Who decides for the children? | naked capitalism

Yves is here. As an adult with impulsive control problems (after years of not being able to express anger, I now take it too casually), it is not difficult for me to understand the view that children are less experienced than adults with emotional regulation and risk taking. evaluation (although, in my self-disclosure, many adults are also lousy at this) and, therefore, should have limited scope. So it is not surprising that this topic is hopelessly overloaded.

Matt BrĂ¼nig. Originally posted on his website

One of the meta-questions associated with the oddly large body of literature on transgender youth these days is the question of who makes decisions for children.

Liberalism generally supports the view that people should be able to make their own decisions. All of the expositional devices of liberal philosophy take rational individuals as the fundamental unit of society and then build from that, generally in the direction of letting people do what they want, provided they don’t prevent others from doing what they want.

But children and adults with severe cognitive deficits are not fully rational individuals in the sense that liberalism needs someone. And so liberalism doesn’t really know what to do with them.

Liberal philosophy so badly wants societies to avoid taking a stand on some ultimate questions about good and evil and what constitutes a good life, but it needs to take at least some stand on these issues in order to make decisions for children and other people, who can’t do it. decide for yourself.

The standard approach to dealing with this problem, when it comes to children, is to leave decision making to parents and guardians. This allows the society to remain neutral in final matters in the way that liberalism prescribes.

This approach works in many cases, but in other cases it produces results that many consider unacceptable. Cases where a result is considered unacceptable come in two forms:

  1. The parent makes a decision that most consider extremely bad.
  2. A parent makes a decision contrary to their child’s wishes when the child is old enough and the decision relates to a topic in which society, for one reason or another, believes the child should have a say.

An example of the first case is a parent’s decision not to allow routine medical care that would prevent the death of their child. In the US, such decisions are often rejected by society on the basis of the opinion, shared by most members of society, that the child has an individual right to life. Parents who make this decision usually do so within the bounds of their religious beliefs, which makes the society’s decision to reject them doubly difficult from a liberal perspective: not only does the society take a stand on the latter issue, it does so in defiance of sincere religious beliefs.

Another example of the first case is when a parent decides that his child can get a tattoo. Some states allow parents to make this decision. Others ignore it and don’t allow any tattoos until adulthood.

A recent example of the second case can be found in COVID vaccination policy. In relation to young children, society has generally taken the position that parents decide whether their child is vaccinated, although this decision, like decisions about vaccinating children in general, has often been strongly pushed to do so by conditional on receiving basic vaccination services.

For older children, some U.S. states have a “mature minor doctrine” that allows children over a certain age who also demonstrate certain cognitive maturity to make vaccination decisions even in the absence of parental consent.

Another example of the second case can be found in abortion policy. While most states require some form of parental involvement when it comes to making decisions about abortions for underage pregnant women, all but one have some version of the mature minor doctrine that allows underage pregnant women to have an abortion without parental consent.

Of course, there are many other cases that fall into these two categories.

There is no general way to determine under what circumstances society should intervene to reject a parent or transfer decision making to a child. All of these ad hoc rules are fundamentally illiberal because they are based on public judgments of final issues. Thus the general principles of liberalism on which we tend to rely in our public discourse provide very little guidance.

In the case of gender-affirming care for transgender youth, both sides of the public discourse seem to agree that parental decisions are inappropriate. But one side believes this is inappropriate in the sense of case one above, meaning that they believe that society should disparage any parent who decides to transfer their child medically. And the other side thinks it’s inappropriate in the sense of the second case above, meaning that they think society should empower medical transition decisions to minors.

As already noted, liberalism offers absolutely nothing to resolve this disagreement. Both positions come from the different responses people have received to recent contested questions about gender and identity. This is inevitably an illiberal debate taking place in the context of a liberal society, resulting in a frenzy grasping at straws and rhetorical confusion.

The fact that what to do with children is a weak point of liberal philosophy is also probably why children are so often the focus of various cultural battles. For adults, liberalism has an answer to different cultural views: live and let live. It’s really impossible for kids. Thus, by focusing the debate on children, you are waging a cultural battle that you would otherwise dismiss as illiberal grievances unrelated to public policy.

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