Violations of Rights

1. Rick, the point is that anyone who stops the child from running into traffic is not violating the child's "right" to freedom of action.

2. The word "we" can mean either "you and I" or "person(s) X and I"--I was counting on you to see that. It was a facetious comment on my part.

3. I fully understand what you've written--you are applying the principles of trade in a certain way to parent-child relations. Do you really think the perspective you take has never occurred to me?

3. Therfore children have the same general moral claims to the protections afforded by the principle of rights as do adults; those entitlements include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

5. Relevant factual contexts include such matters as one's state of knowledge, and one's ability to act freely and rationally.

10. Since that child has the fundamental right to life common to all humans, and since he is metaphysically dependent for his survival upon the actions of adults, therefore the two adults morally and legally responsible for his creation also bear moral and legal responsibility as guardians of his right to life, until such time as he is rationally and physically able to exercise his rights fully in society, as a functioning adult.

Any parent who would abuse, neglect or abandon his child deserves -- morally and legally -- the kind of punishments popular in the days of the Old Testament.

Rick, when you say “It’s an understandable, forgivable violation but that doesn’t change what it is,” would you hold that the government should therefore enforce the child’s freedom to run out into traffic? And if a neighbor reports to the police that little Johnny next door is being held against his will in a crib day after day, that the authorities should step in?

The gang I speak of is those of us who recognize that this is an area that needs more thought and definitions. Ayn Rand is, I think, a member of this group:

Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo as a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.

The clear implication is that a child in the latter six months of a pregnancy arguably has, at minimum, the right to life. Ayn Rand therefore clearly believed that more thought and more precise definitions would be needed around the concept of rights as they apply to embryos and to children.

I too have been dealing with these ideas for a long time, long enough to know that Rand sometimes defined ideas differently in different contexts, according to the distinctions necessary to make her point. And one must recognize that at times she is not presenting a formal definition, but merely a description or an important characteristic of the phenomenon she is talking about. In Galt’s speech, she defined rights as “conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If a man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” I think this is her most formal and comprehensive definition of the concept.

But notice that the identifications and integrations encompassed in this definition all apply to humans who have attained the age of reason. Ayn Rand is basing the idea of rights on the protections needed by fully formed persons capable of exercising the powers that distinguish man as a species from the rest of the animals. Thus, all those observations and rational connections and chains of logic that she brings to bear on the questions of man’s rights only hold in that context.

Everything else, such as the rights of fetuses, children, the insane, etc., requires fresh thinking, new definitions, new knowledge, new concepts.

(Edited by Rodney Rawlings on 3/09, 7:10pm)