Say you think that all autonomous people are entitled to make decisions without state interference,  even if those decisions are ultimately self-harming. You may then notice that there are a few people around you who are less-than autonomous. What should we do about them?

Children (and not just the drowning ones) are a difficult case for any political theory, but they’re especially hard for libertarians because in general libertarians prize personal autonomy and reject an ethic of care full-stop. What should libertarians say about children, who at once seem to be autonomous and also to warrant paternalistic treatment? Before we can answer this question, we should ask first: what is a child?

One of my favorite essays on this question is “What is a Child?” by Tamar Schapiro (gated) she argues that children exist in an odd predicament because they must decide how to shape themselves as agents before they have the agential capacities to decide. In this way, growing up is both an activity and a process. This makes sense of the experience of growing up, it’s at once a natural and uncontrollable process and an activity that kids can fail or succeed to do under our guidance. Schapiro gives the example of playtime as a distinctive way that children bootstrap their way into full agency. They ‘play the part’ of an agent until they actually become agents. It begins in infancy and persists through all the awkward phases of adolescence.

I think this view is right and it points to several libertarian conclusions about the rights of children and teenagers. First, as Schapiro argues:

“We must refrain from acting in ways which hinder children’s development as deliberators. We should not, for example, force children to rely on adult authority on matters they are capable of deciding for themselves. Where they have achieved sovereignty over some domain of discretion, we are not to subject them to our control”

One reason to respect children in this way is that it helps them develop their autonomous capacities. More importantly, if a kid is able to autonomously make a certain kind of decision, we are morally obligated to respect that decision.

The line between childhood and adulthood is blurry, but there are clear cases on either side. Small children clearly are not able to autonomously act in many domains, (though I do suspect that many parents hold on to paternalism long after junior can decide for himself, just because they don’t believe with the little one’s decisions.)

On the other hand, teenagers can clearly make a range of autonomous choices but they aren’t permitted to. For example, teenagers have rights of informed consent for important medical decisions like chemotherapy and heart transplants, but are not permitted to access birth control, get cosmetic surgery, play violent video games and watch rated R movies, stay out past 8 pm, drop out of high school, drink, smoke, or have sex without fear of criminal penalties. Insofar as teenagers have the requisite capacities to make complicated life-and death medical decisions, they ought to be similarly considered competent to make less complicated and more trivial decisions for themselves. Therefore, these prohibitive policies violate autonomous citizens rights and are offensively condescending and paternalistic.

Policy-wise this means that we ought to back off and treat kids with way more respect than we currently do. Foremost, libertarians ought to support unschooling and democratic schooling, and a  free range, idle parenting ideal. We ought to support these policies not because of parent’s rights of school choice, (or because the consequences are better, or because it’s wrong that the government spends so much of our tax money on public education, or for the reasons that Bryan Caplan cites,) but because it is what respecting them requires.

For all the advances in civil liberties over the twentieth century, children remain second-class citizens. If the teenagers you know do not seem ready for this much choice, ask yourself if you would like people making those kinds of judgments about you. Even if children are not capable of making autonomous choices, it may be because authoritarian public policy and parental tyranny has prevented them from ‘playing the part’ of adults and instilled in them a kind of learned helplessness.

Libertarians are especially concerned with rights, parental rights seem to have too much force in their current form. People who really care about freedom should extend it to children as well.

Coda: What does this theory say about the rest of us? Should we all only have rights in those domains where we are really autonomous? I suspect that at some point teenagers pass a ‘threshold of development’ where they are autonomous enough to be given all the liberties that everyone else has, though a discussion of that threshold will need to wait for another day.