Objections Against The State-Of-Peril Argument For Parental Obligations

An AI narration of the article 'Objections Against The State-Of-Peril Argument For Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas.

Critics of the state-of-peril argument for parental obligations have raised many objections — that creating a child is not aggression and so cannot generate duties, that unborn children are themselves the aggressors, that giving life is so great a gift it nullifies all further claims, that adoptive parents disprove any causal theory, that the chain of causation is impossibly tangled. In this post Jake works through ten such objections one by one, drawn from libertarian and analytic-philosophy critics including Brake, Block, Evers, Long, Dominiak, and Brighouse and Swift. A pattern emerges: when each objection is examined, the case for parental obligation only sharpens. Many of the standard counter-arguments turn out to be assertions rather than refutations, or to collapse into ad hominem.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction
0:31 Objection 1: Creating A Child Is Not An Act of Aggression and Therefore Does Not Incur Obligations
1:48 Objection 2: Obligations Are Only Valid If Voluntarily Agreed To
3:27 Objection 3: Unborn Children Initiate Aggression Against Their Mothers
5:31 Objection 4: Giving Life Is A Net Benefit And Therefore Parents Are Not Obligated Further
9:51 Objection 5: Adoptive Parents Disprove The Causal Theory of Parental Obligation
12:16 Objection 6: It is Too Difficult to Determine Who Caused a Baby to Exist Therefore Parents Don't Have Obligations by Cause
14:45 Objection 7: Causal Action Leads To Insufficient Parental Obligations
16:49 Objection 8: Creation of Peril Only Occurs if Someone's Rights Have Already Been Violated but Creating a Child Does Not Violate Rights
18:30 Objection 9: The Non-Identity Problem Means There Is No Creation of Peril
19:48 Objection 10: The Concept of Parental Obligations Is Merely a Cover for Prejudice or Ulterior Motives

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2024/6/27/objections-against-the-state-of-peril-argument-for-parental-obligations on 27 June 2024.