DavidOdden

The essence of Objectivist political ethics is that the function of government is to prevent the initiation of force, meaning that human interactions are based on reason. Every person has the right to pursue his life according to his judgment, as long as he does not initiate force. A corollary of these principles is that holding or expressing a disagreeable position does not constitute the initiation of force. You will notice that although Rand properly vilified leftist and rightist dictatorial views, she also opposed government mind control, indeed it is a central premise of Objectivism that the mind cannot be forced. The proper response to the expression of a vile philosophical idea is not force, it is reason: counter-argument.

Yes. Since voting affects what sort of government we have, we need to be careful about who we allow to vote Although one often hears of a “right to vote”, that’s a concept that I think needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more. If we simply deny that there is any such “right to vote”, then rights do not hinge on taking a loyalty oath, and “citizenship” is conceptually redundant, it simply stands for the idea that some some people can vote, others cannot. In terms of "what are we voting for", I argue that this only refers to the selection of law-making ~ enforcing officials. For example, the senators. It's not at all clear that a popularly-elected "chief executive" is desirable, and it's kind of clear that many elected officials are undesirable. A good case is to be made that changes to the constitution itself should also be subject to a vote of the people as well as the senate. The question of whether the general rule for enacting legislation should be "simple majority" vs. super-majority is not entirely obvious, but insofar as new legislation ought to be extremely rare, there should be more than a "preponderance of support" for new laws. Unanimity would probably be overly burdensome, in case a wingnut accidentally gets elected.

What difference does citizenship make? Perhaps you mean that only citizens can vote, but you would still need to justify that restriction. We sort of have a reasoned age restriction on voting, to prevent the 4-14 year old voting block from outlawing spinach. I just want to see why a loyalty oath is a reasonable requirement for exercising the right to vote; and if there are further consequences of citizenship, we'd need to see why a loyalty oath is reasonable for that purpose.

A person has the right to act according to his own judgment, as long as he respects the rights of others. Therefore, a person can sell knives for a living, even though knives can be used by others to stab the innocent. It is only right that the government prevent the initiation of force. Selling knives is not initiation of force, nor is moving from Nevada to California, nor moving from Canada to the US. The idea that everybody, both migrants and natural born residents (who have come of age), should swear a loyalty oath is squarely at odds with Objectivist ethical principles, and is not even required in fairly oppressive states, except perhaps North Korea and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It is also quite ineffective: forcing people to lie about their beliefs does nothing to protect a society from initiation of force. It is in fact the initiation of force itself – force will be used to block you from entering or remaining if you do not sign the loyalty oath. My rights, to engage in lawful business relations with people from outside the US (who come here to do that business), have been violated by the government. Those who enact such law themselves are initiating force, and must by law be expelled from the country. The problem with deportation for rights-violators “beyond a certain point” is the vagueness of what that point is. Assuming that we have a system of rational laws limited to only punishing violation of rights, there is a technical-implementation question regarding what is the proper punishment for theft or murder. Incarceration is the obvious punishment to impose, exile is not likely to be effective in a free society, but if we erect an impenetrable barrier around the US and carefully monitor entry into the US… we’re back to where we started.

I disagree with your (apparent) stance on infant consciousness. Newborns have already gained perceptual experience in utero, and will have some experiential knowledge of the ambient language, which is essential to developing full adult rationality. It’s not just that an infant will eventually develop concepts, it’s than they have already started to develop their conceptual consciousness prenatally, which a rabbit never does.

I’d say that this is the key identification. It is not the actual demonstration of (sufficient) reasoning in each and every choice, it is the fact that man has a rational faculty whereby a man chooses his actions. A rabbit does not. Only humans have a conceptual consciousness. Perhaps you claim otherwise?

I don’t see how that makes more sense. A moral principle is a form of conceptual knowledge, and as you know from ITOE, simplicity is a fundamental requirement of human knowledge. In order to limit the principle to only certain humans, you have to complicate the proposition, which is anti-sensible. Your counter-argument that if Objectivism were correct then children would have the right to freedom of action but some people hold that they don’t falls on its face, since truth is not a social construct. Children actually have the same rights as adults. If you have a direct proof that children don’t have rights, or lack certain specific rights, let’s see the argument. In addition: you say “I don't disagree with the principle”, but everything you say shows that you do disagree. You cannot agree with the Objectivist ethics while also holding that only a subset of men have rights – that is a contradiction. Unless you mean “I don’t understand the principle”, or worse “I refuse to evaluate the truth of the principle”, there’s no way to maintain that the Objectivist ethics is correct and yet some humans have no rights. You are free to disagree, but remember the sage words of Abu Sina, “Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned”. If you have comprehended the Objectivist ethics, then you either accept it and reject the proposition that some humans have no rights, or you reject the Objectivist ethics. I really want to belabor the epistemological underpinnings of ethics. We have a simple proposition that “rights” is a necessary concept for man to exist qua man. Man’s special tool for existence is “use reason”, not “turn color when threatened” or “run fast”. We do not have instinctual knowledge that certain berries are poisonous or that certain creatures are dangerous – we have to learn this from observation and reason. Your comment that “More fundamentally would be to examine whether the Objectivist notion of essential characteristics is tenable” indicates to me, rather persuasively, that you do not accept the Objectivist epistemology, meaning that you have a very different view of human cognition. To fling around a few obscure terms, it looks to me like you are a fan of extensionalism rather than intensionalism. In a nutshell, do you see knowledge as being “the set of things that it refers to”, or “the principles that identify concretes”? Is your focus the concretes, or the conceptual abstractions from which the concretes can be derived? Essential characteristics are essential to human cognition. We do not understand the notion of “man” in terms of a complete list of all things true of man, we reduce the concept to an essential characteristic from which all other knowledge about “man” can be derived. That would be “rational being”. Again, it’s okay if you reject the Objectivist position, I just object to the notion that you can accept it while accepting its contrary. Or, to frame the matter differently, let’s see exactly what you reject. The epistemology? I find that most rejections of Objections reduce to a rejection of our epistemology.

The Objectivist principle is that man has rights, from which it follows that anything that is “man” has rights. You can disagree with that principle and we could have a different discussion, but the question about “people who lack sufficient rationality” makes no sense in the context of Objectivist ethics. Moving to that different discussion, you might offer an alternative principle: “only a being with sufficiently demonstrated rationality has rights”. Unlike the Objectivist principle, the actual application of this principle is very much up in the air. Who judges what constitutes a sufficient demonstration of rationality; what is the standard? There is no such vagueness with the Objectivist principle. You can, of course, invent a science fiction scenario where it is not clear whether a particular being is “man”, but in the real world, this is a non-question. The Objectivist ethics is based on the obviously true fact that man chooses his actions, and properly uses reason to guide his choices. But man does have the choice to act according to his nature, or not. In contrast, an ape cannot use the faculty of reason to make choices, and cannot act contrary to his nature. Again exploring alternatives to the Objectivist ethics, you might claim that man’s essential character is a combination of reason and great body strength, and therefore it is right that a being with the faculty of reason and great body strength act according to his nature, thus allowing him to treat rational beings of lesser body strength to treat beings of lesser body strength as sacrificial animals. In fact, this characterizes primitive human ethics. The most glaring problem with this alternative is that it is based on a false identification. It is false that man’s essential character is a combination of reason and great body strength (or, simply, great body strength), and if that much is false, then the ethical principle said to follow from that assumption is also false. A completely different approach to the question, again following non-Objectivist thinking, is that rights cannot be assessed using abstract principles, they must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Now, my hope is that you will see that these alternative accounts are wrong, but perhaps you accept one of these alternatives, then we could explore why, and where the contradiction resides.

In Peikoff’s exposition of certainty in OPAR, you will note that (at least in the parts where he speaks approvingly of the concept), propositions are certain, not people. “Contextual certainty” is about what is objectively known, not what you are subjectively aware of or focused on. What would it then mean to be certain that a given toy gun is safe? “Safe” is a floating abstraction, but I assume you mean “the object is incapable of damaging another human” (dogs and rats are another matter). This is the point at which hypotheticals in philosophy especially ethics tend to go way off the rails, with people conjuring up fancy scenarios about dropping the gun thereby causing a victim to stumble over it and conk their head. A straightforward application of "unsafety" is that a person brandishes the toy at a police encounter, causing themselves to suffer high-velocity lead poisoning – unsafe! The conclusion that the gun is “safe” is a consequence of context-dropping insofar as such incidents actually exist and are in the news every so often. Even if this were not a well-known kind of event, part of due diligence is considering the conceptual evidence that the gun is not always “safe”. Part of the problem is the vague predicate “safe”, so instead let us substitute a more restrictive proposition: “is incapable of discharging a bullet at the moment”. We would still go through the same mental process in terms of conceptual evidence, for example an individual may delude themselves about the gun because they are ignorant of the concept “one in the chamber”, but again “due diligence” implies learning these facts, therefore the person has something else to check before concluding that the proposition is certain. This is doable, certainty as to that proposition is possible. It may be easier with a toy gun (I haven’t seen a modern toy gun so this is just a guess). If in fact the real and toy guns are equally incapable of discharging a bullet at the moment, then at the moment you are rationally entitled to any other conclusions that flow from that. One difference that you must reach though is that the toy gun is always incapable of discharging a bullet but a real gun is by nature capable of discharging a bullet, since it is easy to change the context. The only way to evade the relevant second-order conclusion (that is is trivially possible to enable a real gun to fire a bullet, unless you obstruct the barrel at your peril) is to be stunningly ignorant, again highlighting the fact that “contextual knowledge” crucially depends on due epistemological diligence. Therefore, you cannot treat the two guns the same way, because you are not stunningly ignorant and irrational. I’m not making arbitrary assertions about the guns, I am calling on well-known conceptual evidence that simply involves thinking beyond the range of the moment.

I think the problem is a general lack of objective information of a high-enough level of generality to address the question “how bad is it?”. One the one hand, you can find specific studies that e.g. count a particular kind of bug in a location at different times. You can find empirical studies that indicate beneficial effects of a particular bug, for example, honey bees are non-controversially good for us. It also does seem to be true that there has been a decline in honey bee populations in the US (where it is technically an invasive species). In that case, one might want to check the underlying science of reported bee declines. This graphic and the associated Wiki page suggests less than total doom and gloom, and while Wiki is generally a cheesy source for verifying information, it does tend to me more-accurate when it reports hard-core scientific facts, and when dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles are cited. In my opinion, objectively assessing “how bad is it” w.r.t. honey bees in the US is a major research undertaking, one that is orders of magnitude above my pay-grade. The fact that some insect species have gone extinct is a non-issue until it is associated with concrete measures of significant. Insofar as there are about a million named insects (a subset of the total number of bugs) and 2 to 20 times that many unnamed species, the loss of a few bugs is insignificant, except as I noted, the loss of a single species (Apis mellifera) would be rather catastrophic.

I do so because once we understand the fundamental principle that a man has a fundamental right to his own life, and given that “man” means “person” and not just “adult male human”, it is self-evident that a child has a right to his own life. The claim is not that the nature of rights is self-evident, it is that once you understand the nature of rights (and man), the conclusion is self-evident. Told you so. Okay, now that we are in agreement on that basic conclusion, you ask whether that obligates me as a person who is NOT the father to take care of some child – I can’t imagine that anything I said would suggest that. The initial obligation of which I spoke is that of the persons who caused the child to exist: the mother and possibly a father. See the above discussion of responsibility, and also the matter that a person can rightfully (though perhaps not with proper moral foundation) reassign that responsibility as guardian of rights. Can you at least admit that your hatred of reason leads you to embrace an emotion-based theory of morality, even if it's not trie? Alternatively, can you offer substantive evidence and reasoning that I depend on emotion rather than reason to reach my stance? I don’t really think you have a hatred of reason, but I don’t understand how come you won’t accept the rational basis for child rights, and parental responsiblity. I also think that you have inverted the relationship between reason and emotion. “Want” is the emotional response to rational “need” – you want food and shelter because you need them: they are necessary to your survival. “Sorrow” is the emotional response to “loss of value”. I don’t just just admit that many people are driven purely by emotion, I INSIST AND LAMENT that this is so, and take every opportunity to counter the Kantian substitution of reason with emotion. We are now squarely in the realm of OPAR’s discussion of emotion as a tool for knowledge – I think that is where you should be focusing your investigations.

One point that needs to be clarified is the hierarchical nature of knowledge: knowledge is a hierarchical system of concepts and propositions. Insofar as we are speaking of human knowledge (not some table-looking computer), this system must be simple (see the various references to “crow”). Second, moral knowledge is a specific kind of knowledge, about good and bad with respect to choices. Part 2.1 is that “rights” is further specialized kind of knowledge, it is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. The fundamental right is a man’s right to his own life. From this flows the rest of the discussion. If you reject that principle, then we need to understand what you offer in its place. For example, you may instead hold that only males have rights, or men over age 25 have rights, or females under age 65. In a discussion of rights, the fundamental question is whether you accept the fundamental principle that a man has a right to his own life. I recognize that Rand used more classical language in her writing, when she continually speaks of “man”. She means “person” or in Latin homō. It does not mean “male” and it does not mean “adult”. There can be no doubt that she means “person”, and furthermore a child is a person. A child, indeed a newborn, can be distinguished from a fetus because a child, or any other person, does not live inside a person, but a fetus does live inside a person. This is essential to the abortion question. It is true that a four-month-old can’t use his freedom to survive, also a person undergoing surgery (who is unconscious) can’t use his freedom to survive, but still these people have rights. So the inability of a four-month-old to survive on his own is irrelevant in the face of the fundamental principle that all men have rights. I am harping on the hierarchical nature of moral knowledge, because you are dipping down in the direction of those facts that establish the fundamental principle, as though those facts might directly replace the principle itself. This is contrary to the nature of human cognition. It is a mistake to argue that a child has rights, because child rights are self evident from the fundamental moral principle that defines rights. It would be more coherent to reject the principle itself and offer in its place a different principle, for example that only those that survive the Spartan agōgē have rights.

Let’s set aside the question of whether “panic” is the correct term, instead, let’s just summarize what “The Media” did, with an eye to what they should do (and why). The classical view of journalism is that the journalist objectively and dispassionately reports the facts. The contemporary activist view is that the journalist should promulgates a progressivist viewpoint (or on rare occasion, an anti-progressivist viewpoint). Any journal has the right to select their stance, however offensive it may be. The classical, objective-reporting view is decidedly on the decline: I have no suggestions as to how the tide might be turned. Coverage of covid was decidedly not balanced and objective. True, you can argue that reporting the ghastly effects of covid is “information”, but information becomes disinformation when it consistently omits equally valid information. The massive destruction of value mandated by the various governments in an attempt to thwart The Apocalypse was significantly under-reported, and the magnitude of the death and destruction was vastly over-stated. Particularly conspicuous was the failure of the media to engage the public in basic education about the underlying science – what do those chart really show, and what is our standard of comparison? Insofar as there was always a respectable scientific view that covid was not the end of the world, why were the nay-sayers disregarded in the daily cycle of covid sensationalism? A simple answer is that covid sensationalism fit nicely into the syllogism of modern progressivist propaganda. The problem is that The People are suffering, and only proper guidance by The People (via the dictatorship of the proletariat) can alleviate that suffering. Of course their cause was also advanced significantly by the fact that the only visible opposition to the progressivist trend was the moron in the White House. I don’t know if van Horn is overstating the retro-panic nature of the unsourced article which I have not seen, my point is simply that the dominant trend in the media was to encourage fear, and to promote the progressivist agenda. The goal was not to objectively present information, the goal was to shape viewpoints. Which is their right.

A simple example is lying in order to keep the goodwill of another person. It is immoral, and I presume it’s unnecessary (at least right now) to argue for that conclusion. It should not be a crime to lie – except in specific limited circumstances (e.g. perjury, fraud). Rudeness like willfully leaving dog poo in front of a neighbor’s house is likewise immoral (ignore some convoluted “payback” scenario), but is not properly addressed by the law. Focusing on the question of personal moral responsibility, taking responsibility means recognizing that you caused some fact, and it would be immoral – evasion of reality – to deny that relation and the corollary action that constitutes justice in regard to your actions towards others. I don’t deny that most people think of morality from a consequentialist perspective, but that doesn’t make that view correct. Murder if you can get away with it is still contrary to a rational moral code. My claim is, very simply, that there are no contradictions. You cannot claim to be rational while disclaiming the very meaning of “being rational”.

I’ll start from an intermediate position in the chain of reasoning, not going all the way back to “A is A”. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. When you chose to put a person in immediate jeopardy, you violate their rights and you have an obligation to mitigate that harm. The job of proper government is to promulgate objective laws saying what actions constitute putting a person in immediate jeopardy thereby violating their rights, and what the required mitigation is. You may burn down your house if you want, but you may not do so in a way that causes your neighbor’s house to catch fire – you can be required to limit your house-burning so as to not put your neighbor in jeopardy. If you decide to burn down your house, you can be required to notify your sleeping guests so that they can arrange an orderly evacuation. You can even be required to assist your crippled mother in her attempt to escape the conflagration that you caused.

Now we should aim to find the fodder for a proper law, since the spectre of legal enforcement of rights has been lurking at the edges. When you directly cause a financial loss to a person which they did not invite, you should accept that cause-effect relation and you should compensate them for their loss. If necessary, the government should require you to compensate for such a demonstrated loss. We don’t say that the loss only occurs when the customer starts to eat, perhaps it occurs when the meal is delivered, or plated, or when it is cooked – but these specifics are not part of the law, which is only about the general principle of loss, and compensation. The government integrates facts with specialized moral principles, a.k.a. laws, to reach a conclusion (“pay up”). The loss suffered by the business might be incurred at the point of requesting a table (making a reservation, for example). Turning to repudiation of guardianship, your prior actions show that you have accepted the responsibility to be the custodian of the individual’s rights, which obliges you to do certain things. If you want to shirk that responsibility, you can if you do so in an orderly manner as specified by law. The proper concern of the government is whether there is a successor who accepts the responsibility. This need not directly involve the government, it means that if the question arises, you have to prove that there is a successor who accepted that responsibility in your stead. The gravity of being a custodian of rights is significant enough that I believe that an actual legal process should be required, just as real estate sales require legal formalities.

I disagree with the premise that this is the base. It is true that discovery of the nature of rights and morality in a social context is what led Rand to create Objectivism, but the resulting logical framework does not put rights at the base of morality. Existence qua man is the base. Questions of ownership, killing and “can” i.e. deontic principles follow from, and do not lead to, the proper moral foundation. Hence I have obstinately focused on that moral foundation, before moving on to the more legalistic question such as what role the government should have in protecting the rights of an individual. Much closer to the base, IMO, is the concept of responsibility, and the related matter of repudiating responsibility. Of course, we do want to speed ahead to the interesting legal question of the role of proper government in evaluating permissible and impermissible means of repudiating responsibility, and also its role in determining the custodian of the rights of a person who is not fully competent. But before we identify a principle regarding governments, responsibility and rights-custodianship, we should identify a broader principle regarding government and responsibility (because any principle regarding rights-custodianship is controlled by a general principle about responsibility). Therefore, setting aside child education, we also want to know what are the principles governing tort law in a rational society? In the “dine and dash” continuum, when does the “customer” incur an enforceable obligation? What principle says when his responsibility is enforceable, and when is it ignoreable? I argue that it starts when he claims a table, but that’s a concrete example, and not a moral principle.

As I said in various places above, parental responsibility can be repudiated. It would be highly irrational to do so in response to the discover that infants defecate and need to be taught to use a toilet, but it’s not irrational to cut ties with an evil child Questions of permission, contract and ownership are completely secondary to the fundamental moral question of whether a parent should repudiate their responsibility for some reason. Contract reflect only one tiny part of the concept of responsibility, and we’re not talking about the law right now, we’re talking about personal moral responsibility. But you still interject legal questions about rights and nabbing children who are being beaten. To repeat, moral responsibility and objective law are not the same thing. There do have a relation, but they are not the same thing.

At the level of college education, your moral responsibilities have very little to do with children. There is nothing resembling a principle “you should pay for your child’s college education”. Perhaps the child needs a life lesson in finding their own means of survival; perhaps a college education would not be beneficial to the particular child; perhaps shouldering the cost would be self-sacrificial; perhaps the child will foreseeably become the next John Galt or Hank Reardon given an advanced education. Parents have to engage in a long-term cost-benefit analysis to determine what role they should play in their child’s higher education. As for the dangers of woke Marxist propaganda, it is short-sighted to declare that you will never send a child of yours to such an institution. The alternative of sending them to Bible school is even worse, and there are slim pickin’s when it comes to Objectivist universities. If you feel that you have done a bad job of teaching your child to disregard irrational propaganda, that makes your balancing analysis harder. The analysis can be made easier if the child is dead set on a degree in social justice and community activism, and a career in destroying civilization.

The argument is primarily that your actions have predictable consequences, and that “responsibility” is a recognition of that cause-effect relationship. If I’m responsible for the success of an enterprise I get credit, and if I’m responsible for the demise of an enterprise I get the blame, but either way my actions create a responsibility. Accepting the consequences of your actions is simple honesty. Responsibility is a broad concept not limited to “creating a dependent being”: it is nothing more than respecting causality. If you cause an effect, you are responsible for the effect. “Responsible” simply paraphrases the word “causes”. Before we try to move into the question of legal enforcement of rights, I think it’s necessary to focus on a much simpler question, about the nature of responsibility. This is a simple binary question: do you accept that a responsibility derives from the choice to create a child?

There are some bits and pieces missing in your position statement. So, “one has a responsibility to nurture their child because they want to, they would love it, that it has meaning and fulfillment to them”. No, you have this responsibility because you acted in that fashion in the past. You willingly took on that responsibility. But, as I say, you can repudiate that responsibility in an orderly fashion. I think the position that a child is property is untenable from the Objectivist POV. A child is a person (it seems that’s where we disagree), and people cannot be property (man has rights, rights do not conflict). However, it is useful to explicitly lay out these positions. We need to identify a moral proposition regarding rights. We generally hold that it is man that has rights: then what constitutes “being man”? Are you proposing that it is an instance of homo sapiens who has convincingly demonstrated the present ability to survive by reason? Or are you disagreeing with the statement that it is man that has rights?

Contracts are only relevant to business arrangements that are to be enforced by the government. I conclude that there is a legally-enforceable responsibility that isn’t contractual (a tort). Adding government enforcement complicates the question, and resolving the question of responsibility has to come first. The key idea is that when living in a social context, others are not sacrificial objects to be used and discarded on a whim. All men are of potentially enduring value to you, and your actions should be consistent with that fact. Therefore, when walking your dog, you should take responsibility for your dog’s excretions and for it’s random lungings at other animate beings like cats and other dogs. Short-term thinking might lead you to think that leaving a steaming heap on someone’s lawn or next to their car is optimal from the personal self-interest perspective (saves a microscopic amount of time that could otherwise be used for something of higher value to you), but this ignores the fundamental fact that dog feces are objectively a disvalue, and your action (or having and walking a dog) brought this disvalue into existence. “Responsibility” is about cause and effect. “Moral obligation” is a recognition of that causal relationship, that is, it is the code that relates what is (I caused that turd, or that child) to what ought (I should pick up the turd, I should feed and educate the child). Objectivists are particularly centered on the question of the proper role of government, and in this discussion, there is mostly an interest in the question of rights and government intervention. I am going to assume, at my peril, that everybody agrees that a person has a certain moral obligation when they chose to create another human. With that clearly established (right??), then we can turn to the question of proper government action. The first thing, which should be obvious, is that proper government action must be constrained by the rule of law – there has to be an objectively-stated principle saying when and how the government will intervene. The problem of children and the law is that the government should equally, non-contradictorily protect the interests of each individual, but one of the central parties (the child) is to some extent incapable of using their faculty of reason to make a rational choice. The role of the government is therefore to adjudicate the question, to compare competing claims as to the child’s interest (this includes post-hoc “would have decided” cases for restitution given that a third party did not necessarily advance an alternative to a parent’s notion of the child’s interest). The government should enforce the virtue of honesty to a certain extent: if you intend to renounce your interests in a child, you must do so openly, so that others can know that the child is now a disvalue to you, that you intend to abandonment it, and others can act according to their own values. Child neglect is not the result of a parent renouncing interest in a child, it comes from falsely claiming an interest while actually having renounced that interest. Questions of child rights and legally-enforceable obligations flow from honest versus dishonest dealings with the interests of the child. The law does already state the procedure for renouncing an interest in the child, though because of the disease of social safety net, it does so at taxpayer’s expense (governmental orphanages). A perfectly reasonable replacement for this instant-gratification method of child abandonment is to require the custodian to secure a replacement custodian, following some objectively-stated standard. In other words, this is an aspect of tort law. You have a limited duty of care to a child, whereby your abandonment of interest in the child is not instantaneous and whimsical, it is orderly.

I think your question is too abstract and wide-ranging, and would benefit from narrowing its scope, and filling in some details. Let us take the first of your activities: driving a car. Rather than assume infallibility in all other domains, can you be infallible w.r.t. driving a car? Pick a different domain if you want, but don’t start with the premise that infallibility is metaphysically possible in some unspecified domain. Now, state precisely what it means to “fail” w.r.t. driving. I don’t mean “give an example of a failure in driving”, I mean give a description of all things that would be a failure. One possibility is framed in terms of emotional reaction – “actions which cause you to be unhappy”. You can then be infallible, as long as you can control your emotions and can completely detach reason from action. Under the hedonist theory of fallibility, it is not a failure if you drive off a cliff, as long as you are happy doing so. There are very many relevant contexts for an objective view of success or failure, for example, it might be considered a failure to drive for hours and end up where you started, but it might be a success if you have the goal of viewing spectacular autumnal foliage. It might also be considered a failure if a way of driving results in commission of a traffic infraction but saves you 2 hours of time on the road. If so, you will have learned that it is more important to you to not commit a traffic infraction that it is to carry out your plan in a shorter time period. Rather than presuming infallibility in all choices then injecting an abstract possibility of failure, I would start by trying to construct a plausible case for infallibility. Error can arise from failures of logic, and also from lack of relevant knowledge. To be “generally infallible”, you have to be “generally rational” and also “generally omniscient”. I posit that you cannot infallibly know whether an action in a specific context is a traffic infraction (or crime) since these are not objectively defined (in a fashion that any person would know what an infraction is).

That’s a tough question. The government should only use force to protect an individual from violation of rights, i.e. the initiation of force. Failure to provide a decent upbringing is not the initiation of force, so there is no moral basis for government intervention under the pretext that the child’s rights are being violated. Children are also not the property of their parents, to be disposed of as the parent sees fit, so we can dispose of the pretext of “parental education rights”. As an outsider, I should not be forcefully prevented from giving an education to the child, as long as I do not physically force the child to endure that education. That solves the problem in case the parents can’t be bothered to educate their child, and don’t actively block my efforts. What if the parent refuses to allow the child to receive an education, would it be proper for the government to enforce the parent’s wishes? Example 1: the parents want to teach that there is no God but Allah (etc), and I want to teach that there is no God, period. The parents want to give the child a misintegrated education on this point, I want to give the child an integrated education. Example 2: the parents say nothing one way or the other about religion, I want to teach that there is no God – the parents want the child to remain ignorant of the issue. Example 3: the parents want to teach that there is no God, some third party (not me!) wants to teach that that there is no God but Allah. Can the parents then use government force to prevent that person from promulgating a religion at the child? Can I use government force to prevent a parent from promulgating a religion at a child? Were we dealing with an adult, the solution would be simple: the individual in question must decide how to survive as a rational being, he has to make his own choices. We cannot assume that a 6 year old child has adult rationality. The current governmental regime (not just the Biden administration, the whole western legal system over the past century) mostly presumes that the parents best know what is in the interest of the child, though that is a defeasible presumption. One way in which that presumption is overridden is when the government declares that parents cannot leave a child completely uneducated. But the actual implementation of the mandate to educate is about 150º off-course. If the government has the power to require parents to provide a proper education, then the government has the power to dictate what constitutes a proper education, and what thoughts / viewpoints / facts are acceptable. Since a government censor is the greatest threat to human existence, I have to conclude that government mandated education does not actually protect the rights of a child. A proper government also cannot enforce ignorance by preventing non-parental education of a child.

By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child. Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing. Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.