfil obligations on their behalf. They take no care of the children that they cause to be created.

Conclusion

Even if a different set of people are arguably better candidates to raise a child (by having more resources, a more stable home etc), this does not legitimate a transfer of obligation by biological parents. As James Lindemann Nelson has argued:

It is not so much a question of knowing that the biological parents can do a better job than possible replacements; it is more a matter of continually being at hand to answer for one's own responsibilities. With respect to anyone else, the best I can do is predict that they will fufill their duties, but my relationship to my own agency is categorically different; I can bring myself—at least sometimes—to perform my duties.

Parental obligations are only fulfilled once a child reaches the safety and self-sufficiency of adulthood. At this point, the peril that the child faced as a result of being created has been overcome. Once the child has become an independent person capable of taking responsibility for his own actions, the parents are no longer obliged to remove the peril associated with childhood as the peril has dissipated. But until they are grown up, you have enforceable obligations to any and all children that you create.

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 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

Peril is not the only way to acquire obligation. Most positive obligations are acquired by contract. Since adoption usually involves contracts, one might argue that adoptive parents can acquire positive obligations to their children via contractual obligations (although the contract would be between the natural and adoptive parents). This is an additional mechanism for acquiring positive obligations that does not apply to natural parents. But this mechanism does not always apply. If anything it is an additional possible source of obligation in some cases. Do adoptive parents acquire positive obligations through some mechanism that applies in all cases?

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.

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

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: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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.

Objection 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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.

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.

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 independence, self-sufficiency, and 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 Theory of Parental Responsibility.

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.

It is a well established principle of law that one way of acquiring positive obligations is by placing someone in a state of peril. The theory of parental responsibility rests on this principle. In a future post, I will address some objections to this argument.

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.

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 bites 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 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.