From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 11:24:58 MDT
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Lee Corbin wrote:
> >
> > It's very similar with today's fascination with "child abuse".
> > You probably couldn't list very many societies and eras on the
> > right hand side of the sheet. For one thing, stealing (and
> > robbery) are conceptually quite clear. But people will debate
> > endlessly over what is and is not child abuse. Just today some
> > vegetarians had their daughter taken away from them by the
> > Authorities in New Jersey because she was underweight. Soon,
> > they may pass a law there saying that every parent must ensure
> > that his or her son or daughter be either breast-fed or formula
> > fed. (Though they really don't need such laws any more: they
> > can simply accuse one of child abuse, and that's that.) How
> > soon will it be before Concerned Citizens (i.e. the Authorities)
> > are able to make unannounced visits to check up on children?
> > A whole new bureaucracy is in the wings!
>
> Arguing that laws against child abuse Don't Work is a perfectly good
> argument; it is an example of an ancient and honorable libertarian method.
> It isn't enough for something to be actionable; the action also has to
> accomplish net good, or you shouldn't bother. If laws against pickpocketing
> ever became unenforceable and began doing more harm than good, we'd have to
> drop that law too - not because pickpocketing became okay, but because the
> law would have stopped working.
>
> However, you appear to be arguing, not only that laws against child abuse
> Don't Work, but also that they are wrong a priori. This is the point on
> which the rest of us are choking. You seem to think that a third party is
> morally licensed to interfere if party A attempts to murder neighbor B. Why
> does this change when party A attempts to murder child C?
Because murder isn't merely abuse, it is murder. Lee's argument is that
while everybody can agree that killing your kids is wrong, there is a
vast and detailed plenum between that sort of behavior and being Ozzie
and Harriet in what various people, as individuals and as cultures, view
as 'abuse'.
You will get 90+% agreeing that anything that causes permanent visible
physical damage is abuse, but then you have the case of children
physically harming themselves (cutting, picking, head banging, etc) with
parents unaware. Is that child abuse by the parent? It might be
negligence, but the parents committed no acts, they were merely guilty
by omission.
In the US today, you will get a significant percent of the population
(and 99% of the NEA) that believes that anything that makes the child
feel bad, unhappy, or otherwise not feel good about themselves
constitutes abuse, that they need a friend more than they need a parent,
etc. and that in any instance where a parent is disciplining their
child, the parent is wrong to do so.
Between these polar extremes, you will find people with just about every
possible gradation of belief. You will similarly find a more narrow, but
similarly broad interpretation of abuse in the statutes of the 50 states
of the US, and an even more broad one among the 200 odd countries in the
world.
Now, a large degree of this confusion can be attributed to the fact that
the human culture hasn't really matured in regards to child development
issues. It is approximately where women's liberation was in the early
20th century. However, a similar degree of confustion is attributable to
that lunatic generation called The Baby Boom and its attempt to toss out
thousands of years of cultural wisdom on its ear on the assumption that
anything that previous generations did was obviously wrong (though why
such an obviously wrong culture would produce such an obviously right
generation is a question left to the imagination).
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