My Rich Uncle

Additionally, investors wouldn’t want to ‘buy in’ to children likely to be looted.

Ok seriously, Robin asked for a “good clear principle” that explains the line between what parents are and aren’t allowed to do, and I offered one. Upon reflection, it doesn’t really make sense that there would be a good clear principle that explains the line, since it’s actually the result of compromise between political forces backing a variety of moral and legal principles.

Most of them didn’t see it as an ethical issue, or if it was one, it was a very tiny one.

But originally you claimed the following:

We don’t feel there’s any moral issue. . .

The latter could be used to imply a contradiction if someone says parents shouldn’t have the moral discretion (as opposed to the legal discretion) to harm their children needlessly, but the former cannot be. I happen to think it’s an ethical issue, and depending on how bad the health outcomes are, it could be small or large.

Exercise sufficiently, I said. What if she should exercise 60 minutes a day and only does 20 or 30? Who’s really going to see that as a moral issue? 20 or 30 is Good Enough.

Well, immoral does not mean the same thing as requiring moral censure. No one is perfect. I still see it as a moral issue, though.

. . . Apparently it’s perfectly moral to bind people to debts they didn’t contract (and Constitutions, and…). At least, I’m hard-pressed to think of a functioning civilized country with no national debt.

Social contracts are a different beast; it’s hard to say exactly what voluntary and involuntary mean in this case. I don’t think social contracts need the consent of every individual they bind, but I can’t think of many good reasons to bind people to individual contracts they didn’t consent to.

Jess, Robin asked for a clear principle.
. . . Well, as most people here are consequentialists (or the deontologists and the rest are hiding out), no, it’s not a universal matter of agreement that we Just Shouldn’t Do That.

If we are not willing to agree to any universal ethical principle, how can someone present us with a universal ethical principle to determine what discretion parents should have? And why is such a principle needed?

As I tried to show above, it’s perfectly plausible that a suboptimal upbringing could be equal in goodness to an optimal upbringing with liabilities. Given that society will not intervene in most cases of suboptimal upbringing, why should it intervene in the latter case?

It could be that we would like to reduce some of the discretion that parents already have, but it is politically less feasible than denying them this new discretion. There may not be a clear way to distinguish.

But I really do think this is different. The best principle I can give, which is far from clear or universal, is that parents are more likely in this case to choose incorrectly for their children. Without publicly funded childcare and a solid primary and secondary education everywhere, parents have an obligation to work hard to provide these to their children. By enforcing contracts for indentured servitude, society would be giving parents an incentive to sell part of their children’s future when they didn’t need to. Investors would have an incentive to manipulate parents into doing so. Yes, I’m sure similar incentives exist in other cases, but in this case they seem especially likely to lead to bad outcomes and unlikely to do much good. And it’s a case where society has to intervene dramatically in order to give parents this discretion, whereas most of the other cases mentioned would require dramatic intervention to take it away.