A personal conundrum - libertarianism vs the State

It seems to me that the sticking point you are troubled by is that these people made decisions about somebody else's life, and like Heinlein said, "your freedom to swing your fists around ends where my nose begins." If they choose to let their own lives ebb away as a result of their superstition, that is their prerogative. In this case, the difference is that their choice led to the needless death of their child. They should be charged with willful neglect and prosecuted to the full extent of the law for this abrogation of parental obligations. While stupidity may be legal, criminal stupidity is not.

http://www.scientology-kills.org/dead/dead.htm

Here is a list of a few of the victims of scientology. Probably the most famous case is Lisa McPherson, dead from refusal of medical care by scientologists.

Well, at the moment, I'm a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party. In that they no longer require a yearly donation to be so. But I've come to realize as I see more of their platform and rhetoric, that they're not so much libertarian as anarchist.

Moderation, people. All things in moderation. The idea that The State Should Stay Out Of Our Lives has value, but making that an absolute position is, well...crazy talk. Do we want the police to stay out of our lives when we aren't hurting anyone? Sure. Do we want them gone when we're the ones being victimized? No. The Oppressive Machinery of The State never seems to mean the Fire Department or the sewer system. But these guys seem to think it would be just fabulous to privatize all of those.

Back to their roots, in other words, when there were fortunes to be made in buying burning houses if you owned a fire department. You want protection from crime? Just contract with this private police force. Or buy a bunch of guns, of course. Which works until you meet somebody else's private police force...

I became a Libertarian because I realized they had several very good ideas, like ditching the "War on Drugs". But it took a few years to find that they back them up with a whole bookshelf of suicidally bad ideas, like privatizing public services.

For instance, a common straw man attacked by those who oppose drug legalization is that school children would be smoking marijuana in schools--as if legalization prevented sensible regulation to keep such things in the hands of adults. The Libertarians actually embrace the straw man as a position. And apply it to everything.

Sure, the leadership may not actually espose all this openly, but a lot of the rank-and-file do. And they can hardly be ignored.

The particular case under discussion? Well, unless children are chattel, the girl had a right to receive treatment, and preventing it to her death is murder, just as much as denying her water. We convict mothers who drown their children because God told them to. Why should this be any different?

Once you're whatever age of consent applies, of course, you should be able to kill yourself all you want. But a child is not the property of the parent.

And it isn't always about property.

I'm not sure what the solution is either. Yes this is wrong, but so is a nanny state.

I'm just surprised by Rick's admission of being an Objectivist. This should probably be a separate post but I just recently finished Atlas Shrugged and was amazed by how bad it was, well written if needlessly long winded, but my the general concept of the story just didn't impress me at all.

First of all, I would think that laws created to protect people who are not capable of protecting themselves would be welcomed by even Libertarians, but maybe I'm wrong? I think Libertarians forget all too easily that not everyone alive on the planet has the capability to take care of themselves, such as this young child. But there are also the elderly, the mentally ill, the physically disabled and a host of others who would probably wither away and quickly die if they weren't lucky enough to have family and friends to take care of them or a social safety net provided by us (yes, I said "us", because after all, the government is "us"). I fail to see what is wrong with government stepping in to help these people.

Second, I think we tend to think of our government as some independent entity that we have no control over. Granted, it does seem that way, especially over the past seven years, but instead of getting pissed-off about it and doing something about it, we seem to just want to give up on it and either become apathetic or get rid of it completely. What about trying to save it?

Is there really nothing good that government can do??? Think of all the things that we benefit from as a society because we have government to help make it work. Travel to some country where the government is not used to better the lives of its people and tell me that you regret you weren't born a poor person in that country. How is it that all these other industrialized countries can offer its citizens universal health care and other "socialized" services and yet its citizens live longer and are healthier and they don't seem to be kicking and screaming to get out?

Nothing personal to anyone here, but in my view, Libertarianism is somewhat of a cop-out. Instead of doing the hard work to make our government better, it seems you all want to just give up on it. I apologize if I am misrepresenting your views, this is just my take from what I've heard over the years. I'm not saying that our current government doesn't have problems that need to be corrected. It does, and many of them unfortunately. But I would not want to live in a country that doesn't have a social safety net and doesn't have a government to help promote the welfare of its people. No government will be perfect, that's just the nature of it. But I'd much rather put up with some of its imperfections than get rid of it completely.

I want to speak more to Rick's conundrum as a libertarian. I've always enjoyed your description of yourself, because it includes so many seemingly contradictory terms. Yet I have always believed that is a more honest understanding of ourselves; we are all bundles of contradictions, some of which we are incapable of understanding or explaining even to ourselves. I assume that about myself.

The only political party I ever became a member of was the New York libertarian party in 1974, I think (or '76). Jerome Tuccille, whose books Radical Libertarianism and It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand I had read, was running for governor; I went to the annual dinner in NYC and heard Murray Rothbard speak. I subscribed to Reason magazine. A very heady experience, and I enjoyed it. As time went on, though, I became more and more aware of a lock-step mentality that seemed to contradict the notion of independence of thought, individual responsibility, etc., that the party espoused and that had originally drawn me to the party. They seemed to want to out-conservative the conservatives, and I lost interest. I still believe in some of their stances, but not all of them.

What intrigues me right now is that I am reading Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience, the part in which he discusses the Quakers and their failure to succeed as a strong entity in the colonial period primarily because they stuck so rigidly to the strictures of their faith, whereas the Puritans, whom we tend to perceive as rigid, were actually more realistic and more flexible.

All beliefs, it seems to me, must be moderated and held in balance by some kind of human barometer, some awareness of human imperfection and variability. Ultimately, I think, our measure must be the human, not the dogma; this is sort of a variation on the statement, imperfectly remembered, that, if it came down to a choice between my country and my friend, I hope I would have the courage to choose my friend. If the parents are so blinded and hampered by their faith that they cannot see the pain and danger to their child, they are guilty of something more than murder, I think. If we are blinded to the value and possibilities of means to a good end by the strictures of our political or moral or other beliefs, then we may be guilty of something else, I don't know what to call it.

Life, it seems to me, is an eternally balancing or juggling act, doomed to some level of inadequacy or failure. But if we manage to remain aware of the human factor at all times, I believe that the failure and inadequacy will be moderated.

I digress....

Frank Moorman, skeptic

There's an old joke based on the premise that it's easier to beg for forgiveness then to ask for permission. The joke is that a daughter is going on her first date, and when the young man shows up at the house to take the daughter out on the date, the father pulls the boy aside and whispers, "That there is my little girl, and she's my whole world. Keep that in mind while you're on your date because - I don't have any problem with going back to prison."

Yes, the state is needed for basic regulation, and protecting the lives of children should be a part of that regulation - even it it is protecting them from their own parents. This has already been firmly established here in our American societal contract, and bolstered by law. It is indeed a hairy situation to be sure, to determine where the line that separates violating personal liberties and protecting innocents lies. However, I would think that keeping a child from dying would be unambiguous.

What does this have to do with the little joke I told above? Well, in my mind it's a simple cost-benefit analysis. Does the life of that girl outweigh my own personal discomfort of possibly going to prison for kidnapping her and taking her to a hospital to save her life? As others on this thread have pointed out, maybe their neighbors should have stepped up to the plate. Personally, I wouldn't have any problem at all in going to prison for kidnapping if it saved the life of that little girl.

The bottom line is that we're in this together. We don't all see things as clearly as we should, and we need to help each other though this life. That's what families, neighbors, and societies in general should do. I am NOT making the claim that I have all the answers - I know that I do not. But collectively we can approximate the right answers pretty consistently. And we should. It's the right thing to do.

For the most part we do seem to get it right more than we get it wrong, but in this case the system broke down completely and deprived that sweet girl of the rest of the only fucking life she'll ever get. And that demands that we punish the people directly responsible for this outrage - her parents - so that we can get it right more often in the future and save some other child from an early death due to, well, let's call it what it is: insanity.

Crap. This one really makes me want to scream in frustration. So unnecessary. So sad.

Parents obligations are to act as guardians of their children and there is an implicit contract that society not to interfere in the matter of how that guardianship is maintained. However outside of contract law, children have the same basic rights as adults and when guardianship deprives a child of those rights, then parents should be held liable.

You are correct to use the word murder in this case.

It's bad enough that the parents would allow their child to die because of their beliefs, but that a judge refused to intervene sickens me. I'll bet the judge truly agonized over the decision, but beliefs are sacred in the US, no matter how stupid or dangerous they are.

I too consider myself a moderate libertarian, but I see no conflict with my belief in minimal government intrusion into our lives and thinking that the government should have intruded here. The government (or State, whatever) has a legitimate role in creating and enforcing laws that serve to promote life and rights. The state failed in this case, because it put the religious beliefs of the parents ahead of the immediate needs of the child.

People argue that if the state intervenes here, at what point do you draw the line? That's a good question, and I'm not sure what answer is. Should the state step in when it thinks the parents are teaching "wrong" beliefs? If the parents aren't giving enough allowance? I don't know, but certainly the line should be placed where this young girl would still be alive.

Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

One of the problems with libertarians is that they seem to see "The State" as some sort of independent entity acting on its own volition. But "The State" is just another human-created organization, like a business or an association or a church. It has no independent "life". It is the result of multiple human interactions.

Something like "property rights" only exist because people got together to create an organization called the state which would recognize and enforce the idea. Without the state the strongest persons or groups would control land and goods and might be said to have "property", but it wouldn't be "property rights".

Other people of course would have neither property no rights.

In both ethical and practical terms today, there is much abuse of state power over peoples' lives. The "war on drugs" comes to mind. Legalizing drugs would have no effect on the overall functioning of society. There is also much abuse with those in power unfairly favoring some economic interests - friends' business ventures for example - over others.

But as with any human endeavor, such conflicts are to be expected. So it is necessary to have counter power centers too. Which theoretically we have. The state's supposed primary function is to protect people - I would add, from others, not themselves. So the overall society has an interest that the state protect people from such actions as someone denying medical care to another person, especially someone under their care. There are exceptions, such as when a person is in a vegetative state or has an incurable condition and wants to die.

Enough, I go on too long.

Surely it is unlawful to cause death by unnecessarily depriving a dependent minor of life-saving treatment?

That it was due to personal beliefs should only be a mitigating factor in the sentencing.

The teen died shortly after a judge denied an emergency request by the state to mandate the transfusion.

I think the judge shares some of the blame/credit for the outcome.

I agree: murder. No different than if they'd starved her to death. To deny a kid insulin for diabetes is just ... homicide, any way you look at it.

There's another element to the thing too: In any sane world, the police would look into whether anyone in their weird little church encouraged them to do this, and charge those people as accessories or co-conspirators.

Somebody needs to go to prison here, both for the crime they've committed against their daughter, and to serve as an example to other religious wackos thinking of denying their children medical care.

As to the bind you find yourself in as a libertarian, I may have a partial solution.

I’m guessing part of the problem you have is the idea of the State intruding into family life, interfering in private medical decisions.

But this medical decision wasn’t exactly private. There was a hidden third party involved, an adult whose rights were violated by her temporary guardians. That person was the adult the victim herself would have become.

Hidden in our view of family is the unnoticed assumption that parents possess some sort of “ownership” of their kids. “Ownership” isn’t quite the right word, but it does express some of what goes on in our heads when we think of the rights of “family.”

I would think a true libertarian position would be that children don’t “belong to” their parents. They belong to themselves. Yes, they’re in the temporary care of their parents, and rightly so. And certainly those parents have some rights in that caretakership – including privacy and some sort of sovereign decision-making ability – but nothing in that body of rights implies permission to harm the children in any way. Any such harm would be a transgression on the rights of the adults the children will become. (To give you a for-instance of how strongly I feel about this, I think making decisions on ear-piercing, circumcision, etc., on minors by their parents is a betrayal of the rights of the kid.)

The sovereign decision-making ability of parents can be honored by other members of the society only as long as the decisions made are clearly in the interest of the minor. The instant parents start making decisions in which they feel their own interests outweigh those of the kid, even to the point of her death, they have defaulted on the social contact that recognizes their rights as parents. To my way of thinking, their rights end; the only difficulty comes in recognizing when they flip over into that selfish, deadly behavior, and deciding what to do about it.

Respect for the rights of those adults-in-waiting almost requires some sort of intervention when the custodians are betraying the trust of the children in their care. In this case, where true harm is being done, an interfering State can only be a secondary villain. The closer, more immediate threat to this girl, to the responsible adult she might have become, was always her parents.

In this case, these people believed, wrongly, that they had the right to risk death to their daughter, a person they assumed they owned enough to make such casual life-and-death decisions. They made the wrong decision deliberately, and in a society in which the knowledge of how to treat diabetes, or any ailment, is as common as how to fix a busted radiator: First you take it to an expert.

I don’t know enough about libertarianism to say, but I suspect that one of the rules is something like “If you expect other people to honor your full rights as an individual, you have to honor theirs.”

These people weren’t doing that. They killed their daughter, not just the child but the adult-to-be, and they did it slowly and with deliberation. Maybe it can be argued that they were too stupid or too deluded to consciously realize that she would die, but not knowing a gun is loaded doesn’t excuse the act of pointing it at someone and pulling the trigger, or the consequence if it fires. By their deliberate ACTS, by denying her medical care that would have kept her alive and healthy, even if they were to plead extreme ignorance, they caused her death.

But any pleas of ignorance are negated by how this thing played out. Having your kid sick for weeks or months, and then having her fall into a coma, and not calling a doctor, is beyond plain negligence or stupidity.

For any society to survive, either the one we’ve got or one a lot closer to the libertarian ideal, such people have to suffer some sort of consequence. I don't know what a libertarian philosophy allows in situations in which the rights of one individual are violated by another. I have some vague picture of concerned neighbors intervening. Bit since that didn't happen here, I'm okay with government becoming involved.

The very least result (I mean if we can't have them convicted of murder and sent to prison, or have their neighbors drop by and cave in their heads with axe handles -- jusssst kidding, ha-ha) is that their other kids have to be moved completely out of their stewardship and to a place of safety. These people have proven themselves to be unfit custodians of minors, beyond any shadow of a doubt.

I’d also be in favor of Child Protective Services taking a close look at every OTHER parent in their little cult, to find out just what sort of medical care their children are getting.

While I agree that I don't want the state getting into my personal life. Like everything there has to be a balance. As atheists, we know that the most valuable thing that we have, the most valuable thing that exists is life. If ever there is a time for there to be a tip toward state intervention: risking or taking a life is it.

If I'm not hurting anyone: stay out. If someone is going to die, please state intervene! There are (in all states as far as I know) very good, reliable and professional guardian ad litem programs. Once the parents actions become known, it is our responsibility to act: to let the state know.

I was shocked when I heard, in this case, that the cops were leaving the other kids with the parents. What, killing your kids isn't enough child abuse?

Wow, that's a real conundrum. I dont want the State to intervene either, but anyway, how about this as a way out in similar situations:

The citizens (their neighbors for example) take the child away and take her to a hospital and return her to the parents after she is well. They will be charged with kidnapping, but Im betting that a jury of their peers will side with them. They could even reason with the parents in the parent's own language: "How sure are you that God didnt send us to do what we did so your daughter will get well?"

Sorry Rick, I agree completely. More importantly, I want their remaining children taken away from these nutters.

From what I understand the behavior of the parents is indeed illegal and they ought to be brought up on charges.

I have similar political view as you Rick, I do however realized that a certain amount of regulation is required. This is particularly true in the case of children and corporations. The former because they are not in control of their destinies, the latter because the function of a corporation is to maximize profit, not look out for the well being of people or the environment.