From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 21:58:21 MDT
Eliezer writes
> Arguing that laws against child abuse Don't Work is perfectly good...
> It isn't enough for something to be actionable; the action also has to
> accomplish net good, or you shouldn't bother.
>
> 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?
This is, of course, complicated by the fact that a huge number
of modern and successful societies indeed do have laws precisely
forbidding murders of *all* humans; (most disagreement now centers
on whether the unborn are "human" and therefore also sacrosanct).
We are now following a tradition, and perhaps the notorious, true,
and sometimes wicked doctrine "Law is the great teacher" applies.
Actually, I do approve of bystanders interfering when party A
attempts to murder child C, at least in the situations that
most quickly come to mind. But laws do have to be written
precisely, and that may be my undoing in this argument. One
can hardly beat for simplicity a law prohibiting one person
from murdering another, period.
But the relations between parents and children call for something
special IMO. The aim here is not address situations in which
children are murdered by their parents so much as it is the
rapidly expanding phenomenon of "child abuse"; rapidly expanding
because more and more behavior tends to fall into such a category
as government bureaucracies become ever better funded and more
intrusive, and people have fewer things of substance on their minds.
But still, sticking with murder for the nonce, how ought societies
react when parents take the lives of their children, especially
very young children or babies? The principles of having as few
laws as possible in a society, thus maximizing the freedoms people
enjoy and fostering an atmosphere of liberty, freedom, and
independence from the "Authorities", suggests that what happens
internally in households be regulated as little as possible.
So first, I would strike from the books all laws relating to
child abuse (probably hundreds of thousands of words by now),
and then move towards even more freedom if possible. Some
states (within the U. S. or communities within other nations)
could then, if freedom was more widespread, experiment with
further lessening of prohibitions. I might, for example, in
my community favor proposals that would hold parents free
from anything that happened to their own children up to a
certain age, say 5, at which some ceremony (perhaps linked
with attending school or something) in which the child legally
becomes a citizen. Until a few years ago in Japan parents had
the right to kill their babies for a ninety day period after
the child was born, or so I've heard, and we know that in
ancient Rome one parent was all powerful.
For a freedom to be taken away from people, i.e. a law
enacted, a number of strict tests should have to be passed.
One would be, in the current absence of such a law, is
there no other satisfactory mechanism or tradition observed
by society that would do as well?
In the Andrea Yates case, for example, the presence of the
entire legal establishment is entirely superfluous, if not
stupid and laughable. Her family and church---to say
nothing of neighbors---were horrified at what she did,
and punishment almost to the point of shunning would have
occurred anyway. I cannot believe that most people see
this as a matter for the police and courts.
So far as I know, Iceland at one point, the Netherlands at
another, and---most recently---post-revolutionary America
were the great exemplars of liberty. I wish I knew whether
in most states laws were on the books in 1800 covering the
death of infants at the hands of their mothers.
Lee
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