Comment by andrepd
3 months ago
Parents shouldn't beat or rape their kids yet many thousands do. Parents should teach their kids about sex yet we still have sex ed in schools. Parents shouldn't deprive their kids of an education yet a minority do for religious our personal reasons; we still have compulsory schooling. Parents shouldn't give cigarretes or alcohol to kids yet we still have laws to prevent their sale to minors.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
Kids are not property of the parents. Because with property rights comes responsibility.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
> Because with property rights comes responsibility
Response-ability. The ability to respond. Which you have, if you want it or not, for anything and everything you can respond to.
You see children on the streets getting beat up? Your response-ability. You see someone throwing garbage to the ground? Your response-ability.
What you DO with it, whether you act on it, or you deny to have it, doesn’t matter. It is purely the ability, the capacity to. And not responding is also a response. We typically share response-abilities with others around us who are similarly capable. Ownership doesn’t inherently come with increased response-ability. Power does.
Maybe you are confusing responsibility with (legal) liability?
See also: Duty to rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue - at least as applied and lived in EU, LatAm, Africa; and some US states on paper
responsibility:
> "fact or condition of being responsible, accountable, or answerable," from 1780s.
and in the mid 1790s it meant "that for which one is responsible; a trust, duty, etc."
i am not sure where you're getting this "ability to respond" idea from. i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans, unless we go back to being tribal.
The key point in the etymology is "that for which one is responsible" you have to actually be responsible for some "thing" to have any responsibility.
even "Response" comes from re- + Sponsor, which:
> The general sense of "one who binds himself to answer for another and be responsible for his conduct" is by 1670s.
i am not bound by anyone else on this planet, thanks very much.
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