Mirror of Justice

I am thankful that Jim Dwyer is graciously participating in our discussion on poverty, children, education, and anthropology.  Here is Jim's response to Rick, Rob, and I:

"Thanks, Michael and Rick, for your comments.  Michael is correct that I have not directly answered his question as to what my views are of the nature of the human person.  I have never presented such views in my past writing because I believed my views on the subject were irrelevant to my analysis.  What I’ve written about children’s education and children’s family relationships has been political theory, and the relevant question for that sort of analysis is what is the state’s view of the beings it governs.  As Rob V. suggested, I think the state’s view of what a person is must be relatively thin.  The view currently reflected in the law of western societies is not much more than that a person is a living, post-birth human being.  And the state has conferred certain basic rights on all persons, at the most basic level a right to have one’s interests taken equally into account in state policy decision making and a right not to be treated instrumentally to serve the aims of other people.  From those two basic rights, I have developed arguments about more specific rights of children in the contexts of education, parentage, termination of parental rights, non-parental claims for visitation with a child, etc..

Michael might believe that even the state (and not just individuals in their private moral lives) should adopt a thicker conception of persons, and I would be interested to read an argument for that view.  It might be that giving some additional content to the state’s notion of what a person is would be consistent with the personal moral, religious, or metaphysical beliefs of most citizens and would be innocuous.  For example, I’m not sure anything would follow as a legal or policy matter from state actors’ assuming that people have souls.  But if state actors adopted any more specific assumptions about souls – in particular, what is in people’s spiritual interests, that would be a problem for a liberal society.  (And note, the state cannot sensibly say even that conferring rights to self-determination in religious matters or rights to control children’s lives furthers spiritual interests, without its assuming an awful lot about what people’s spiritual interests are.)

There is, however, a substantial body of literature in the field of moral philosophy on what a person is and, more fundamentally, on what gives rise to moral status for any beings – that is, what makes any being “entitled to life, autonomy, respect, etc.”.  No one in the field, though, has focused just on children and developed a full account of what their moral status is, whether they should be regarded as “persons,” and what follows from their moral status.  I am now finishing a book manuscript on this topic, tentatively entitled “The Superiority of Youth: Moral Status and How We Treat Children.”  As the title suggests, I present a case for concluding that children have a moral status not inferior to adults, as some philosophers (e.g., Kant) have contended and as many social policies seem to assume, and not even equal to that of adults (as most legal scholars and philosophers assume today), but in fact higher than that of adults.  Even in this work, though, I am not operating from some personal view of the nature of the human person or of the child, and I am not developing a foundationalist account of children’s nature and status, but rather I am teasing out the implications of widely shared views of what gives rise as a general matter to moral status for any beings.

There is no disputing Rick’s point that humans are social beings.  In all my writing, I have directly addressed the fact that at some point children become deeply immersed psychologically and emotionally with particular caregivers (typically, their legal parents).  In writing about education, I noted that this, coupled with the need for parents to have some space/freedom/privacy in order to operate effectively as parents, counseled against state efforts to regulate parental teaching/speech in the home beyond what it already does (e.g., in making emotional and psychological abuse and neglect bases for child protective agency action).  In writing about child abuse and neglect, I have noted that once children form a bond with certain adult caregivers, that bond, assuming there is something positive to it for a particular child, provides a reason for attempting parental rehabilitation rather than rushing to terminate the relationship (nothing novel about that point).  Significantly, though, attachment to particular adults does not develop until a few months after birth, and so I contend, in the book that just came out, that it is preferable to terminate parental rights (or not bestow them in the first place) to a much greater degree with respect to newborns than currently occurs – that is, try to identify the biological parents who are almost certain to end up losing their children ultimately anyway, and terminate immediately after birth so that the child never does bond with them but instead forms an attachment to adoptive parents who (hopefully) will never abuse or neglect the child and therefore never require state agency workers to come into the child’s home.

I don’t agree, though, with Rick’s contention that “when we are talking about children, we are *always* talking about the relative moral weight of the claims of parents and the state, respectively, to make decisions about children's education, welfare, and upbringing,” if by that he means competing moral rights of parents and the state to make decisions.  I have presented lengthy arguments against the idea that any adults are entitled to control children’s lives and for the idea that allocation of a decision making privilege between private adults and the state should be based on rights of the children themselves, as is done with incompetent adults.  That said, Rick and I agree at a basic level about vouchers – in fact, my second book argued that voucher programs are constitutionally and morally mandatory, not merely permissible, though also that substantial regulatory strings must be attached.  I guess the point of our disagreement is that I don’t think there is a sound argument for concluding that “the character, identity, and private-ness of the school” trumps what the state concludes is necessary for the secular educational interests of children, though certainly the state should have good, research-supported reasons for the educational aims it imposes.  And so, we might disagree about some specific regulatory strings.  But we might not.

Jim"

Any reaction?