What do people think about this case? Should the Dutch have interfered with her and her parents?
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1 - Tuesday, 1 September 2009 at 12:53 pm
Simon Cabulea May
My sense is that they should have interfered, although I don’t have much of a theory about when the state should not allow children to do dangerous things. But is there any reason why libertarians should have a different answer to this than welfare state liberals, apart from incidental concerns with how adults’ liberties may be threatened by a state that interferes more with what children can do?
2 - Tuesday, 1 September 2009 at 4:04 pm
Andrew Jason Cohen
To my mind, the issue here is about when its permissible to interfere with the way people raise their children. (There may also be an issue about interference with the girl–but for me that is largely an empirical question: does she or does she not count as rationally autonomous?) We all recognize that there are cases where interference in parenting is permissible (cases of clear abuse, for example) and other cases where its not (feeding the child lower quality but faster food). How to draw the line is my real question. These parents seem neither abusive nor neglectful. Yet, the trip their daughter wanted to take is clearly a danger. Still, I tend to think the state should not interfere when parents choose not to have medical operations done on their children because of religious beliefs. So…..
3 - Monday, 7 September 2009 at 2:23 pm
Simon Cabulea May
How to draw the line is hard, but I’m wondering whether there is any principled reason for libertarians and left liberals to draw it differently when the issue here is one group of people’s guardianship over another group of people. To put it another way, a libertarian could think that adults should enjoy a very great amount of freedom from government interference in everything that directly affects only them and other adults. As soon as children are involved, we have a consideration that defeats the presumption of strong non-interference. So I think we may have different intuitions about the Dekker case (?), and that may be because of our different beliefs about libertarianism and left liberalism, but it’s not clear to me if there is any real reason why the latter should explain the former. It’s not as if we would expect different beliefs about what the speed limit should be, right? (Except, again, for incidental reasons about distrust of an interfering state, etc.)