But not all children have living parents. These children clearly cannot have a "right" to parental care, unless they have as well a right to force that care from someone who might have chosen to never even have children.
Perhaps a child does have such a right. Or at least perhaps society has recognized that a child does have a right to some level of support until he can care for himself.
Yes, recognition of positive rights does lead to some slippery slope problems.
Yet the right to counsel and to compel witnesses as well as to compel jury service are essential to protecting the rights of the accused. Some will argue this is different because such rights only come into play if the state chooses to prosecute rather than leave a man in peace. Yet, failure to prosecute crimes leaves all of society's rights at practical risk.
If protecting negative rights requires providing positive rights to some, in some cases, perhaps that is true in some other cases.
A child has a right to life...at least once he is born. Yet for the first several years he is wholly incapable of sustaining life if all society does is leave him alone. Left utterly alone, a baby surely dies within a few days. So can a society meaningfully protect a child's right to life, without providing some level of life sustaining support? Without such support, the "right to life" of an infant is nothing but hollow theory.
If some children do not have this right, then no child has this right, since rights are universal.
But if all children do have a right to some level of support, the question changes a bit.
Or looked at another way, perhaps a child does have a right to compel HIS parents to provide some level of support, similar to how a creditor has a right to be repaid by his debtor. That some debtors die without sufficient assets to pay their bills doesn't mean the rights of the creditor do not exist, it simply means he has been denied those rights and there is no way for him to reclaim his property. Similarly if a debtor is still alive but is unable or unwilling to make his payments and has no assets (ie "judgement proof"). The creditor, all creditors, retain their rights. In some cases, those rights cannot be exercised/enforced or they are infringed.
In this view, a child has a right to certain things from his parents. That some children are unable to exercise/enforce those rights against living or deceased parents doesn't diminish the rights of other children.
And perhaps all children have a right to life, and thus--in the absence of parents who can fulfill their responsibilities--a right to some minimum level of support from any society that claims to respect and protect that right to life.
Yes, this poses some troubling conundrums for conservatives, libertarians, and anarchists alike who rely on pure rights theory to oppose all forms of mandatory welfare.
And at the practical level, perhaps private charity is a better way to provide the needed support. But in the absence of sufficient private charity, does the child's right to life translate into a right to a claim on some of my and your property for a minimum level of support? Or do we have the right to withhold our surplus even if doing so means the certain death of a child who cannot hope to provide for his own support?
I do not claim to have any easy answers here. But any sense of moral compass suggest that maybe even rights theory must make some accommodation for the care of infants in any society that claims the right to life is fundamental and universal.
Of course, if no one has a right to life....
Charles
