A Classical Liberal Argument Against Parental Rights
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2023Metadata
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Barataria. Revista Castellano-Manchega De Ciencias Sociales. 2023, (33), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.20932/barataria.v0i33.655Abstract
That the freedom of one individual entails the unfreedom of another is a fundamental challenge for liberalism, and this article examines how children pose a problem for certain varieties of liberalism. It begins by showing that the term liberalism is used in very different ways in the literature on parental rights. Then an analysis of a strand of liberalism referred to as classical political liberalism, based on John Locke and John Stuart Mill, is performed. A classical liberal framework is then proposed, where the government does not have comprehensive positive duties to ensure that children achieve certain outcomes, but in which it does have a clear duty to create and secure a negative space for each child. It is also argued that liberal theory is based on a comprehensive conception of the good, and that in order to know what sort of negative space is required, this must be acknowledged.