Justice For Children: Autonomy Development and the State

Justice for Children Autonomy Development and the State

Harry Adams

State University of New York Press

JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN

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JUSTICE

FOR CHILDREN Autonomy Development and the State

Harry Adams

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Cover photo: Senator Robert Kennedy discusses school with young Ricky Taggart of 733 Gates Ave. World Telegram and Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico. February 4, 1966. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Cathleen Collins Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adams, Harry William, 1962– Justice for children : autonomy development and the state / Harry Adams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7331-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Autonomy in children. 2. Social justice. 3. Parent and child. 4. Child development. 5. Child welfare. I. Title. BF723.A87A3 2007 155.4'18—dc22

2007016825 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land, saying, “The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb. —Ezekiel They die so slowly that none call it murder. —Coleridge The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. —John Stuart Mill Poor children don’t have much lobbying clout. The only remedy is a decision on the part of political leaders that protecting the most helpless members of society is the most important thing that government does, and deserves the highest priority when the resources are doled out. —Anonymous Op-ed writer, New York Times, 6/24/04

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Autonomy 1.1 Autonomy 1.2 The Necessary Conditions of Autonomy 1.3 The Degrees of Autonomy 1.4 The Value of Autonomy 1.5 The Moral Priority of Children’s Development of Autonomy

5 5 10 16 21

Chapter 2. Autonomy Development 2.1 Child Development and the Autonomy Threshold 2.2 Young Adulthood and the Signs of Autonomy (The Commencement of a Life Path) 2.3 Adolescence and the Building Blocks of Autonomy (The Acquisition of Self-Efficacy Skills) 2.4 Childhood and the Foundations of Autonomy (The Early Pathways of Development)

39 40

31

43 57 70

Chapter 3. Crippled Autonomy Development and State Intervention 85 3.1 Crippled Autonomy Development and the Harm Principle 85 3.2 Crippled Autonomy Development and State Intervention 94 3.3 Possible Types of State Intervention 113

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Chapter 4. Intervention in the Family: A Parental Licensing Model 4.1 The Proactive Management of Risks 4.2 A Model of Parental Licensing 4.3 Compulsory Contraception Chapter 5. Intervention in the School: An Educational Justice Standard 5.1 The Need for Educational Justice 5.2 The Educational Justice Standard (to Support at Least Minimal Autonomy, * AL3) 5.3 Addendum: Educational Support For More than Minimal Autonomy (* AL4)?

117 118 123 137

157 158 166 173

Chapter 6. Conclusion

191

Appendix. The Societal Assessment of Injustice to Children

197

Notes

203

Bibliography

225

Index

251

Acknowledgments

Whatever merit this volume has, it undoubtedly would have had far less if not for the following individuals. Whether directly or indirectly, whether through intellectual, emotional, or moral support, each of them helped me to be far more astute and sensitive in writing this book than I would have been otherwise (although whatever flaws it has can of course be attributed to me alone). Thanks to the Department of Philosophy at Rice University, where many of the ideas here were first incubated, and in particular: to Steve Crowell for being an exemplary department head, for finding funds that helped facilitate my writing of early drafts of some material here, and, along with Alastair Norcross, for setting such a convivial tone among the department with the get-togethers they hosted; to Richard Grandy for being an ideal teacher and intellectual inspiration; to Sherri Roush, for her keen mind and especially down-to-earth friendliness; to Mark Kulstad for his genuine warmth and for offering living proof that philosophers can be saints; to Donald Morrison for so often both extending an open door to me and keeping me on my intellectual toes with his provocative quips and comments; to Eric Margolis for his earnest counsel; and to Larry Temkin, Tris Englehardt, and really all the Philosophy faculty for providing an atmosphere void of strife and rich with collegiality. Special thanks to George Sher, for being a model of clearheadedness and a midwife of some of the ideas here; it’s a testament to his “perfectionist virtue” that, despite our occasionally wide political differences, he was always so easy to work with and so enjoyable to get along with. ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks extend also to economist Hervé Moulin and historian Richard Wolin, for being two other significant sources of inspiration at Rice. Bill Nelson, Dave Phillips, Larry McCullough, Baruch Brody, and also Alastair, Don, and George again, provided consistently rewarding interaction through the Ethics Reading Group. Martha Nussbaum, John Roemer, Shelley Kagan, Axel Honneth, Michael Sandel, and Susan Wolf proved to be very stimulating during their visits; I am grateful to them and to Larry and Don for allowing opportunities for very fruitful discussion. I also profited from discussions about some of the ideas herein with Clint Parker, Maud Barriquand, and John O’Neal, and am appreciative of their friendship during those times in Houston. The reviewers at SUNY Press provided helpful suggestions for making stronger drafts of this manuscript. Janet Malek, Brenda Connor, and Trisha Buchanan, along with Jason Hill, Brian Coleman, and Dan Palmer at Purdue University, could not have been better fellow-travelers along the way. And special kudos to philosopher Rick Boothby and political scientist Michael Franz at Loyola, for so well embarking me on this voyage. Robin, Cindy, and Catherine have my deepest appreciation; were it not for their love and support through the years, this work never would have been possible. Justin has my undying devotion, not the least for which he’s brought so many of the lessons herein down to earth and close to home. And last but not least, I wish to thank my dearest Dana, to whom I owe all.

Introduction

Since the publication of John Rawls’s magisterial Theory of Justice in 1971, there has been a resurgence if not explosion in political theory generally, and in theorization about social justice—what it entails, what it requires, what it precludes, and so forth—in particular. At the very least, Rawls helped the world to see that proposals for a just society need not consist merely in the personal tastes or utopian hopes of their proponents but, more than this, that they might consist in rigorous, empirically sensitive arguments. Their rigor was such as to allow us to say that one vision of a just society was conclusively more just or more inclusive or more practically realizable than other competing visions. Accordingly, even critics of Rawls who rejected his theory have since felt obligated to show why and where his vision was flawed, and how it could be improved. In this way, Rawls widened the door for hope of real progress in political theory, for hope that our theories would come to more faithfully capture ideals of justice and, in turn, that our societies would come to instantiate these ideals. This book is presented in that general hope and, in particular, the hope that various ideals of adult justice—especially those of autonomy and equal opportunity—might be significantly extended by showing where they should and how they could be applied to children and children’s development. Let me explain. Most systematic theorists of justice (such as Rawls, Brian Barry, Robert Nozick, and Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum) concentrate on the world of adults, primarily occupying themselves with discussion of institutional and distributional arrangements that would fairly serve and represent the interests of adult citizens. Discussion of arrangements that would fairly support children’s interests, while not altogether ignored, are usually either kept on an implicit level or else subsumed within discussion of adult interests. 1

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INTRODUCTION

For instance, while Rawls insists that “fair equality of opportunity” must occupy a foundational place within his Second Principle of justice and, more broadly, within the basic structure of a just society (even explaining that “fair equality of opportunity must be underwritten by education for all” [1971, 87]), he doesn’t go into much more specific detail about what a just “education for all” would look like, much less what the specific family arrangements of a just society would look like. Likewise, Nozick insists that the topic of “the just original acquisition of holdings” must occupy a foundational place within any decent theory of justice; but he discusses this topic mainly from the perspective of what prior historical developments, stakes, and claims serve to qualify any holding(s) as being justly originally acquired. And he certainly doesn’t discuss what early formative (child) developments might serve to give one stakeholder, who owns more or more valuable holdings, an unfair advantage over other stakeholders who might have come to own less or relatively worthless holdings. Sen and Nussbaum have advanced discussion a little more in the direction I have in mind. But even Sen and Nussbaum—who argue that person’s capabilities, and not merely their primary goods or holdings, should be the analysandum or main focus of theories of justice—say very little about how members of a just society should originally come to assimilate and possess these capabilities—in their early formative years. My goal in this book will be to fill in these gaps and remedy these imbalances. Specifically, I will present a theory of justice that lays out the “normative formative” conditions and institutional arrangements that any just society will provide for its children. I’ll thus build on the claim that no society will be just, and no theory of justice will be complete, unless it carefully and explicitly attends to these fair early conditions that children should be able to enjoy as they grow up. The underlying premise that I’ll build this project on will not simply be, then, that “all citizens and civic institutions should respect persons’ autonomy.” Loosely speaking, this might be taken as the underlying premise of these adult-oriented theories of justice. Although I endorse this basic claim, I will significantly extend and modify it here. Consequently, a central underlying premise that I’ll establish and build on is that “autonomy is not an attribute that all adults possess automatically or necessarily, simply in virtue of their being adults (or humans, or moral agents, or citizens, etc.); but rather, autonomy is an attribute that some adults come to possess as an ideal end-product of a contingent process of personal development.” As such, the moral imperative to “respect others’ autonomy,” as I’ll argue, only becomes truly valid (truly coherent, complete, and properly action-guiding within the context of

Introduction

3

theories of justice) when understood as the imperative to “respect the possession, but also development, of persons’ autonomy.” In other words, it would make little sense for any theory of justice to raise a great hullabaloo about “respecting everyone’s autonomy” if a significant number of people simply were not autonomous, and if hardly any attention were given to how people develop—or fail to develop—autonomy, in the first place! Or again, faithful and responsible fulfillment of the former morally binding imperative (to “respect people’s already-attained autonomy”) depends on faithfully and responsibly fulfilling the latter imperative (to “support the development of everyone’s autonomy”). In order to defend and elaborate this “modified” theory of justice, and to draw out many of its striking moral and social implications, I use the following plan of attack. In chapter 1, I articulate the particular conception of autonomy on which my account will be built. I explain not only the differing degrees to which people come to possess autonomy, but also why there is a moral mandate to respect and support people’s (especially young people’s) development of at least a minimal threshold level of autonomy. As it turns out, this minimal autonomy (which I designate as Autonomy Level Three, or AL3) marks the level below which people are not able to govern their own lives with even minimal effectiveness. AL3 will mark a critically important normative standard for all that follows; the rest of the book, that is, will largely be devoted to showing why and how society is obligated to allow children to develop at least this minimal level of autonomy in their lives. (My theory should thus not be confused with a more aggressive or overly intrusive liberalism that holds society responsible for ensuring higher levels of autonomy for every child, above AL3.) Chapter 2 is devoted to empirical descriptive questions more than to moral prescriptive ones; in it, I explain how, in point of fact, people do develop autonomy and fail to develop autonomy, from the time they’re born to the time they become adults. In chapter 3, largely through an extension of John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, I argue that it is morally permissible, and perhaps even obligatory, for the state to intervene on behalf of children whose development of autonomy may be seriously arrested or crippled. My arguments here are built on the insight that this type of crippled development— the type that prevents a child from developing autonomy to at least a minimal degree—can be just as or more hurtful to a child as any overt physical injury. In the next couple chapters, I provide models that demonstrate how the state should intervene in the family (chapter 4) and regulate the educational system (chapter 5), if necessary, to support children’s development of at least minimal autonomy. While considering some fairly aggressive policies of intervention here, I discuss

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INTRODUCTION

their dangers and excesses and advocate them only guardedly, under extreme circumstances and when they seem necessary to prevent children from not developing even this minimal level of autonomy. Finally and briefly in chapter 6, I conclude by recapitulating the main points established throughout and by suggesting how these might form the basis of a more unified theory of justice in the future. This new theory could amalgamate the dimensions of both adults and children, both present and future generations, and also insights from both consequentialist and deontological approaches to justice; and I suggest that this new theory could accomplish this ambitious task by building on the unifying principle that “the autonomy of all is to be maximized, within the constraints of procedures and institutions that respect the autonomy of each.” All quite provocative food for thought . . . and, I hope, action.

1

Autonomy

1.1. Autonomy There may be no concept or term of art more widely used, interpreted, and appealed to today in moral and political theory than autonomy. Depending on the context when discussing it, one can be talking about personal identity, theories of action, moral responsibility, individual freedom, political freedom, the foundations of liberalism, medical ethics and patient’s rights, or ideals of justice, for starters.1 One can be viewing it as an attribute of actions, of decisions, of desires and preferences, of values, of agents and of persons at one point in time or over the course of a lifetime. The concept of autonomy has been employed, and really overburdened, with the task of being integrally relevant to all these other concepts and issues, and in the process has been conceptualized in myriad different ways. Some philosophers have kept busy merely by trying to catalog the varying conceptions and tasks that have been assigned to autonomy. For instance, Paul Gilbert has recognized three distinct conceptions or branches of autonomy, comprised of moral agency, of psychological awareness, and of a certain legal status; Lars Sandman has outlined four leading uses of autonomy, in terms of self-determination, freedom, desire-fulfillment, and independence; Diana Meyers has argued that autonomy should be understood not only as it commonly is, in terms of the critically rational self, but also in terms of what she calls “four other faces of autonomous selfhood,” including the social self, the relational self, the divided self, and the embodied self; Joel Feinberg has outlined four other central uses (in a taxonomy that I elaborate below); Rainer Forst has enumerated five additional conceptions of autonomy; and Nomy Arpaly has outlined yet eight more conceptions, 5

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in terms of (a) agent-autonomy and self-control, (b) personal efficacy or material independence,(c) psychological independence, (d) normative moral autonomy, (e) authenticity, (f) self-awareness and selfidentification, (g) heroic autonomy or free-spiritedness, and last but not least (h) responsiveness to reasons.2 (Will the real autonomy please stand up?) I mention these variations not in order to elaborate or contrast them here, but merely to provide an idea of the variety and wider context within which my own conception appears (cf. Dworkin, 1998, and Gaus, 2005). In what follows, I will be using a conception of personal autonomy, that is largely informed by the social-scientific notion of selfefficacy. This conception is faithful to core intuitions about autonomy and also, I hope to show, perfectly suited to serve as a ballast for an account of children’s development and, more broadly, justice for children. Let me explain. As I will use the term, autonomy (from the Greek auto, for self, and nomos, for law or rule) is the complex ability to effectively govern one’s life according to one’s own preferences and capacities. In filling out this conception of personal autonomy, one can hardly begin better than by citing Isaiah Berlin’s characterization (albeit of what he called “positive liberty”): I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer—deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them . . . I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes.3 As many have noted, such a conception trades on analogy with the self-governing rule of a political body. To say that some such body or state rules itself autonomously is to say that it is substantially free of two general kinds of disorder. First, the state must be free of inordinate dissension and civil strife. No state can be said to autonomously rule itself if it is in a state of deadlock, internally divided or disorganized to

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the point of being incapable of decisive action and legislation. Second, the state must be substantially free of external domination and control. No state can be said to autonomously rule itself if it is merely the pawn of a foreign power, if its policies are the result of foreign interests and manipulations more than its own interests and will, or if, in essence, it functions like a colony or puppet regime as much as a self-determining, independent republic. The autonomous individual governs herself in a parallel fashion, along these same “internal and external” dimensions. Along the internal dimension, an individual possesses autonomy insofar as she is free of such internal hindrances as inordinate ignorance, akrasia, and anomie.4 With ignorance, the agent lacks true or important relevant information, so that she cannot make accurate or adequately informed choices. With akrasia, or weakness of will, the agent’s effective choices (the choices the agent ends up acting on) are in discord with her preferred choices (the ones she most strongly identifies with, all things considered). In Harry Frankfurt’s terminology, this agent’s effective first-order desires are at odds with, or come to override, whatever considered, secondorder volitions she may have (Frankfurt, 1971, 65–67; I deal with such weakness of will at greater length in 1.2.2.) And with anomie, the conflicted agent’s desires and preferences are in a chaotic state of disarray, with none being predominantly identified with, so that she cannot even say which of these desires or preferences are really her own. And along the external dimension, an individual can express her autonomy only insofar as she is free of the external hindrances of manipulation and coercion by others, and insofar as she has an adequate range of options to choose from. With manipulation, the agent likewise cannot make accurate or adequately informed choices; but in this case, the problem is not rooted in any lack of the agent, but in the guile or underhanded influence of others. With coercion, someone else forcefully imposes his will on the agent, so that she either may no longer actualize her will or else may do so only with dire consequences. And when confronted with an inadequate range of options to choose from, an agent will also be hindered from governing her life autonomously, since someone can do so, and exercise truly autonomous preferences, only if she is able to make choices from among a decent variety of options, with these representing more than a ubiquitous uniformity or narrowness of choice. For example, a “vote” for some candidate—if this candidate is the only “representative” on the ballot or if his agenda is virtually identical with the other representatives on the ballot—cannot necessarily be considered as representing the voter’s autonomous preference. Or again, if my only real career options are between being a

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janitor, a dishwasher, or a garbage collector, and I “choose” to be a janitor, the autonomy of my choice will be dubious. The conception of autonomy I will use in this work thus sees it largely as what Joel Feinberg calls “the actual condition of selfgovernment and its associated virtues” (number 2 below). As mentioned, Feinberg is one of the philosophers who has performed the helpful task of cataloging various leading conceptions of autonomy. Many of these can be seen as boiling down in one form or another to four of the following conceptions that Feinberg picks out: When applied to individuals the word ‘autonomy’ has four closely related meanings. It can refer either to [1] the capacity to govern oneself . . . ; or to [2] the actual condition of self-government and its associated virtues; or to [3] an ideal of character derived from that conception; . . . [4] the sovereign authority to govern oneself, which is absolute within one’s own moral boundaries—one’s ‘territory,’ ‘realm,’ ‘sphere,’ or ‘domain.’ (Feinberg, 1989, 28) In what follows, I will elaborate on these fourth, third, and first conceptions of autonomy, in order to establish why, in contrast, this second conception is most appropriate for a theory like mine that emphasizes the actual development of autonomy. The fourth conception is essentially that which holds autonomy to be an inalienable right of all adults. In particular, this is the right “to have one’s autonomy respected,” to have one’s life and personal space and especially one’s own self-regarding choices, treated as inviolable, as offlimits to encroachment by others. It is in this sense that biomedical ethicists speak of physicians’ and caregivers’ obligation “to respect a patient’s autonomy,” by honoring whatever medical decisions that (competent) patient makes concerning her own health and welfare (cf. Buchanan & Brock). One of the main reasons I will not primarily be using this conception in what follows is in order not to gloss over the following problem, as is so often done. It is somewhat misleading to gesture at “respecting the autonomy” of adults when, in many cases, these adults substantially lack autonomy (in the sense of number 1 or 2). Theorists have perpetuated this fourth conception of autonomy largely in order to enforce a hedge of protection around citizens, to protect them from the excessively paternalistic interference of Big Brother–types who “know”—supposedly better than citizens themselves know—what is really in these citizen’s or patient’s best interests. Although this is obviously a serious concern, it does not seem ultimately

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constructive to address this concern by using the language of “respect for persons’ autonomy”—since this serves to obscure the fact that persons and persons’ choices oftentimes substantially lack autonomy. Can we or should we respect what is actually not there? Does it make sense to try to respect someone’s autonomy if that person is fairly incapable of making autonomous decisions? In lieu of these problems, I think it is more reasonable and respectful, on the one hand, to avoid such misleading language and, on the other hand, to concentrate on whatever measures will lead to greater actual autonomy among persons. As I hope to show, the mandate to respect the autonomy of all adults will become truly coherent only when society takes steps to ensure that all these adults—when they are children—are actually on the path of becoming autonomous. Feinberg’s third conception, as a moral “ideal of character,” represents a constellation of virtues that constitute and undergird autonomy. These would include the virtues of self-discipline and self-control and whatever others are conducive to critical acumen, personal organization, and independence. Although I will partially assume such a virtueethical usage, I will not employ it as my primary conception of autonomy, since this tends more in the direction of a decidedly moral autonomy than what I intend here (in this politically oriented work). For I do not want my conception to be too heavily insinuated with, for instance, Kant’s notion of “moral autonomy,” or with a particular model of virtue ethics, or with comprehensive liberal conceptions of the good which, in their more extreme and imbalanced versions, prioritize atomistic, individualistic, purely self-regarding constellations of virtues and independence. What I mean to emphasize here, in contrast, is more of a personal autonomy, a more generic ideal that any just regime should be able to support as a public standard of justice, and that any persons holding widely varying conceptions of the good should be able to accept as compatible with their doctrines and ideals. Such a plan seems appropriate here, since persons ranging from Marxists to liberals to libertarians to many religious types all give considerable lip service, in one form or another, to the value of personal autonomy (while many fewer of these will be enthusiastic about attesting to the values of, say, individualism or moral autonomy). To some degree, I will employ Feinberg’s first version of autonomy (“the capacity to govern oneself”), although this will comprise only a smaller part of my overall conception. It will comprise this part because, as Feinberg notes, someone may fully possess this kind of autonomy (#1, which is generally equivalent to my “internal dimensions of autonomy”), and yet lack actual effective autonomy (#2). As we’ll

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see, this will be possible if the individual is a slave, or has to endure very oppressive social conditions, or is caught in any situation where he is not allowed to exercise autonomy, even while possessing what would otherwise be a very high degree of it. For instance, we might imagine the prophet Daniel here as he was being led away in chains toward Babylon—fully possessing autonomy #1 and yet fully lacking autonomy #2. Since examining such social conditions (which are generally equivalent to my “external dimensions of autonomy”) is an integral part of my overall plan, and since autonomy #2 presupposes autonomy #1, I will thus employ this second version as my primary conception of autonomy in what follows. Only this second version—”the actual condition of selfgovernment”—makes it clear that, for a person to be considered as truly governing her life autonomously in an all around sense, she must possess certain internal capacities and virtues and also enjoy certain external social conditions and freedoms.

1.2. The Necessary Conditions of Autonomy In this section, I hope to take this conception of autonomy (the actual condition of self-government) and, as if it were a beam of light, pass it through a kind of analytic prism to see what individual colors and components it’s composed of. As it turns out, it is composed of three primary components: a set of cognitive skills, a set of volitional attributes, and nonadaptive preferences (cf. Santiago, 2005). In much of what follows, I will use these a combination of these three things as a regulative ideal and normative goal, to clarify what children should be developing, and developing toward, in their process of becoming autonomous.

1.2.1. Cognitive Skills First, agents may be said to govern their lives autonomously only if they’re able to employ a certain set of cognitive skills. They need to be able to consciously deliberate between alternatives, effectively weighing and comparing the pluses and minuses of different options. They need to be capable of some level of critical reflection, viewing their lives not only in the moment or according to the given assumptions and prejudices of their peers and culture, but with some degree of detached objectivity. They need to be able to exercise functional means-ends reasoning, calculating with some degree of reliability which means will and will not accomplish which ends, and what current actions will cause what long-

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term effects. And they need to be able to organize their beliefs and reasons for action with a fair degree of consistency. Truly autonomous agents, in other words, cannot be grossly irrational, uncritical, imprudent, or inconsistent. And as I emphasize, although autonomous agents may not do or have to do all these things to a very high and accomplished degree, to qualify as autonomous they need to be able to do them at least to some minimal degree. To illustrate, if someone claims to be a staunch and committed environmental activist and yet regularly litters, wastes natural resources, wears fur, and eats factory-farmed meat, that person needs to be able to recognize these inconsistencies and eventually resolve them, or at least have some good reason (if there be such a thing) for this inconsistency. Otherwise, such marked inconsistency suggests that the person is more rationalizing than rational, and more disorganized, self-deceived, misinformed, confused, or anomic than autonomous. (I am thus not talking here about merely trivial inconsistencies—such as between a desire for healthy teeth and an occasional failure to brush—which even very autonomous persons can have.) We should also consider here cases wherein there’s significant inconsistency between a person’s native capacities and her career or personal ambitions. Imagine a “math-compromised” person who—despite having repeatedly failed to master basic algebra and trigonometry—plans on becoming an accomplished physicist. Or imagine someone who is intent on becoming a major league pitcher, despite the inability to throw more than a 60 mile per hour fastball—which is really not that fast, and certainly not fast enough to get big league hitters out. If such persons stubbornly maintain their plans (and not just wishes) long enough, beyond adolescence and into adulthood, and in the face of long-standing evidence to the contrary, then we may safely assume that they lack real effective autonomy because of demonstrating a certain type of cognitive failure. In particular, persons with such “personal incoherence” seem to lack our aforementioned functional means-end rationality. That is, although they might properly reason that certain ends (being a physicist or big league pitcher) would make them happy, they irrationally assume or rationalize that they can avail themselves of certain necessary means (mastering calculus or throwing at least 80 miles per hour) toward these ends. Such persons demonstrate a lack of autonomy to the degree they base their lives on an ignorance of, or refusal to acknowledge, their own limitations, and thus on irrational plans, pursuits, or “hopeless hopes” (cf. Anderson & Lux). It is one thing to be determined to chase a dream: in fact, many perseverant, autonomous people do this. But it is quite another thing to be living in

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a dream, and few if any truly autonomous people will be caught doing this. Autonomous people, in fact, will usually recognize the difference between the two.

1.2.2. Volitional Attributes Second, agents may govern their lives autonomously only if they possess certain volitional attributes. Persons lacking these attributes are those whom we think of as typically lacking self-control, especially who are enslaved to various impulses, appetites, or addictions. One cannot be autonomous if one’s will and choices are determined largely by the beck and call of these “heteronomous inclinations,” as Kant would say, or by cravings for immediate gratification (Mele, 2002a, 2002b). Persons cannot be or become autonomous if they don’t learn how to delay gratification and to make and execute plans for long-term fulfillment. In more moralistic terms, we could say that a reasonable degree of selfcontrol and temperance are necessary conditions of autonomy. Such a condition is especially pertinent in terms of standards for a child’s development of autonomy, since, as is commonly noted (and as we’ll see in chapter 2), a major hurdle of adolescence is learning how to delay impulses for immediate gratification, and learning how to plan and act according to future considerations (cf. Bandura, 1997). To be considered autonomous, each person needs to be able, not only to desire or wish for certain things (virtually any animal can do this), but to hold second-order desires about these first-order desires and wishes—in such a way that the first-order desires reach some state of coherence with the second-order ones. In other words, truly autonomous people will not entertain just any desires or wishes that pass through their heart, but only ones that they validate as being worthwhile (Hyun, 2001). Such a claim may be understood through the standard example of desire for drink. No one (besides perhaps a fanatical teetotaler) would say that such a desire, in itself, disqualified anyone from being autonomous. But if persons with a history of intemperance have a higher-order desire not to have that first-order desire (i.e., they wished that they didn’t want a drink)—and yet seem powerless to act on this second-order desire, so that their first- and second-order desires are often in conflict and they all-too-often end up acting the fool and getting drunk as skunks—then these factors suggest that they are not autonomous. This is especially true, of course, if they are enslaved to these cravings for alcohol to the point that they spill over into other areas of their lives “outside the tavern,” adversely affecting, say, their

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work and health and family life. Autonomy and alcoholism aren’t good drinking buddies. Most theorists agree that some such volitional attributes—selfcontrol, temperance, an ability to delay gratification, and congruence between one’s first- and second-order desires—are necessary for autonomy. What distinguishes Harry Frankfurt’s Conative Theory of autonomy is that he takes such volitional congruence to be sufficient for autonomy (at least in his earlier formulations). That is, Frankfurt claims that autonomy (and also “freedom of the will”) is operant whenever an agent’s first-order, effective desires are in accord with her second-order desires or volitions. In such a case, the first-order desire may be seen as free and autonomous insofar as it is identified with, and has been validated by, a second-order desire (a considered desire for the firstorder desire). But as various critics have objected, there are many serious problems with claiming that such a volitional state of affairs is sufficient for autonomy, all by itself.5 Are there no cognitive or other elements that are necessary for autonomy? In what special way do these second-order desires establish autonomy? What, if anything, lends validity to these second-order desires? What are we to say about persons like inveterate gamblers and alcoholics (so-called happy drunks) who strongly identify with their destructive first-order desires, whose second-order preferences are perfectly consistent with, and even validate, these firstorder desires? Can’t we consider artists like Charlie Chaplin and F. Scott Fitzgerald or Jimi Hendrix—who had huge, unabashed appetites for sex and booze and drugs—perfectly autonomous? Don’t these kinds of persons fill the bill of being autonomous? On another level, might not second-order desires themselves need to be validated, in turn, by some other feature, or by third-order desires, and so on and so on, leading to an infinite regress (cf. Roughley, 2002; Cuypers, 2000)? To be sure, Frankfurt hints at such problems: “There is no theoretical limit to the length of the series of desires of higher and higher orders; nothing except common sense and, perhaps, a saving fatigue prevents an individual from obsessively refusing to identify himself with any of his desires until he forms a desire of the next order.”6 But this does not squarely address, much less solve, these problems; a “saving fatigue” is an inadequate answer to what ultimately grounds autonomy, or what establishes truly autonomous preferences. I will thus conclude, contra (the early) Frankfurt, that, although consistency between one’s firstand second-order desires might be necessary for autonomy, it is not sufficient for it. Together, these cognitive and volitional components of autonomy comprise what some have called “responsiveness to reasons.”7 Even

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together, however, these components do not tell the whole story of what autonomy consists in; together, they still are not sufficient for autonomy. Since the autonomous person does not respond to just any arbitrary reasons, we will need to specify what kinds of reasons he responds to in governing his life. As I show in this next section, these reasons (values, goals, interests, desires, etc.) must align themselves not only with these formal cognitive and volitional features, but also with what some have called the formation of nonadaptive preferences.

1.2.3. Nonadaptive Preferences Third, then, agents may lead autonomous lives only if they are not governed by adaptive preferences. These are not true or authentic preferences of the agent, but ones she holds largely because of her rationalization that other choices—which the agent should realize or admit would satisfy her more—would, in her distorted judgment, not satisfy her more. Adaptive preferences are basically a form of lying to oneself, of telling yourself that something isn’t true or good just because (early on or deep down inside) you don’t want to believe its true or don’t think its attainable. So this type of rationalization usually follows a numbing period of disappointment or deprivation, after the agent has long experienced frustration with a subpar range of choices. Jon Elster refers to this phenomenon as “sour grapes” (Elster, 1982, 1986). As he explains it, this adaptive process exhibits a certain kind of “fox-and-grapes structure”: The fox really would enjoy and prefer a certain bunch of grapes hanging from a vine, if they were available. But since he has let himself believe that they are beyond his reach, or since he let himself forget how sweet and satisfying they really are, he adjusts his preferences to go without, telling himself, “I wouldn’t like them anyway, for they would be sour.” (Or as the dumped dupe tells himself, “She’s really not that pretty anyway.”) So the fox adapts his preferences in this way, “learning” to content himself with lesser fare—worms and grass, we may imagine, instead of the grapes—largely so as not to overburden himself with frustration and discontentment. Considering this process through the following all-too-common scenario may help us to understand why the formation of such adaptive preferences is, as Elster insists, inimical to autonomy and autonomous preferences (Cf. Arneson; Sher 1983). Consider the thirty-five-year-old Harriet. Harriet has formidable native intellectual gifts and, in her youth, had a passion for science and strong hopes of becoming an astronaut or astrophysicist. But because of the constraints of a stultifying environment (going

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to schools with pitiful math and science programs or curricula that “pushed home economics on the girls,” living in areas without decent museums or libraries, etc.), the influence of unsupportive parents (who poohpoohed her scientific aspirations and encouraged her instead to “realize her place” as a good homemaker), and the pressures of a domineering husband (pressures to be a submissive, fecund, and busy-at-home housewife), Harriet has never been able to cultivate her prodigious natural gifts or, for that matter, to enjoy much intellectual stimulation or growth. Somewhere along the line, after tiring of the tension behind her youthful aspirations, Harriet “came to terms” with these developments, or lack thereof. Now, although she spends all her days at home with menial chores and stultifying routines and demeaning obeisance to a bullying husband, she has contented herself with her lot in life. In fact, she’s come to think that she actually prefers this domestic way of life—thinking it more peaceful and satisfying than that “silly, headstrong, hustle-and-bustle” alternative she dreamed of as a girl. What should we say about Harriet—who, need I add, still represents more than a few women in the world today? May we say that she is living or governing her life autonomously, or that her current preferences are autonomous? Certainly not, I think, for the following reasons. Harriet’s current preferences are quite specious, because of: (a) having been formed, or rather distorted and malformed, through a background of manipulation and deprivation, if not outright coercion and sexism, (b) being uninformed, based on comparisons between alternatives when she was largely unfamiliar with one important set of these alternatives (the set representing the pleasures, attractions, and achievements of the intellectual, scientific life), and perhaps, (c) being based on a very tentative, if not simply false, assumption, namely, that she is happier and more fulfilled now than she would have been if she were pursuing a scientific career. (I won’t be adamant about this third factor since it’s based on a counterfactual that would be hard to confirm conclusively; but inasmuch as her native capacities and gifts are simply atrophying and lying fallow, it’s hard to see how she could really be more fulfilled now.) Some might think that Harriet is better off because of her adapted preferences, insofar as they help her to be happier and better adjusted to her admittedly suboptimal circumstances. But this seems like a backward way of thinking since, if anything, these preferences are keeping her from realizing better possibilities and from taking any action toward those possibilities. (At thirty-five, might she not still be able, say, to go back to night school?) Essentially then, Harriet is not governing her life autonomously because her significant life preferences are rationalized, having emerged through a prototypical process of adaptive preference formation. If she had been

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enabled to pursue a scientific career, so that this was really a live option, if she had not been manipulated away from this option, if she was adequately familiar with such other options, and if, through all this, she still preferred the domestic life, then perhaps we could say that her current domestic preferences are truly autonomous and authentic (i.e., nonadaptive), and that she is governing her life autonomously. But these “ifs” were not true; so as it stands we have no grounds for saying this. Because of the rationalization inherent in Harriet’s thinking, and in such adaptive preferences, some might be tempted to want to include this third condition of autonomy under the first necessary condition, as a merely cognitive failure. But this would be ill-advised, I think. For adaptive preferences do not represent a merely cognitive lapse, concerning only the agent’s errant judgment that some option would not satisfy her so much. Adaptive preferences also embody a type of volitional lapse, whereby agents seems to distort their will, coming to prefer something “most” strongly that, with greater circumspection and determination and with less rationalization and restrictive conditions, they would otherwise not have preferred so strongly. The formation of adaptive preferences thus seems to involve some combination of these cognitive and volitional inadequacies, but also, in most if not all cases, excessive restrictions in one’s environment or range of viable options.8 For these reasons, it seems that this adaptive-type undermining of autonomy is too complex, important, and paradigmatic in its own right, to mention only as an instance or subcategory of a cognitive deficiency, volitional deficiency, or both. Together, these seem to be the three necessary conditions of autonomy, then: One must possess these aforementioned cognitive and volitional attributes and, also, one’s significant preferences in life must not have been adaptively formed in response to unjust or oppressive social conditions. To merely resign oneself to one’s circumstances— without any real fight and without a healthy measure of critical reflection and resolve of the will—falls short of what it means to govern one’s life autonomously. Such resignation marks the life of a passive object, as Berlin would say, or even a tragically dispirited animal, more than that of an active, dignified, and autonomous subject. (Think here of the broken down greyhound or stallion who has stopped trying to run and just lies around all day, even after the leash is off, just because it’s grown so accustomed to it around his neck.)

1.3. The Degrees of Autonomy Admittedly, each of these three conditions of autonomy lend themselves to a range of generality. It was mentioned, for example, that

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autonomous persons “need to be capable of some level of critical reflection”; that “a reasonable degree of self-control and temperance are necessary”; and that autonomous agents cannot look at less fulfilling options as being “so satisfying.” Such generality is unavoidable in any sober account of autonomy, for the simple reason that autonomy is not an all-or-nothing affair but one that admits of degrees.9 Some persons are highly autonomous in certain areas of their lives but largely nonautonomous in other areas. (Even the highly accomplished Sherlock Holmes had his private little cocaine habit.) And it should come as no surprise that different individuals possess very different levels of autonomy overall. The following “Autonomy Scale” is offered with these considerations in mind, to serve as a set of six ideal types ranging from Zero to Five—with Autonomy Level Zero (AL0) representing absolute nonautonomy (i.e., the lowest level of autonomy that humans are capable of while still remaining alive) and AL5 representing the highest level of autonomy that persons are capable of attaining. AL0: Fully Nonautonomous Humans—this type of person isn’t even conscious, and has intentional control, at most, over some subconscious thoughts. (E.g., the comatose and those suffering from serious brain damage.) AL1: Substantially Nonautonomous Persons—this type of dependent person would die soon or at least fare miserably, if not under others’ or institutional care. (E.g., infants, the severely mentally retarded, and most very young children.) AL2: Moderately Nonautonomous Persons—these persons have so little maturity and wherewithal that they are not able to stand on their own two feet. In lacking the stability and independence that mark effective self-governance, they aren’t currently capable of “forging their own way.” (E.g., many early adolescents, the mildly retarded, recidivist criminals who seem incapable of rehabilitation, persons with out-of-control psychological problems or neuroses, and serious drug addicts.) AL3: Ambiguous Persons—these persons seem to lie in the gap between autonomy and nonautonomy. Their lives are not a total mess, but neither are they running smoothly or free of significant frustration. While seemingly effective at some areas of selfgovernance, these people nevertheless have other significant personal and financial struggles, hurdles, and challenges to overcome.

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN It is not clear whether these people have, or are able to follow, a clear plan to emerge from these struggles; and they seem to accommodate themselves to the apparent limitations and “given” circumstances of their lives, rather than showing much evidence or assertion of will to transcend these limits and circumstances. Similarly, these people seem largely to be products of their social setting rather than critical perusers of this setting; and they seem scarcely able to transcend or critique the assumed norms and behaviors of their culture or immediate peers. (E.g., many late teenagers; phlegmatic types who want only to be able to fit in; prostitutes; occasional hard drug users [as opposed to addicts] and persons in recovery from addictions or mental disorders; those who, though “free and living on the outside,” are leading a life of crime; many illiterates; and persons with other very hard-to-manage medical or personal problems.) AL4: Moderately Autonomous Persons—governing their lives with functional effectiveness, these persons possess a secure measure of autonomy. Despite various obstacles, they stick to their plans and chase their dreams with a fair measure of circumspection and perseverance. While it isn’t clear whether these persons can significantly transcend the assumed norms and behaviors of their culture and immediate peers, at least they can independently determine their own personal goals and plans of action. And they’re able to reflect on the assumed norms and practices of their culture and peers with at least some degree of critical detachment. (E.g., many in their midtwenties and older, and those set on entering or maintaining mildly preferred, if not extremely fulfilling, careers.) AL5: Highly Autonomous Persons—these people are governing their lives very effectively. Despite various obstacles, they have stuck to their plans and achieved their dreams with a high measure of circumspection and perseverance. They have capitalized on abundant intellectual, psychological, and material resources, so as to be able to critically assess and actualize options from among a very wide range of alternatives. And so they’ve enjoyed a good degree of self-actualization, and oftentimes social mobility. (To use extreme examples here, think of Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass in his postslave years, Benjamin Disraeli, John Glenn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; or at least people who seem to possess many of their qualities and experience many of their types of achievement, albeit not necessarily to those degrees.)

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It is important to note at least the following six points about this Autonomy Scale. First, this is undoubtedly a controversial Scale (perhaps especially as it tries to demarcate the upper reaches of autonomy); and much of this will stem from various individuals who might seem to lie at the borders of these levels. But just because some degree of vagueness will obtain with such borderline individuals should not the obscure the fact that, nevertheless, we should still be able to assess the majority of individuals, especially who are far above or far below the threshold of AL3. To deny this would be to insist, unreasonably, that people’s overall autonomy is inscrutable and cannot be measured at all. Some of the controversiality of this scale might also stem from its inclusion of multiple dimensions. In this sense, we might wonder how to accurately assess someone who exhibited, say, a high degree of cognitive awareness with a relatively low degree of volitional control (like Sherlock Holmes on one his cocaine binges). But here, too, these multiple considerations should not prevent us from being able to derive an all-things-considered judgment, of person’s overall level of autonomy. And this leads to the next point. Second, the main criteria running throughout this scale is the degree of agency and control, including self-control, that persons have over their lives. One might view this same criteria from a negative perspective, by asking: What specific limiting conditions or forces fence in and inhibit the persons, rendering them relatively more powerless, dependent, and not-in-control of their life course? Third, as should be obvious, persons’ autonomy levels will normally blossom from AL0 to (at least) AL3 as they grow from birth and infancy, through childhood and adolescence, on to adulthood. As children learn to support themselves and take control of their lives more and more through these successive (st)ages, parents and caregivers should impose their paternalistic support and control less and less. In this way, the agent’s autonomy and the caregivers’ paternalism should have an inverse relationship: as the former waxes, the latter should wane. Concerning this process, Feinberg notes that “there is a series of stages in a child’s growth between total helplessness and incapacity at the beginning and near self-sufficiency at the threshold of adulthood. Blameable ‘paternalism’ must consist in treating the child at a given stage as if he were at some earlier, less developed stage” (Feinberg, 1980, 140). The opposite problem, however, may be even more common and blameable. That is, it may be just as or more pernicious to treat anyone at a given stage as if he were at some later, more developed stage—by providing him with less support and nurturance than he really needs. Such irresponsibility—consisting of the twin wrongs of overestimating a

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person’s capabilities and especially of providing inadequate support for their development of autonomy—constitutes the paradigmatic injustice that I will be critiquing in this work. Fourth, Level Three (AL3) represents a critical threshold below which persons cannot be considered even minimally autonomous. I should point out now that my whole account of justice for children will be based on this “Autonomy Threshold,” that will comprise a crucial normative standard marking out what all young adults (who are not genetically indisposed) should, at a minimum, be able to attain. As we’ll also see, this threshold (AL3) will mark out the crucial standard of what the state should support, in the sense (as I will argue) that it should intervene, when necessary, to prevent children from ending up below this threshold by the time they become adults. Fifth, any assessment of person’s autonomy will be indirect and cumulative, based on a combination of many of these signs, characteristics, and indices. To accurately classify anyone, we would need to know the following types of things. What conditions and limitations are they bound to or by (e.g., bad habits or addictions, neuroses or phobias, diseases or dysfunctions, etc.)? What opportunities, concrete freedoms, and live options have been available to them? What skills, talents, and abilities do they possess or lack? What significant preferences, plans, goals, and hopes do they have, and how satisfied do they seem in relation to these? What kind of schedule do they conform to, and how do they feel about this schedule? What is and has been the shape and direction of their life’s trajectory? What kind of things do they feel especially fulfilled or frustrated about? It would also be essential to know about persons’ life histories: What are their class and family origins? What kinds and levels of material resources have they had at their disposal? What kinds of education have they received? What behavioral models, influences, and lifestyles have they had exposure to? And last but certainly not least, what salient advantages and disadvantages have they previously enjoyed or suffered through?10 Even such detailed information will tell only a partial story, however, about what prospective level of autonomy a young person may ultimately attain in the future. For some persons, like Frederick Douglass or Louis Armstrong, will have had the worst of imaginable origins, and yet, through being extraordinarily gifted, resourceful, and selfmotivated, end up attaining substantial levels of autonomy. (In such cases we should nevertheless contemplate what such exceptional individuals might have achieved with privileged backgrounds: perhaps achievements of even greater magnitudes!) Conversely, some “fortunate sons,” despite the most privileged, autonomy-supporting backgrounds, will

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come to manifest exceedingly dull, herdlike, nonautonomous characters and lives. Finally, and as the previous paragraph suggests, it will thus be helpful to explicitly mention the role that genetic factors play in the development of autonomy: The innate capacities anyone is born with determine the upper bounds, or maximal level, of autonomy that he or she is capable of attaining. Tragically, some with serious birth defects (e.g., anacephaly) will be born with the capacity to attain an Autonomy Level of Zero at best. Others (e.g., those with severe Down syndrome), even with the best current medical intervention and most supportive family environments, will be able to attain a level no higher than One or Two. At the other end of the spectrum, only a limited number of gifted individuals will be able to attain the level of effective self-government that AL5 represents. Not everyone will have what it takes to live life so substantially on their own terms, in such a way as to successfully maneuver through all the obstacles and “troubles, toils, and snares” that sooner or later threaten everyone’s plans and preferences. Undoubtedly, therefore, the far majority of humanity lies in between these extremes, having enough of what it takes to surpass an altogether dependent and lemming-like existence (nonautonomy, below AL3), but not so much as to attain the level of incisive free-thinking, self-determined action, and “Ubërmensch autonomy” that AL5 represents. Accordingly, I will assume that, unless persons are born with serious natural handicaps, they will be capable of attaining at least AL3. Furthermore, I will infer from this that, if nonhandicapped persons do not attain Level Three, we must then look to social and environmental factors as lying at the root of their nonautonomy.11 And looking ahead, I will argue that a grievous and pernicious injustice occurs whenever a child is prevented—through various forms of social deprivation—from attaining at least some minimal, barely functional level of autonomy (not even to mention the maximal level of autonomy he or she is naturally capable of attaining).

1.4. The Value of Autonomy Before examining this injustice, along with various other social and political implications of this scale and this threshold, though, it will be important to consider how much value we should recognize autonomy as having, and what its value consists in (cf. Oshana; Hurka, 1987). For if its value is rather limited, or rooted in some merely idiosyncratic view or parochial way of life, then the moral imperative to support all children’s development of autonomy will likewise be limited. For some

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look on autonomy as a narrowly Western notion, having no appropriate place or value in traditional non-Western societies. Others view it as a reified concoction of liberalism, that ultimately serves to perpetuate the atomizing and overblown values of individualism and independence. In this section, then, I will address such concerns; and I will show that if we underestimate its value—or do not give children a decent enough chance to develop it—then this will come at too great a human cost and result in too much disvalue. Perhaps the clearest way to establish the value of autonomy—as an important component of any dignified and distinctively human life—is to imagine a life without it. If someone is not autonomous and has not been allowed to develop at least some modicum of it () AL2), then have they lost nothing of value? Is their life no less valuable for their lack of autonomy? Or again, if the value of autonomy is only superficial and doesn’t run that deep, then can we say that someone who is not governing his life autonomously lacks nothing of real deep or universal significance? Surely not; surely a life without autonomy is grossly subpar, if not in some ways subhuman. To see this, imagine what the life of someone who lacks (even minimal) autonomy looks like. Since it is a complex ability, comprised of each of the three necessary conditions mentioned in 1.2, this implies that a life without any of these conditions would thereby lack autonomy overall. There are at least three ways, then, that we may conceive of someone living without autonomy. First, we might imagine someone living without employing the cognitive qualities that are requisite for autonomy. This life would essentially resemble Socrates’ “unexamined life” (which, of course, he famously says is “not worth living”). A person living this kind of nonautonomous life would not examine alternative directions that his life might go in, and would not make critical comparisons between different possible lifestyles and perspectives. This kind of shortsighted person would not seriously contemplate various “What ifs?”; and would not notice the various means available that, with any imagination, planning, or determination, could open up vistas that extended beyond his immediate line of vision. Would such a life be perfectly acceptable, lacking nothing of substantial value? No, even if such a person was lucky enough to find some security or satisfaction with his lot, life still would still seem incomplete. In lacking these self-reflective, critical, and proactive (rather than merely reactive) components of autonomy, such a life would resemble a dumb sheep’s as much as a prototypically human and self-aware life.

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Or we might imagine a life devoid of the volitional qualities that are requisite for autonomy. This would essentially be Kant’s state of heteronomy (which he also compares with the life of a nonhuman animal), that is, a life ruled by one’s inclinations, appetites, or compulsions. In Frankfurt’s terms, someone living this akratic kind of nonautonomous life would regularly succumb to his first-order desires, without considering whether these aligned with higher-order desires (the volitions embraced by the “authentic self”). In this case, we would not be able to say that “the person was governing his life” (according to his own higher-order preferences) as much as that “his life was governed,” by his unvalidated, first-order desires. Would this kind of life be perfectly acceptable, lacking nothing of real value? Certainly not. For it seems to resemble the life of an addict or dog in heat as much as the life of a dignified and self-possessed human. Finally, let us imagine a life governed by adaptive rather than nonadaptive preferences. Such a life would be marked by what Nietzsche called “resignation,” by passive adaptation of one’s desires and preferences to what one (wrongly) assumes is “given,” rather than by active attempts to remold the given by changing one’s circumstances, so that these come to fall in line with one’s preferences. (Remember poor beaten-down Harriet here.) Similarly, we could say that such a life is marked by what Marx called an opiated or false consciousness: in the face of serious injustice and deprivation, this person merely adapts through various rationalizations (“My master could be worse”) or utopian future hopes (“I will enjoy pie in the sky by and by”), rather than fighting for a better life now. These kinds of people dreamily accept whatever flow of circumstances they find themselves in, drifting along like a piece of wood in a stream, all the while managing to tell themselves how contented they are in doing so, however putrid the stream might be! Here again we must ask, Is such a life perfectly acceptable, lacking nothing of significant value? By no means. Contentment is one thing, but self-deception and complacency are another. When faced with real hardship or privation, it seems like more of an honest and courageous reaction to acknowledge the extent of these and to strive to correct them, rather than to merely adapt one’s responses toward them—by fooling oneself into thinking that things aren’t so bad, or that some truly better life wouldn’t really be that much better after all. The value of a life governed by nonadaptive preferences, then, consists in the greater truthfulness, courage, and again dignity, that these preferences entail. As John Stuart Mill famously argued, “better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied pig” or fox.

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I should admit some provisos here. I am not arguing that a nonautonomous person is of no value; for certainly persons have great value even if they lack any practical autonomy in their lives. Likewise, nonautonomous persons may yet be able to manifest and enjoy a range of other values in life. For instance, even the most brainwashed goosestepping “party-member” may be able to enjoy a life of solidarity, and identification with the ideals of his party and party leaders. And even the most servile house servant may be able to enjoy a feeling of belonging and contribution toward the weal and welfare of “her” house, or a sense of security within the grand scheme of things—much like Berthold Brecht’s serfs in his play Galileo, who despite their flawed geocentric and feudal worldviews nevertheless enjoyed feeling secure within “the center of God’s plan and God’s universe.” Along these lines, I am not arguing that autonomy is a precondition for all other types of value, or that nonautonomous persons cannot share in or appreciate any other values in life, but, more modestly, that persons who lack autonomy in life lack something of deep- and deeply human value, and are significantly and relatively impoverished because of this lack. Notwithstanding these provisos, then, autonomy is valuable insofar as lives actively governed with critical reflection, self-control, and nonadaptive preferences contain much more value than lives passively led without these things. And it makes no sense to ask whether autonomy is valuable apart from these three things, since these are essential components of autonomy. To have the former is necessarily to have the set of the latter, and vice versa. A critic could be persistent here and demand to know, in turn, what the value of these things lie in. Although such a demand borders on the Pyrrhically unreasonable—in being skeptical about things whose value and justification appears selfevident—I will nevertheless offer one more response. As I’ve suggested throughout, the value of critical reflection, self-control, and nonadaptive preferences lies in the way that these distinguish a life as being distinctively human. I have not contrasted these things, and the autonomous life overall, with the lives of animals—sheep, dogs in heat, lemmings, herd animals, pigs, and foxes—for merely rhetorical effect. A good case can be made that these components of autonomy are, as much as anything else, what set us apart from such animals and distill us with a distinctively human type of dignity. In imbuing their possessors with a qualitatively higher level of both conscious awareness and personal agency, these things mark out the ideal of what it means to lead an active, dignified, and contemplative human life, versus a merely passive and unreflective animal-like existence!

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It is worth pointing out, too, that this dignity is an actual dignity, based on qualities of character that will be actively manifested by whoever possesses autonomy. This is not simply an imputed dignity, based on mere inclusion in the human species or set of sapient or sentient beings. According to various moral philosophers, that is, all humans bear an imputed dignity insofar as, being members of the species homo sapiens, they are supposed to have the capacity for such things as rationality, free choice, a moral will, and so on (cf. Kuflik). As such, each and every human is supposed to be worthy of respect based on these capacities and this imputed dignity—regardless of the degree to which an individual actually realizes these capacities, or is actually dignified in character. (Remember here what I said was the less adequate notion of autonomy, used by Feinberg and many others, as the mere capacity for self-governance.) In this sense, an obnoxious fool and an insensitive slob both demand respect qua humans, even though they may otherwise be quite lacking in terms of rationality or autonomy or actual dignity of character. It is not my desire to totally jettison this idea of merely imputed dignity, since, for one, it has undergirded many moral advancements such as imperatives to show at least minimal or civil respect to all persons, including those of vicious character. And this has obviously been a good thing. But what is not so good, and what I wish to call attention to, is the way that this idea can lead to inadequate emphasis on the possession of actual dignity. In other words, it is plausible to suspect that, as moral theory has so emphasized our duty to respect all person’s imputed autonomy and dignity, it may have simultaneously underemphasized our duty to nurture all person’s (acquisition of) actual autonomy and dignity!12 It would be getting ahead of myself to fully defend this latter duty now; the reason I raise it here is to suggest that, if autonomy were viewed in terms of actual, developed abilities, it might well help to engender more of an actual concrete type of dignity rather than a merely imputed or purported dignity. As such, the value of this concrete, developed kind of autonomy may be compared to the undeniable value of cash in hand, as opposed to the contingent value of mere IOUs or promissory notes. For, we might ask, how good is it to have one’s “imputed autonomy” or “imputed dignity” respected, if one is actually an ignorant fool? It is in this sense—in constituting various qualities of real and concrete human dignity and agency—that these three components of autonomy seem to have intrinsic or at least great value. For regardless of what benefits flow from them, it just seems valuable, in itself, to be critically reflective, self-controlled, and honestly sober-minded. These

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seem to be some of the main things that make human life—as opposed to mere animal life or what Marx called mere “species-existence”—so distinctive and valuable. Apart from the issue of whether or not autonomy holds such intrinsic value, there should be no doubt that it holds significant instrumental value (Young, 1982). To the extent that someone is autonomous, he or she will be able to enjoy a proportionately higher level of practical benefits: As someone exercises more and more critical reflection and circumspection in life, that person will, to that extent, be able to perceive a broader range of options and achievable plans, plans that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. As someone exercises greater selfrestraint and comes to gain greater overall personal coherence (between first-order desires and higher-order desires and long-term goals), she will, to that extent, be able to achieve a greater net balance of fulfillment in the long run. And as someone fosters nonadaptive as opposed to adaptive preferences in life, that person will, to that extent, be able to realize those interests that are really in her best interests. Would slaves do best by growing accommodated to their chains, by adapting their preferences away from their own real interest in freedom? Or would they not rather do better by continuing to resent their chains, thereby persisting in trying to figure out how to break them? Although continuing to resent his chains might not result in the greatest subjective preference-satisfaction in the short run, it would surely lead to a greater level of freedom and well-founded happiness in the long run—if not to the slaves themselves then at least to their posterity (who, we may assume, will more likely and more quickly become free through continued resistance rather than through continued accommodation). Thomas Hurka has expressed something similar concerning the value of autonomy, in noting the way that autonomous persons exercise a more far-reaching agency and have a relatively greater causal impact on the world, than nonautonomous, or essentially slavish or enslaved, persons: Practical perfection involves agency: It involves expressing intentions in the world and determining what it does and does not contain. The autonomous agent, by virtue of her autonomy, more fully realizes this ideal. When she makes choices, she has two effects: realizing some options and blocking others. She has a more extensive causal efficacy than someone who lacks options, and a higher score on the practical dimension. By letting her determine what she does not do as well as what she does, her autonomy makes her more widely active and more practically efficacious. . . . Autonomy

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realizes agency even more so when it follows deliberation. . . . Then we have not just autonomy but deliberated autonomy: free choice from a wide range of options that reflects practical reasoning about them. This kind of autonomy realizes deliberative rationality, but in a more than intellectual way. The elements it organizes are not [merely] beliefs, which are available to a slave, but intentions realized in the world [italics mine].13 In all these ways, autonomy will arguably be of great intrinsic value, but at least great instrumental value, to all who possess it. For it imbues its possessors with an actual, rather than merely imputed, human dignity. It entails qualities and capabilities that seem valuable in themselves, in addition to entailing many concrete benefits. And if autonomy doesn’t always yield the greatest immediate satisfaction, it nevertheless leads to other more abiding benefits, such as better-conceived plans and goals and greater long-term fulfillment. Insofar as autonomy is constitutive of certain fundamental human capabilities, then, its value seems to hold irrespective of the social context it appears in, extending beyond the bounds of any merely local culture or ideology. As such, every society should arguably ensure that its children grow up developing this valuable complex ability. If not, if a society (and usually the elder generation of leaders within any society) ignores, and especially actively subverts, the development of its children’s autonomy, then we should suspect that these elders are interested more in their own welfare, or more in the perpetuation of their own sacred cows and interests, than in the welfare and true flourishing of their youth. Or so I will argue in later sections. Of course, some critics, notably from communitarian camps, squarely disagree with these claims and insist that autonomy does not have any such intrinsic or universal or even instrumental value but has come to have, at most, a kind of localized value within the context of Western liberalism.14 More to the point, such critics hold that an undue emphasis on autonomy emanating from this context has fostered an inordinate growth of individualism, and made various communal traditions and enriching forms of social life wither in the process (Graham, 2001; Callan, 1994; Rossi, 2001; Boylan, 2001). The concern is not only that autonomy is a foreign competitor to these traditions and forms, but that it is has a positively inimical, deleterious, or colonizing effect on them. An even more specific fear, within our context, is that children who grow up in non-Western or nonliberal cultures—that is, cultures that devalue autonomy and personal independence and assign much

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greater value to things like faithfulness to tradition and adherence to authority—but who nonetheless feel led to value and cultivate autonomy, thereby become unable to share in, appreciate and perpetuate the values of their own culture. (For instance, we can imagine, say, Middle Eastern and Chinese youths here who, to the extent that they feel compelled to become autonomous and “live their own lives,” thereby become unable to share in and enjoy the rich cultural traditions and values of Islam and Confucianism, respectively.) From this perspective, autonomy may thus actually have disvalue, rather than having merely little, local, or neutral value. There are a couple salient strategies that defenders of autonomy commonly make in response to such communitarian concerns. The first more direct response appeals to some form of perfectionism, and sticks to its guns by insisting that autonomy just is an important component of any good life. In this vein, the argument is that not all forms of social life or conceptions of the good are equal, or should be lent equal support, but that some versions of these—that are more supportive of certain primary goods, basic human capabilities, and objective goods such as knowledge, virtues of character, and even relational excellences that include love, friendship, and community—are simply better than others, and should be promoted in the public sphere without apology. Sometimes these perfectionist conceptions of autonomy and of the good life are defended in terms of being more objectively valuable or more supportive of human flourishing, or in terms of emerging from a thin, overlapping consensus of reasonable conceptions of the good. In each case, the underlying argument is that autonomy is one vital component (but not necessarily the only or most valuable component) of any truly good individual life or social life, and that individuals, communities, or states that disparage or reject this component ultimately do so only to their own hurt. There is also an indirect strategy, more pervasive within modern liberal thought, that is used by those who defend the value of autonomy against such communitarian concerns—that appeals to the tolerant neutral state. The thought here is that, rather than necessarily opposing or eroding various communal ties and traditions, a healthy public recognition of the value of autonomy can actually protect and support these traditions, by assuring members the freedom to pursue and enjoy them (these ties and traditions) without biased interference from any non-neutral party or state. This type of argument can be clearly discerned in John Rawls’s work, as one paradigmatic example, and proceeds as follows: A state (and only a state) that recognizes the value of, and shows respect for, people’s autonomy will allow its citizens to pur-

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sue their own thick, comprehensive conception of the good. Officials of this kind of state will not paternalistically push their own conception of the good but will remain neutral, by structuring institutions and pursuing policies that may be said to issue from behind a veil of ignorance. (Such a veil thus protects not only people’s eventual social positions and distributional goods, but also their ideological beliefs and ways of life.) It is only through this thin conception of the public good—based squarely on a respect for everyone’s autonomy and a public reason that all reasonable citizens should be able to accept—that various cultures and communal traditions will be protected and allowed to flourish. Understood in this way, recognition of the value of autonomy, along with a commitment to respect everyone’s autonomy, actually generates the best support and protective hedge to all such forms of communal life (cf. Gauthier, 2000). Conversely, it is only when there is not a recognition of the value of autonomy, nor a commitment by an otherwise neutral state to respect persons’ autonomy, that true dangers and disruptions to communal life present themselves—including those of sectarian violence, of certain groups forcefully trying to seize the reins of state and to suppress rival groups, and of members (especially new and young members) being repressed and coerced by collectives rather than wooed by whatever genuine appeal their communities and traditions have to offer them. Since this is not the place to establish which of these strategies might be better,15 it will have to suffice to point out the following common thread: According to both strategies, autonomy and a recognition of its value are compatible with and not inimical to the life of any community—except very authoritarian and repressive communities who vigorously deny and suppress their members’ autonomy. In such cases, but such cases alone, I admit that there is real tension and incompatibility of these communities with autonomy and a recognition of its value. But what would such communities look like, that consistently denied the value of autonomy and routinely denied the autonomy of their members? By definition, wouldn’t they allow precious little exposure to alternatives? Wouldn’t such groups brand all rival views and ways of life as “pernicious”? It seems so. And how much could such communities sequester or “cloister away” their members from such rivals, before these members essentially become imprisoned—if not in body at least in mind? Would these communities brook much dissent or free thought without punishment? Would they allow any exit except ostracism or death? It appears not. And if communities weren’t quite so repressive and allowed their members a little autonomy, would this make these members or communities any less valuable? For all these

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reasons, then, it seems that communities who deny autonomy and its value or deny its members the opportunity to develop and exercise it, whatever else they offer, will lose some essential component of freedom that holds value for every human being. Other critics who question the value of autonomy sometimes do so with feminist concerns in mind. Even if autonomy does have some value, some feminists argue, all too often it either is overblown or paints a distorted picture of persons and of ideals of personhood.16 For in presenting autonomy primarily in terms of rational deliberation and responsiveness to reasons, it misleadingly caricatures ideal persons as cognitive calculators, rather than as living, loving, feeling beings who are embodiments of care. Carolyn Stone, for instance, criticizes common conceptions of autonomy (such as R. F. Dearden’s) as being onesided ideals, which overemphasize various masculine qualities like critical judgment, and underemphasize various feminine qualities like empathy and compassion.17 It is highly debatable whether various qualities based around rationality and critical deliberation are particularly male. The assumption that males are more inherently rational or rationally inclined than woman is not only empirically specious, but also seems to worsen rather than improve various gender biases and confusions. But even if these qualities were in some way more male-oriented, it is not clear why the concept of autonomy (qua responsiveness to reasons) should have to equally incorporate other “female-oriented qualities.” Must every ideal contain equal parts or maintain an equal balance between the male and female poles of personal identity? or must every ideal be gender-neutral in every way? Especially if this is not the case, such objections (about the gender bias or one-sidedness of autonomy) seem to perpetuate a counterproductive tendency in regard to theories of autonomy, which is to expect it to do too much work. Must the concept of autonomy—which is already overburdened with supposed integral connections to a plethora of concepts including moral responsibility, political liberty, rationality, individual freedom, and so forth— also be expected to bear integral connections with various qualities of care? If proponents of the value of autonomy were arguing not only that ideal persons or all truly mature persons must be autonomous, but also that autonomous persons manifest certain cognitive qualities that must eclipse all other emotive and care-oriented qualities, then this objection might have some bite. But this view of autonomy is largely a straw man, that few of its proponents hold. There is no good reason why autonomous persons cannot be the most loving, caring, empathetic persons around. One of the valuable things about autonomy, in fact, is that it fully allows concerned persons to base their ideals, goals, and

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character development significantly around qualities of care and projects supportive of women. In her Autonomy, Gender, Politics, Marilyn Friedman has defended very similar points—namely, that harms to women that supposedly arise from autonomy or an overemphasis on autonomy really stem from traits misidentified with autonomy, and that a proper appreciation of the value of autonomy can actually strongly support women’s interests and concerns (along with children’s interests and concerns, as we’ll see; cf. Friedman 2003 and 2005).

1.5. The Moral Priority of Children’s Development of Autonomy Let us recapitulate the main points made so far, and then consider what implications these have concerning children’s development (as opposed to the adult exercise) of autonomy. We saw that: 1. Autonomy is the complex ability to effectively govern one’s life according to one’s own preferences and capacities. 2. A person will attain this ability contingent on her development and employment of certain cognitive and volitional qualities and of non-adaptive preferences. 3. In part because of differences in their native endowments and capacities, persons will be able to develop these three sets of things, and so become autonomous, to very different degrees. An important corollary to 3 needs to be added here: 3'. Every (nonhandicapped) child should be capable of attaining at least Autonomy Level Three, that is, of developing at least a minimal threshold of autonomy (* AL3). 4. And autonomy will be of great instrumental value, if not also of great intrinsic value, to all who possess it. Putting all these claims together, we might logically conclude that: 5. A pernicious injustice occurs whenever a child is prevented— through various forms of social deprivation—from attaining at least a minimal threshold level of autonomy. (cf. 1.3) My goal in this section is to elaborate and defend this conclusion. So as not to build on unsound foundations, I will start out by discussing premise 3'. (For 1 and 2 are definitional or stipulative, 3

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seems obvious, and I have already defended 4.) If 3' is not plausible, it can hardly follow that there is a moral priority to try to ensure that all children develop autonomy.18 To be sure, 3' makes an empirical claim. If this premise is not true, this will mean that many persons—not only those who are born with serious genetic defects but also many “normal” and nonhandicapped children—are naturally incapable of achieving any real autonomy. In terms of David Riesman’s work in The Lonely Crowd, this will mean that many people are naturally suited to being only nonautonomous conformists, or what he calls “adjusted” members of society.19 “The adjusted are those who reflect their society, or their class within the society, with the least distortion” (278). As Riesman explains, these natural conformists are capable only of going along with the flow of their peers and social setting; they are capable of adapting to others’ values, behaviors, and ways of life but are hardly capable of adopting their own. Riesman defines “the autonomous,” on the other hand, as “those who on the whole are capable of conforming to the behavioral norms of their society . . . but are free to choose whether to conform or not” (278). These two ideal types are contrasted in this way: Whereas the adjusted person was driven towards his goals by a gyroscope over whose speed and direction he hardly had a modicum of control and of the existence of which he was sometimes unaware, his autonomous contemporary was capable of choosing his goals and modulating his pace. The goals, and the drive toward them, were rational, nonauthoritarian and nonconformist for the autonomous; for the adjusted they were merely given. (287) An implicit suggestion here—that many otherwise “normal” people are actually incapable of being autonomous—is not entirely implausible. As Riesman says, “When someone fails to become autonomous, we can very often see what blockages have stood in the way; but when someone [else] succeeds in the same overt setting in which others have failed, I myself . . . am tempted to fall back on constitutional or genetic factors” (282). In other words, it appears that Riesman believes that many people are incapable of attaining AL3 and that most people are incapable of attaining AL4 and AL5. This belief is one that I will reject, or at least qualify, however. Although many people might be naturally incapable of achieving a very high level of autonomy (AL5), all (nonhandicapped) persons should be capable of attaining at least a minimal threshold of autonomy (AL3). It makes more sense to assume this, and so to accept rather than reject

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3', first and foremost because there is simply no evidence that I know of that contradicts 3'. (Despite Riesman’s hunches, he certainly presents no evidence to show that many or most people are incapable of autonomy.) And also, if Riesman’s suggestion were to be accepted—so that we assumed many people were not capable of attaining even a minimal level of autonomy—then this would have radical, and radically disturbing, implications for many of our central and most firmly held moral and psychological beliefs. For starters, it would imply that autonomy, far from being a central moral norm applicable to all, is rather a particularistic and specially attained quality applicable to only a gifted few, akin as much to amoral qualities like intelligence as to central moral qualities like freedom. (Would we then be obligated to “respect the autonomy” of only the very gifted or intelligent?) Similarly, it would implausibly imply that we have no, or certainly much less of a, duty to respect all (competent) persons’ autonomy.20 For how can we, or why should we, try to respect persons’ autonomy, if they simply cannot possess it or are incapable of manifesting it? This implication would bode ill for our aforementioned imputation of autonomy, which moral philosophers including myself are strongly inclined toward. If true, this conjecture would also suggest that authorities would be justified in exercising far more paternalistic care of the “hopelessly non-autonomous” than is currently believed acceptable.21 Although, as I will argue, I think that much more thorough care of not-yet-autonomous children is justified, I do not think that so much more paternalistic care of such “hopelessly non-autonomous” adults would be justified (cf. Scoccia, Carter, Douglas, & Van DeVeer). On a more psychological level, the denial of people’s capacity for autonomy would logically force us to embrace some brands of behaviorism and determinism, which of course entail many further empirical and practical problems. Without a long digression into these thorny issues, I will suggest that the denial of people’s ability to become autonomous has radical implications that it is currently best to reject (especially, again, since psychology has as of yet not unearthed strong enough evidence to support this denial). Also, our social institutions have not as yet proven efficient and benevolent enough to warrant trust in being so much more paternalistic in their treatment of all the (purportedly) many “hopelessly non-autonomous persons.” Autonomy denied, in other words, would invite unbridled paternalism. As coherentists like Quine rightly point out, it is advisable to revise our more central beliefs only when we have strong warrant to do so. For these reasons, it seems preferable to accept 3' as a working assumption, rather than to perform the far-reaching revisions in our moral, legal, and psychological theories and systems that would have to result from rejecting 3'.

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Assuming that 3' is true, then, most children will fail to become autonomous only for social and environmental reasons and not for genetic reasons or inherent limitations. Considering the great value of autonomy (premise 4), this, in turn, suggests that these tractable social reasons will be prima facie illegitimate and demanding of change. For if autonomy is so vitally important and valuable, and if children are naturally capable of attaining autonomy, there would, on the surface, seem to be no justifiable reason for children’s (socially inhibited) failure to attain autonomy. Such reasoning harkens back to the well-known distinction between natural and social causes of injury. If a child becomes malformed due to being struck by lightning or being born with a birth defect (assuming that the parents were not irresponsible by, say, neglecting prenatal care or using hard drugs or cigarettes during pregnancy), then we would say that this child has been the “victim,” figuratively speaking, merely of natural causes or bad luck. In these types of cases, there is little or nothing that anyone could have done to prevent such misfortune. However, if someone can act so as to prevent such malformation, then by definition this scenario fits into the second case, of social causes of injury. In this case, if a child becomes malformed due, say, to being physically mistreated and abandoned, or to his mother constantly smoking around him during the prenatal and postnatal period, or being raised on chemically toxic land (when the parents and community and chemical company should have known better), then we can conclude that this child has been the victim, literally speaking, of unjust social causes, or criminal behavior (or at the very least civilly liable behavior). When there is something that people can, and indeed should, do or refrain from doing, to prevent an injury, then a moral and often legal obligation is introduced into the situation. And this process gains priority in accordance with the extent and probability of the injury: the greater or more likely the injury or suffering, the greater is the moral priority to address or prevent these (cf. Mayerfield). Accordingly, there may be no more vital moral priority than to protect and support a child’s development of autonomy. This claim may be understood in terms of persons’ interests. In his paper “The Interest in Liberty on the Scales,” Joel Feinberg explains that everyone possesses a hierarchy of four sets of interests, where these increase from least to most important to a person’s overall welfare. These are (a) trivial interests (e.g., my interest in not losing this button on my shirt); (b) significant interests (e.g., my interests to have a happy family or to grow and excel in my career); (c) basic welfare interests (Feinberg includes here “interests in one’s own physical health and

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vigor, the integrity and normal functioning of one’s body, the absence of distracting pain and suffering or grotesque disfigurement, minimal intellectual acuity, emotional stability, the absence of groundless anxieties and resentments, the capacity to engage normally in social intercourse, at least minimal wealth, income, and financial security, a tolerable social and physical environment, and a certain amount of freedom from interference and coercion” [1980, 32]);22 and (d) the interest in being or becoming autonomous (which, with some minor differences, Feinberg calls “the interest in liberty”). There are several points especially worth emphasizing about these four sets of interests. First, the last interest (d) is of overriding importance since, without its realization, a person will be hindered from being able to organize, utilize, or realize any of her other prior interests. Lacking (d) will resemble the frustration of having a full orchestra without a conductor or of having a cacophony of sounds and instruments without any overriding harmony. Second, this last interest (d) will be built, in part, on combinations of met welfare interests; and, conversely, setbacks to (d) will often consist of prior frustrations and setbacks to various welfare interests. For instance, someone will hardly be able to become autonomous if their development is hampered by, say, severe malnutrition and physical and emotional trauma. The third thing to note is how these personal interests properly connect with state involvement: In terms of John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, the state is generally taken to be justified in interfering with someone’s life if that person has harmed, or very likely will harm, someone else. And Feinberg defines “harm” here as a “wrongful set-back to another’s non-trivial interests.” Fourth (and this follows from the definition of harm), if parents and those having duties toward children allow these children to be substantially deprived of basic welfare interests, this allowance constitutes serious harm. As Joseph Raz has argued, “A person who fails to discharge his autonomy-based obligations to others is harming them” (1986, 417). When these four considerations are put together, they imply the following ultimate conclusion: If it is a moral priority to intervene, when necessary, to protect a person’s significant and basic welfare interests from being set back, then it is just as much or more of a moral priority to intervene, when necessary, to protect a child’s interest in becoming autonomous from being set back. Similarly, this chain of reasoning suggests that the state has as much or more business getting involved with the protection of this child interest (d)—by intervening to prevent any children from following a developmental trajectory that would otherwise ultimately land them below the Threshold of Autonomy Level Three23—as it has with the protection of adults’ significant interests (even if these latter protections are currently

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more commonly acknowledged in law and public policy). The importance of these claims for what follows cannot be overemphasized; in fact, most of the arguments that follow in the whole remainder of this book can be seen as resulting from them, in one way or another. We might also view the moral priority of a child’s development of autonomy through a comparison between setbacks to a child’s development along our Autonomy Scale with equal setbacks (in absolute terms) to an adult’s development along this Scale. In other words, it might well be morally worse for a child to be hindered from becoming autonomous in the first place than it would be for an adult to be hindered from growing upward on the Autonomy Scale after the adult has already attained autonomy—even if these two hindrances are equivalent in absolute terms. Or again, it might be markedly worse for a child to be prevented from growing from AL1 to AL3 than it would be for an adult to be prevented from going from AL3 to AL5. To see why this is so, consider the following scenario, involving a child named Charlene and an adult named Darlene. Darlene is minimally autonomous, but never grows or progresses beyond this point through the years. Because of a certain amount of wrongdoing (W) suffered at the hands of others during her fourth decade (e.g., mistreatment by her sexually harassing boss, abandonment by her unfaithful husband, etc.), Darlene basically stagnates through life, not suffering especially much but not experiencing the heights of life’s possibilities, either. So Darlene never attains more than AL3. Charlene, on the other hand, through the same amount of wrongdoing suffered at the hands of others, but suffered during her second decade, or teenage years (but in this case in the form of, say, abandonment by her father and serious sexual abuse by her stepfather, etc.), never becomes autonomous. As it turns out, Charlene grows up to live on public assistance, remains essentially dependent, and never buds or branches out on her own, never realizing (what could have been) “her own” dreams and aspirations. So she never attains more than AL2 on our Autonomy Scale. (To keep the absolute magnitude of wrongdoing equivalent in both cases, we can thus stipulate that, whereas W has prevented Darlene from moving from AL3 to AL4, W has prevented Charlene from moving from AL2 to AL3.) What can we conclude about these two scenarios? It seems to me that, although the wrong meted out (W) in both cases is equal, the effects—in terms of the all-things-considered damage that came in the wake of W—were disproportionate. In not attaining even minimal autonomy, we could that say Charlene suffered a greater moral wrong, or more overall disvalue, than Darlene. Why this disparity? Part of the answer seems to lie in the fact that Charlene has suffered a qualitatively, and not only quantitatively, worse

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setback than Darlene. Granted, Darlene’s experience—in not being able to advance much beyond a minimal level of autonomy—was bad enough. But at least Darlene was able to enjoy some degree of functionally effective self-governance, critical competence, nonadaptive preferences, and so on. Arguably, however, Charlene’s experience—in not being able to achieve even a minimal level of autonomy—was much worse; for, by definition, she was not able to enjoy even a minimally acceptable degree of effective self-governance, and so forth. And these things, as explained earlier, seem to be essential ingredients of any truly dignified and distinctively human life. It is one thing to have to struggle through a difficult human life; but it seems like quite another thing— like a qualitatively worse fate—to have to live like a caged, harried, or abused animal. In many ways, if we do not sugarcoat the realities involved, this is just what it is like to live life nonautonomously (assuming that one isn’t enjoying luxurious or commodious institutional care). Or again, it is like the difference between having to live on a poor diet if one is young and already thin and, in the process of development, might easily develop a crippling disease, as opposed to living on the same poor diet for the same length of time when one is older—but a little plumper, tougher, and less vulnerable to developmental impairments. In the former case, the deprivation thus seems more wrong because it is so much more pernicious in its effects, even though the deprivation is equal, in absolute terms, in both cases. So children’s greater relative vulnerability—since they are delicately passing through deeply influential formative periods in their lives—seems to be part of the reason why insults to them seem morally worse, all things considered, than the same insults to adults. A verbal, psychological, or physical insult (like a 50 psi blow) to a seasoned and callused adult might easily leave him unharmed and unaffected, like “water off a duck’s back”; but the very same insult to a child might easily break a bone or a spirit, thus doing a lot more harm. Such greater neediness and vulnerability may not comprise the only reasons why, given equivalent insults, the ensuing harm to a child seems more wrongful. Another reason seems to involve a child’s greater relative innocence. When an adult suffers an injury, it isn’t unusual for our sympathies to be rather limited, perhaps because we think the adult wasn’t so innocent or undeserving of the blow. (At least if the person wasn’t too saintly or virtuous, we might think that such injuries represented a kind of cosmic balancing for whatever bad karma he had built up.) But when a child suffers an injury, other things being equal, we commonly respond with much more sympathy, regret, and indignation, as if the injury somehow constituted a crueler injustice in the overall scheme of things. According to such intuitions and instincts (be they

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moral or parental), there just seems to be something more wrong, more immoral and unjust, and more tragic, about a child’s victimization and deprivation. But even in a less sentimental and more coldly calculating frame of mind, we can reason that, when a child is seriously harmed, this can ruin a good five or six decades of human life, whereas if an adult suffers the same harm, this will usually ruin at most a few decades of life. For all these reasons, a greater injustice seems to occur when children suffer a certain amount of insult and deprivation in their early social environment, than when an adult suffers the same absolute amount of insult and deprivation. Similarly, greater moral disvalue results when children are hindered from becoming autonomous (
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Autonomy Development

We know very little about how, as a matter of fact, personal and moral autonomy is developed in children, or, for that matter, in adults . . . What is needed is an extensive research programme investigating the conditions which facilitate the development of autonomy. This investigation could not avoid dealing with the extensive empirical considerations involved. —T.H. McLaughlin For For For For For

the the the the the

want want want want want

of of of of of

a a a a a

nail, the shoe was lost. shoe, the horse was lost. horse, the rider was lost. rider, the battle was lost. battle, the kingdom was lost. —English Nursery Rhyme

Consider the following “chain of reasoning”: Doughboy will hardly find success as an adult if his teenage years are really screwed up. Doughboy’s teenage years will hardly go well if his childhood is really screwed up. And Doughboy’s childhood will hardly go well if he’s dropped on his head as a baby. So Doughboy will hardly find success as an adult if he’s dropped on his head as a baby.

The overall argument in this chapter will follow a variation of this reasoning, elaborated in terms of children’s development of autonomy. Starting from adulthood and then working backward toward birth, I 39

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will trace what earlier conditions and advantages will be needed for children to develop at least a minimal level of autonomy by the time they’re adults. Through this process, we should also be able to gain an idea of what early deprivations and disadvantages will sabotage a child’s development of autonomy. In particular, my argument will follow this fourfold chain of reasoning:1 1. On reaching adulthood, no one should be considered autonomous unless that person is able to pursue a set of “life-goods” (on an abstract level) and a chosen career or line of work (on a concrete level) that are consistent with his or her nonadapted preferences, plans, and capacities (section 2.2). 2. Moreover, these life goods and careers will not be truly viable options to young adults unless they’ve previously (largely during adolescence) developed a broad and effective set of cognitive, self-management, and social skills (section 2.3). 3. In turn, an adolescent’s acquisition of these vital skills will be supported and successful only to the degree that, from birth onward, her development has not been retarded by various forms of deprivation, disadvantage, and unmet needs (section 2.4). 4. \Therefore, the autonomy that any adult possesses and exercises is not automatically guaranteed, and does not arise spontaneously through some mysterious ex nihilo process; rather, it is a contingent product that arises in proportion to the degree that the adult, throughout his or her childhood, had enjoyed the development of certain basic skills and capabilities and also the satisfaction of certain basic needs (cf. Katz, 2000). I elaborate and defend this argument in what follows by filling in the many empirical and conceptual premises that inform it. After explaining how the Autonomy Threshold (AL3) applies to each age and stage of child development (in section 2.1), I devote a separate section to elaborating and defending each of the top three premises (premise [1] in section 2.2, premise [2] in 2.3, etc.). In this way, I also hope to fill in the vacuum of knowledge referred to by T.H. McLaughlin above. 2.1. Child Development and the Autonomy Threshold In this section, I modify one feature of the minimal “Autonomy Threshold” (AL3). Up until now, this Threshold referred to a static level of

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autonomy achievement, often reached after adolescence by the time persons enter adulthood, in their early- to mid-twenties. But a person’s being 20 years old or 120 by the time this Threshold is reached was irrelevant, as in either case she either did or did not possess at least this level of autonomy as a matter of fact. If we’re to be able to use this Threshold as a normative standard applicable to all ages or stages of a child’s development, however, this static reading will not do. For how would we know, if a child is, say, five or ten or fifteen years old, whether she is meeting the standards of the Threshold (by developing with at least some minimal progress) or is falling below the standards that the Threshold marks out (by suffering through subpar, below-minimal “progress”)? As it stands now, we have no way of knowing, that is, we have no way of knowing whether or not a child is suffering through an unacceptable and debilitating process of arrested development at any stage along the way. For our purposes, then, the Threshold should be modified to be able to refer to an ongoing standard of development that can be applied continuously from birth to adulthood. This amended version of the Threshold would be more comprehensive, taking into account the general standards required for minimally healthy development in (if one uses, say, the Piagetian model of child development) a child’s sensorimotor period (birth to 2 years old), preoperational thought period (2–7 years old), concrete operations period (7–11 years old), and formal operations period (11–15 years old). In other words, the Threshold must be amended to enable us to check—and then respond with appropriate intervention, if necessary—whether or not a child is developing adequately at every age or stage along the way. Of course, I won’t attempt to provide all the details of what marks out acceptable-versus-unacceptable progress here, since these details are better left to developmental psychologists, social workers, and so on. What I will provide is a general theoretical framework of autonomy development within which such empirical details might be filled in, and which such specialists might use to monitor the development (or lack thereof) of any particular child at any particular age. The guiding questions that specialists intent on applying this framework would ask would be If children continue on the trajectory that they’re currently on, can they be expected to fall above or below the minimal threshold of autonomy by the time they reach adulthood? And if they’re on a trajectory to fall below this threshold () AL2)—and thus won’t otherwise be capable of even minimally effective self-governance at that time— then what help can be given to get them back on the right track? There are two potential problems here, though. The first is that, as is well known, different children manifest different tempos of development.

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Some children will be precocious, some late bloomers, some will grow consistently, some in leaps, and so on. So it might prove difficult to measure, at any particular time, if a child is really falling below the Threshold (and so requiring intervention). This should not be an insuperable problem for an “ongoing Threshold,” however, because we could focus on general inputs rather than specific outputs. In other words, we could make our standard set relatively less to how much, or at what pace, a child is actually responding to care and nurture, and set relatively more to if that child is receiving adequate care and nurture— as gauged in regard to his or her basic developmental needs and welfare interests. For example, in terms of Joel Feinberg’s conception of these interests (1.1), we could ask, Is the child being provided with adequate nutrition and exercise, so as to attain a decent level of physical health and vigor? Is the child being protected from various forms of physical and emotional abuse and neglect? Is the child receiving adequate training in regard to her intellectual faculties, and various social and economic skills? And so forth. (It would also constitute a very fruitful research program to trace out these developmental needs and stages in terms of Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s system of “capabilities.”) Since each basic developmental need and welfare interest is an essential building block of a child’s development, inadequate nurture of any one of them would thus indirectly stymie his or her development of autonomy. In principle, then, application of an ongoing Threshold would reveal when a child was undergoing inadequate development, so as to allow for quick intervention before this arrested development led to long-term or permanent dysfunction. The second potential problem with an “ongoing Threshold standard” is that there is among psychologists as of yet no consensus or consensus models regarding what constitutes healthy child development, much less development of autonomy. Instead, there is a cornucopia of competing empirical models, each concentrating on different aspects of development and each displaying different theoretical vices and virtues (cf. Thomas, 1996 & 1999). Consequently, no particular model of child development can safely be used now as if it were an absolute or nonrevisable anchor for our Threshold. With this proviso in mind, I will use noted psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (aka Social Cognitivist Theory) and, in particular, his conception of selfefficacy, as an empirical backdrop for much of what follows. I will use his model not necessarily because of its superiority to other models of child development, but because of the ideal correspondence between its conception of self-efficacy with the concept of autonomy. In a nutshell, Bandura’s theory operates on two fundamental insights. First, Bandura points out that most of the abilities children as-

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similate arise through their active imitation of behaviors they observe other people performing. As a result, the repertoire of skills and abilities that any adult amasses and uses to maneuver through various stages and challenges in life, derive largely from the behaviors and influences that were prominently modeled in early environment. The behavioral models and influences (be they constructive or destructive) that a child is exposed to earlier thus become the source of the personal skills and abilities he or she assimilates later, with these skills and abilities comprising the building blocks of whatever autonomy, or lack thereof, the child develops as an adult. Second, through his conception of self-efficacy, Bandura also points out that children will especially come to assimilate and practice those skills and techniques they believe they have special aptitude for. Accordingly, children will hardly become able to effectively govern their lives in certain areas and directions, unless: one, they have confident beliefs (based on a fairly accurate awareness of their own talents, capacities, and limitations) that they can do so and, two, they have grown up in an environment that has fostered, rather than undermined, these selfconfident “self-efficacy” beliefs. Children who are tone deaf, who grow up with little exposure to music, who are laughed at when they try to carry a tune, or, for that matter, who are simply mute, will seldom aspire to become opera singers. This is how these Banduran insights will apply to our ongoing Autonomy Threshold: At each stage of a child’s life, we may assess whether that child is developing within these input parameters and selfefficacy processes—that Bandura claims a child must develop within in order to become autonomous, or “self-efficacious.” And if the child’s development of self-efficacy is being impeded at any stage along the way, we should have an idea of what interventions will be needed, in order to place the child back on a healthy developmental path toward “self-efficacious autonomy.” It’s within this theoretical context that the Autonomy Threshold could be used as an ongoing standard for children’s development of autonomy.

2.2. Young Adulthood and the Signs of Autonomy (The Commencement of a Life Path) Ideally, persons will be autonomous by the time they emerge from the last phases of their adolescence and enter adulthood. We’ve seen what this means in general, in terms of the necessary conditions of autonomy. Now we must examine what this means more specifically, in terms of the concrete manifestations of autonomy that should emerge at this stage of the life course, during anyone’s early- to mid-20s years. (My

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overall strategy here will be to establish the ideal end-product of a process of development, by backtracking from adulthood and inferring what earlier formative conditions must be presupposed in adolescence and then in childhood if adult autonomy will be able to emerge.) To establish whether or not someone is autonomous on becoming an adult, it would be tempting to use the following strategy. One could consider each of the individual decisions that a person makes and each of the individual preferences that he or she has during this period. If some preponderance of these decisions and preferences were autonomous, then one could conclude that the person led an autonomous life overall. By proceeding this way, however, it would become too easy to lose sight of the forest by getting lost in the trees. Since the details and calculations of this strategy could easily prove too elaborate and cumbersome, we’ll use the following more global strategy instead. We’ll consider the most significant and overarching preferences that any person holds (preferences for what I call “life-goods”) and the most significant decisions that a person makes (decisions to pursue certain career paths or lines of work) during their twenties. If these two central sets of preferences and decisions are autonomous and not inconsistent with each other, then we will be justified, I’ll argue, in granting that this person leads an autonomous life overall. So first, we need to consider what are arguably a person’s most significant preferences in life, concerning these so-called life-goods. As any logician or action theorist might assume, all individual preferences occur within a certain domain (viz., a certain category of similar, competing preferences), where such domains have at least two members, m1 and m2, so that it can be said that the agent prefers one member to the other(s). If I have a preference for jazz, for instance, it is understood that I am referring to the domain of music. And while it would make perfect sense to say that I prefer jazz to country-western, it would seem illogical, or involve a category mistake, to say that I prefer jazz to broccoli (which obviously isn’t a member of the domain “music”). Furthermore, certain domains are more relevant than others in what they imply about corresponding aspects of person’s lives. For instance, the domain of my dietary preferences will have much more significant implications about my health status than the domain of my music preferences: If I strongly prefer, say, broccoli and other fresh fruits and vegetables to greasedrenched bacon double-cheeseburgers, then this will imply much more about my physical health (or at least about the condition of my heart and arteries) than does my preference for jazz. Accordingly, we might ask, what domain is most relevant and significant as the domain of preferences within which people express

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their overall life autonomy? That is, what domain of preferences reveals the most about, or bears the strongest implications toward, a person’s status as being autonomous or not? In answering this question, we may safely set aside people’s more trivial preferences—for, say, paisleys over polka dots—and focus on their weightier preferences, on those things that they invest the greatest concern, effort, or hope in. It is precisely this “weighty” domain that, as I stipulate, consists of these “life-goods.” These life-goods may be defined as the cherished ends (qua raison d’être) that people yearn most for, that instill their lives with meaning, purpose, and perspective; in short, these are the basic existential values that ultimately govern people’s lives. I will thus be assuming that an autonomous person’s life-goods organize and motivate her life, providing it with its priorities, directions, impetus, and meaning (cf. Ekstrom, 1993). Establishing this preference domain of life-goods provides perspective against which the many less significant preferences and decisions of a person’s life may be assessed. These life-goods should help to facilitate and economize our assessments of persons’ autonomy in the following ways, then, and according to the following three exhaustive possibilities.2 (Logically speaking, that is, it seems possible for there to be only three types of relationships between a person’s preferences and her autonomy-status.) First, it’s possible that a person may prefer certain overarching lifegoods but do so non-autonomously, that is, as a result of manipulation by others, sheer thoughtlessness, or a process of adaptive preference formation. In these cases, we should be able to conclude that the rest of his life, to the degree it’s centered on these life-goods, is also substantially nonautonomous. For if a person nonautonomously prefers certain ends, and consequently makes a broad set of decisions as means to facilitate these ends, it seems that these decisions themselves must be substantially nonautonomous. Or again, if the main motivating forces, aspirations, and valuations of a person’s life are nonautonomously held, or were nonautonomously formed, this would seem to greatly delimit the degree to which he could still be autonomous overall. (For example, if our aforementioned tone-deaf mute doggedly prefers to become an opera star, we would seriously want to question that person’s overall autonomy or the autonomy of her preferences.) Second, it’s possible that a person may autonomously prefer certain life-goods, but live in such a way that his day-to-day acts and decisions are inconsistent with or counterproductive to these preferences. In such cases, the person’s life seems to be characterized more by akrasia (lack of self-control) or disorganization than by autonomy; and as explained earlier (1.2), these things are inimical to autonomy. In these cases, too,

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because of the glaring inconsistencies involved, we seem justified in concluding that this type of person leads a nonautonomous as much as an autonomous life. (Imagine here a young man who says that he really wants to become a star bodybuilder, but spends all his time eating junk food, lounging around, and working out only his little fingers on the TV remote.) Third, it’s possible that a person has come to autonomously prefer and cherish certain life-goods and also lives in such a way that his dayto-day acts and decisions are consistent with, and supportive of, these preferences. In this last type of case and apparently this case only, we seem justified in concluding that this person is leading an autonomous life overall. Therefore, if these life-goods are to serve as the ultimate reference domain against which persons’ autonomy or nonautonomy will be assessed, we’ll need to consider both how persons come to acquire these overarching life-good preferences and also if their concrete day-to-day decisions and actions are consistent with these preferences. So what does this domain of preferred life-goods actually consist of? What are the specific things that people ultimately live for and govern their lives according to? For the far majority of people, it would seem to consist of some combination of these “Top 20” things: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Pleasure (i.e., the general ability to have pleasurable experiences) Sex and physical intimacy Love Friendship (this and #3 might include a successful marriage) Health (physical, mental, and/or emotional) Security and peace of mind (including a place to call home and freedom from violence and from worry about undue death or catastrophe) Success at parenting/well-raised children Satisfying, fulfilling work Spiritual enlightenment Deep community involvement and belonging Virtuous character Wealth (which, of course, may merely be a means to the other life-goods) Knowledge Wisdom Social esteem or prestige Fame Beauty (be it in a natural, man-made, or imagined form)

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18. Altruism (strong concern for others’ benefit and improvement) 19. Achievement 20. Power Certainly, some of these life-goods will overlap each other; it is not assumed that these are altogether distinct or mutually exclusive. But to the degree a young person lacks exposure to, and thereby never becomes familiar with the value of, many of these life-goods, he or she is to that degree less autonomous. For in such cases, the preferences for whatever life-goods and life plans that person ends up embracing will not be informed preferences and plans, but rather will be based as much on ignorance or narrowness of vision as on any kind of informed or authentic choice. So if he thinks he prefers, say, a life replete with sexual satisfaction over a rich intellectual life—but only because he’s never been exposed to the allurements of the intellectual life and the pursuit of knowledge—then his “preference” for the former would seem to stem as much from narrow vision or happenstance or what Kant calls “heteronomy” as much as from an informed kind of autonomy. Likewise, to the degree that a young man has consistently been denied access to, and justifiably feels that he has little hopes of attaining, many of these goods, he is also to that degree less autonomous. For in these cases, the lifegoods he ends up embracing will be the result of a typical process of adaptive preference formation. Such compromise and compromised autonomy will be evidenced not simply by whatever life-goods a person ends up preferring, then, but rather by the prior and background circumstances against which the person formulated his preferences. Let me illustrate these claims. It would be one thing for a young man to circumspectly foreswear the possibility of future wealth and romantic love and parenthood for himself, for example, as many new priests do when they assume vows of poverty and celibacy. Such choices, if made in carefully deliberated ways and with the knowledge that one might well have enjoyed the foresworn alternatives, are fully compatible with and even expressive of autonomy. But it would be quite another thing for a young man to foreswear these things (LGs 12, 3, and 7) because he had seen so little of them, and seen so few from his background attain them, that he simply came to think they were unattainable, beyond his reach. (It takes little effort to imagine a young man like this here who grew up in a ghetto and who, through a process of rationalization, cynicism and callousness, resigned himself to a life of using and abusing women and of “just getting by”—with no real effort expended but no real wealth or security or happy family life emerging, either.) Considering how this kind of resigned preference conforms to

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the sour grapes pattern, it seems anything but autonomous. And surely a young person’s life “plans” should not be considered autonomous in the more extreme cases of such resignation, ignorance, and deprivation—if these persons have long been denied access to (and even information about how he could gain access to) most of the last 15 or so of these life-goods. Such a scenario, in fact, constitutes the prototypical sour grapes pattern. For how could one begin to govern his life autonomously if he had to forge his hopes and plans from among a pitifully narrow range of values and ideals, life goods and life prospects? Unfortunately, nonautonomy stemming from such a paltry range of background information and life options is not a rare phenomenon, but is all too common. As Alasdair MacIntyre would say, this nonautonomy is too often represented by all those “unscripted, anxious stutterers” who’ve been so deprived of inspiring ideals, instruction, and role models that they don’t have much idea how they should “compose their own life narrative” (MacIntyre, 216). These unscripted, anxious stutterers include all those who—because of a lack of much information, ideals, and long-term foresight and aspirations—end up unprepared and practically unable to effectively govern their own lives, at least with much circumspection. Despite the apparent stereotypes, this group would include all the dropouts, drug addicts, derelicts, and young homeless persons and petty criminals who “prefer” nothing more in life than a quick fix (in essence, LG1) or a warm, safe place to call home for a while (in essence, LG6). At this point, some might object that I’m painting an unrealistic or overly melodramatic picture of these deprived young adult types. They might insist that any human being who spends 20 years in society must be exposed to a far wider range of these life-goods than I’m letting on to. Unless they’re raised among a pack of wolves, so they might object, they’ll be exposed to at least a decent range of these 20 valuable life goods, allowing them to formulate their major preferences and life plans with a wide enough awareness of the possibilities that life offers. Accordingly, even severely deprived youth should be able to formulate some kind of autonomous preferences and life plans. But this is, I think, a far too rose-tinted and out-of-touch view of what life “offers” for many. It loses sight of the fact that, for many youths, there is a not only a steady day-after-day and year-after-year nonexposure to most of these life-goods, but also a steady exposure to the opposite of these goods (poverty instead of wealth, disease and dysfunction instead of health, disrespect instead of social esteem, stultifying labor instead of fulfilling work, hatred and violence instead of love and community, etc.). As Bandura explains,

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Impoverished, hazardous environments present harsh realities with minimal resources, models, and social supports for culturally valued pursuits but extensive modeling, incentives, social supports, and opportunity structures for antisocial pursuits. Such environments severely tax the coping efficacy of youth embedded in them to make it through adolescence in ways that do not irreversibly foreclose many beneficial life paths. (Bandura, 1997, 183; hereafter cited as SE) As such, these youth’s developing autonomy will become stunted in proportion to how many of these life-goods and valuable life paths are foreclosed to them or never shown to them. At this point, such a critic might doggedly stick to his guns by pointing out various success stories of persons who, despite backgrounds of real deprivation, yet manage to forge successful autonomous lives and come to enjoy a wide range of these life-goods. Don’t these resilient people show that none are so deprived as to not have exposure to at least a decent range of these life-goods? And don’t these people show that early deprivation is never really bad enough that it must cripple one’s adult autonomy? Perhaps not, at least in all cases; but it’s worth pausing to more carefully consider these types of individuals to clarify exactly what they do and do not show. Such exceptional individuals do not imply that anyone is infinitely resilient or resourceful. They do not imply that there is not some level of deprivation that would have crippled anyone’s autonomy. And they do not imply that everyone doesn’t have his own personal threshold of deprivation that, if experienced, would have crippled his autonomy. All these claims remain untouched by such “resilient counterexamples.” What these successful underdog-types do reveal, when we examine their lives closely enough, are the various skills and resources that enable persons to persevere and become autonomous when the hardship and deprivation, although formidable, are not of some critical or crippling magnitude.3 (Metaphorically speaking, this magnitude is like the variable critical perimeter of a whirlpool or maelstrom, which may have a little shorter radius for those particularly robust ships that, on hovering near it, have a little stronger engine to escape its inward pull.) For surely there’s a critical magnitude of environmental deprivation that, once suffered, will cripple each youth’s development of autonomy, along with what would have been his autonomous goals, hopes, plans, and self-governing abilities. No child is infinitely resilient. Given enough cruelty and violence, enough heartbreak, enough hunger and deprivation, enough corrupt role models, and so forth,

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along with the lack of enough support and good stimulation, and any and every child will eventually break down. (Sections 2.3 and 2.4 will lend support to these claims.) Although some children laudably make it through enormous early obstacles, this by no means implies that all children can or that all children who don’t make it through fail only because of moral reasons, like laziness or a lack of adequate moral resolve. (Such rationalizations that our “critic” offers here, I suspect, ultimately stem not from reason but from a psychological tendency to avoid addressing or considering any responsibility for just how hellish and tragic the early lives of some children can be.) It will remain difficult to assess the truth or weight of such arguments while remaining on this abstract level of young adults’ preferences among the domain of life-goods. Subsequently, and in order to examine that other domain of choice most significant to young adults’ autonomy status, we now need to consider what career choices people make and are able to make on becoming adults. For it will only be after seeing how life-good preferences work in conjunction with this more concrete domain of career preferences and choices that a more comprehensive and empirically robust picture of young adults’ autonomy will emerge. There are a few salient ways in which young persons’ career choices will significantly constrict or expand their ability to enjoy various lifegoods and, thereby, constrict or expand their emerging autonomy. First, the choice of persons’ careers will have enormous implications for the material bases of their lives: Their salary will largely determine what level of financial resources will be available to them through life. Their work benefits (or lack thereof) will largely determine what kinds of health insurance and retirement benefits they may expect. Their work environment will determine what kinds of immediate physical and psychological stresses and strains they will have to endure, and what overall health dangers and benefits they may experience. Similarly, their work routines will determine what kinds of daily and weekly rhythms, and what allotments of leisure and vacation times, they will have to grow acclimated to, and so on. Second, a person’s career or work take up a large portion of her waking hours, sometimes more than her family life does. If she spends all this time doing things she dislikes and would prefer not to do and never really planned on doing, this suggests she possesses relatively less autonomy. For how autonomous can a person’s career choice be if it commits her to spending the majority of her waking life in personally distasteful or nonpreferred uses of time? Doesn’t it make more sense to say that a truly autonomous person, more often than not, will set out in a career that is personally gratifying and fulfilling, that involves ac-

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tivities and uses of time that are harmonious with her dispositions and preferences? This isn’t to say that the autonomous person will always derive maximal pleasure from the ways she’s originally chosen to spend her time, but only that, given other alternative careers and uses of time, she still prefers those that she chose. This view is compatible with the autonomous author, for example, who agonizes over every page of her writing and feels the creative process to be painfully tortuous—yet cannot conceive of being content with any other life than that of a writer’s. Third, a person’s workplace will provide many of the peers and social influences that she’s around in life. We must consider here the degree to which one’s company (both business and social company) can influence one’s behavior and character. To the degree that one’s work-peer influences end up subverting or conflicting with one’s preferred self-image, ways of behaving, and character ideals, it seems that, other things being equal, these influences will undermine rather than undergird one’s autonomous preferences for a certain personal identity. For instance, if after careful deliberation early on a woman strongly preferred to find fulfillment as a wife and active church member but then ended up spending most of her life as a nightclub stripper and prostitute, it seems highly doubtful that her “career” and later personal identity (at least if she wasn’t the proverbial “whore with the heart of gold”) resulted from autonomous choice. Finally, there is another (in some ways more fundamental) way in which young persons’ career choices will significantly reflect, but also impact, their emergent autonomy—this time via a means-ends relationship to the life-goods they eventually find themselves able or unable to enjoy. Inasmuch as life-goods serve as the ultimate ends of people’s lives, persons’ careers often serve as the practical means to achieve these ends. Sometimes, this means-end relation is so tightly knit that an engagement in the former (an appropriate career) automatically entails some achievement of the latter (corresponding life-goods). For example, becoming a politician implies exercising some degree of power (LG20), becoming a professor requires mastery of some sphere of knowledge (LG13), becoming a business executive often brings some measure of wealth (LG12), becoming an artist often assumes intimate familiarity with some type of beauty (LG17), and so forth. The ideal expectation is that, after someone decides which life-goods he or she especially values and wants to enjoy in life, that person then pursues a career that facilitates the enjoyment of these life-goods. In accordance with such overall life coherence, the following three general stages provide a paradigm for an ideal process of autonomy development. During the first stage, a late adolescent will come to prefer and

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prioritize some particular set of life-goods, as the fruit of a long and thoughtful sampling, weighing, comparing, and also self-assessing process.4 During the second stage and as the person approaches adulthood, this person will make sure to learn and assimilate whatever skills are necessary for success in a career that will support and facilitate the attainment of this set of life-goods. But she’ll only come to settle on a career that requires skills she has the native capacities to be able to learn and assimilate, that is, she won’t settle on a career path which she lacks the native capacities to be able to succeed in (1.2.1). Neither will anyone who is becoming very autonomous settle into career work that leaves her highly frustrated and bored, because of wasting her native gifts and capacities. For, by definition, autonomous persons tend to supercede rather than long continue in these kinds of dead ends, frustrations, and mismatches (between one’s “true self” and one’s activities). During the third and final stage and on becoming an adult, this person will diligently apply herself to enter and succeed in her chosen career path, thereby helping to assure that she’ll be able to long enjoy her preferred set of life-goods.4 It seems safe to say, other things being equal, that people who start out their adult lives according to this three-stage process are thereby forging highly autonomous lives. What’s required for autonomy is thus not the agent’s enjoyment of all the life-goods or her ability to enter a large number of different careers. All that’s required is her having a good opportunity to enter some career that fits the overall life plan she’s developed, where this career serves as a platform or channel for her enjoyment of as much of her preferred life-goods as her talents and capacities allow. In contrast, those who aren’t autonomous by adulthood fail to successfully negotiate this third stage. Young adults who fail here will be nonautonomous insofar as they prove unable to “leave the nest, take wing, and fly out on their own.” As demonstrated by their ill-preparedness to launch out in some promising and preferred line of work, these nonautonomous persons, by definition, will simply lack the foresight and planning, the self-management skills, and the overall wherewithal that it takes to govern their lives effectively. The question that naturally arises here is Why? . . . Why would some be so ill-prepared for autonomy or effective self-governance at this stage of life? In most cases, as we’ll see, failure at this third stage is rooted in various kinds of failure during previous stages of development. As an illustration of this claim and of young adults at this juncture, we might imagine (what Max Weber would call) a hypothetical ideal-type

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of inner-city youth named James. It should prove instructive to consider James because he occupies an ambiguous, hard-to-diagnose position between autonomy and nonautonomy. That is, if a young adult governs his life any more effectively than James, we should be able to conclude that he’s at least minimally autonomous, and if someone governs his life any less effectively, we should be able to conclude that he’s nonautonomous. If we can thus gain clarity about such an ambiguous case, it should be relatively easier to categorize others’ autonomy status. Let’s assume that James is fairly smart and has thought long and hard about what he wants out of life (thus successfully completing the first stage). He’s decided that, more than anything else, he wants to become wealthy; and he correctly reasons that if he achieves this (LG12), it will greatly facilitate his ability to achieve a number of other lifegoods as well. The only “problem” with James is that he comes from a very rough inner-city background, has gone to very poor schools, has little apparent musical or athletic talent, and has become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of really only one other “line of work” that has a good chance of making him wealthy, namely, drug dealing. So he finds himself faced with these three “career options”: (a) he may work at an unskilled service sector job (which he’ll certainly be able to do, finding only the monotony and boredom challenging, but without acquiring any real wealth); or (b) he may deal drugs (which, he assumes, he’d be good at and earn lots of money from, while, he guesses, incurring only about a one-in-three chance of getting arrested); or (c) he may pursue a career as a doctor or lawyer or business executive (although these aren’t really live options for James since he’s academically so ill-prepared and has learned so little about their prerequisite means, such as doing well on the LSATs or GMATs, being able to get through any premed program, etc.); although he anticipates only about a one-in-ten chance of success here. Using the language of rational choice theory, we might say that James envisions his three options according to the following schema (with the prior number being his expected yearly income and the latter number being his assumed probability of success at that option): Option 1: (17,500) ⫻ (.95) = 16,625. Option 2: (100,000) ⫻ (.67) = 67,000. Option 3: (100,000) ⫻ (.10) = 10,000. James ends up acting as any “rational utility maximizer” would when faced with these options and plunges diligently into the second one, saving up a good deal of profit as he goes (at least for a while).

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What should we say about James and his choices at this crucial point in his life? Can we say that he’s commencing his adult life and pursuing a “preferred” line of work autonomously? Is he being truly rational in the way he’s trying to achieve his preferred life-good?5 It’s not easy to say. On the one hand, he’s thought about and knows what he wants in life, has a plan to achieve it, and is diligently carrying out this plan. These are features that suggest autonomy. If he had less idea about what he wanted from life, had no real plans for his future, or was intent only on inertly accepting whatever line of work was most easily available to him, then we might be warranted in viewing him as nonautonomous. But as it stands we don’t seem so warranted. On the other hand, should someone be considered autonomous if he has few if any socially and legally acceptable options? And we wonder about the long-term implications of his choices and plans (not to mention the people he might be harming). How reliable is his calculated one-inthree (33%) chance of getting arrested? Won’t this probability increase every year that he continues in this criminal endeavor? Should his plans and choices be considered autonomous even if he stashes away troves of money for a decade, but then ends up in prison for as long or longer? Don’t we thus need to consider the long-term trajectory of his life and plans when assessing his overall autonomy? It seems so. And if so, then this question (Is James or anyone like him autonomous?) will apparently best be answered only from a wide temporal perspective, with the person’s future prospects, current capabilities and options, and also prior childhood experiences and opportunities all firmly in mind. Our answer to the related question of James’ rationality likewise depends on the opportunities and information he had available and was using, and on the way we define “rational.” If James had other opportunities to develop skills and pursue careers that would have led to wealth, but rejected these, then this suggests that his choice was irrational. But if he was never really exposed to alternative opportunities to become wealthy, and drug dealing appeared to be far and away his best shot at achieving this, then this suggests that his problems lie less with his rational decision-making faculties than with the background information and environment that he was able to make decisions from. In other words, if “being rational” requires only prudent and well-calculated decision making, irrespective of the background one has available, then James might be considered perfectly rational. But if “being rational” requires the additional condition of having a wide range of relevant background information and options, then perhaps James should be considered irrational. And this confirms an earlier point: that many young adults are ill-prepared for effective self-governance and end up failing at this stage

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of life because of various kinds of inadequate information and background deprivations that they suffered through—through no fault of their own—during previous stages of development. According to psychologists of the Social Cognition School of thought, the most immediate or proximal reason that some people’s prospects at the third stage (where they prepare to enter their careers) are blighted is because of their holding greatly diminished self-efficacy beliefs about their work capabilities. (Self-efficacy beliefs, as social cognitive theorists define them, are the assessments people have of their own capacities to perform specific tasks and to achieve specific goals.) In other words, the reason why some people don’t launch into more personally fulfilling lines of work is often because they don’t believe they have the requisite abilities to do so. Bandura (SE, 188) explains this self-limiting process as follows: Beliefs about one’s capabilities are influential determinants of vocational life paths (Betz & Hackett, 1986; Lent & Hackett, 1987). Young adults forgo vocations they see as providing valued benefits and rewards if they believe they lack the efficacy to fulfill the entry requirements and occupational demands (Wheeler, 1983). A low sense of efficacy thus forecloses considerations of vocational options despite opportunities and attractive incentives. Beliefs of occupational efficacy are largely the product of socioeducational experiences and prevailing cultural attitudes and practices. The adverse experiences associated with low socioeconomic status breed a low sense of occupational efficacy regardless of the prestige level of the vocation. Efficacy beliefs are diminished by experiences arising from gender barriers as well as social class barriers. (Hannah & Kahn, 1989) Along these same lines, Hackett and Betz [1981] provide a conceptual analysis of career development in which perceived self-efficacy functions as a key mediator. Most occupational pursuits depend on cognitive and social competencies that require years to master. Hackett and Betz document the diverse ways in which institutional practices and socialization influences contribute to developmental paths by the types of competencies and selfbeliefs they promote in childhood. Experiences during this

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Females, in the context of scientific and mathematical endeavors, well illustrate these patterns. Up until high school, girls display equal natural aptitude for excellence in math and science as boys, without differing on their standardized test results (Betz & Hackett, 1983). But because of numerous negative social influences, girls eventually come to much have much lower self-efficacy beliefs about their capacity for mathematical, scientific, and technical endeavors than boys do. (These influences include cultural biases that women are less capable in quantitative and technical fields [Matsui et al., 1989]; similarly, parents who perpetuate stereotypic beliefs that boys are superior to girls in their capabilities for these fields [Eccles, 1989]; teachers and school counselors who encourage boys but discourage girls in these vocational directions [Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987; Fitzgerald & Crites, 1980]; etc.). Later on, during and after high school, it comes as no surprise that girls’ achievements in these areas start to lag behind those of boys. But it is crucial to note that this lag is not due to girls having less natural aptitude in these areas than boys have. Rather, this lag emerges because, as their self-confidence wanes, young women take less interest in, prepare themselves less for, and decrease their pursuit of (thus adapting their preferences toward), careers in these fields (Steele, 1996). Socially rooted impairments of their self-efficacy beliefs thus create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in which (originally unfounded) self-efficacy beliefs about their inferiority eventually lead to actual inferiority in these areas! As a result, women have pursued careers and made achievements in these fields much less than men (although happily this trend has been recently decreasing). To the extent that individual women have been discouraged by these social influences from achieving careers and lifegoods in these areas (LGs 19, 13, 12, and 8—achievement, knowledge, wealth, and fulfilling work in the context of these fields), and particularly in fields such as engineering, mathematics, and physics, their autonomy has been relatively diminished. In contrast, we can say that, for all those women who have more recently become able to pursue and enjoy these life-paths as real and accessible options, their autonomy has been relatively expanded. One point to note from this gender-aligned scenario is that impaired self-efficacy beliefs alone do not usually explain persons’ impaired autonomy and ill-preparedness for adult success. Rather, and especially

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in social environments harboring deep socioeconomic and racial divisions, impaired self-efficacy beliefs are usually mere signs and offshoots of impaired self-efficacy itself. To better understand these processes, we will, in the next section, examine the “self-efficacy skills” that must be developed in order to ensure that when young adults emerge from adolescence, their autonomy or self-efficacy will not be so impaired.

2.3. Adolescence and the Building Blocks of Autonomy (The Acquisition of Self-Efficacy Skills) Bandura describes the general importance and priorities of adolescence as follows: Adolescence is an important transitional phase in the life course that presents a host of new challenges. It is a crucial formative period because this is when the roles of adulthood must begin to be addressed in almost every dimension of life. Adolescents must begin to consider seriously what they want to do with their lives. During this time, they have to master many new skills and the ways of adult society. . . . As adolescents expand the nature and scope of their activities into the larger social community, they have to assume increasing responsibility for conduct that plays a more decisive role than do childhood involvements in fostering or foreclosing various life courses. The way in which adolescents develop and exercise their personal efficacy during this period [will] play a key role in setting the course their life paths take. (Italics mine, SE, 177) The purpose of this section is twofold. First, I’ll specify the “many new skills” that adolescents must master if they’re to “develop and exercise their personal efficacy” (which I will take here as roughly synonymous with their personal autonomy). And second, I’ll point out various background environmental conditions and sources that will largely determine whether or not, and how much, these skills are mastered. I’ll organize these skills into the three categories of cognitive (2.3.1), self-management (2.3.2), and interpersonal (2.3.3) skills. As we’ll now see, the nondevelopment or arrested development of any of these skills will seriously diminish whatever overall autonomy a young adult ends up possessing.

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2.3.1. Life Course Rationality Skills 6 Every adolescent must develop at least a high school level of literacy, reasoning skills, and numeracy (basic quantitative skills) if they’re to be able to confidently and effectively maneuver through society as adults. With only a junior high– or lower level of these skills, their future lives will be marked by significant struggle and frustration, at the very least (assuming they don’t have deep reserves of luck or inheritance to draw on). This much should be fairly obvious. Above and beyond this, adolescents must also develop cognitive skills that are prerequisite for what is often referred to as “life course rationality”; and the three components of this rationality may be described as follows. First, such rationality consists of a set of self-assessment skills. These skills are what enable people to accurately assess their own strengths and weaknesses and prominent native talents, capacities, and handicaps (if any). In particular, these skills will lend adolescents a reliable sense of what type or types of intelligences they excel most in. I say “intelligences” in the plural because, according to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, intelligence is not a singular, unified personal power that operates with equal effectiveness in all aspects of life. Instead, intelligence is more accurately conceived to be seven separate types of abilities, or intelligences, that make their separate contributions to the adequacy of people’s performance in life’s endeavors. The seven focus on (1) use of language, (2) logical-mathematical analysis, (3) spatial representation, (4) musical thinking, (5) the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, (6) an understanding of other individuals, and (7) an understanding of oneself. (Gardner, 1983)7 Children hone these self-assessment skills mainly through comparisons of themselves with their peers (SE, 170–172). Children’s assessments of their own capabilities benefit from comparisons made with others who are similar to themselves and yet who excel, or at least are slightly better than them, in regard to whatever capabilities are being assessed (Morris & Nemcek, 1982). In addition, as children grow more proficient in these skills through adolescence, they learn that greater expenditures of effort can compensate somewhat for deficient ability, but also that greater effort expended necessarily can signify lower ability in the areas being appraised (Kun, 1977; SE, 171). These findings suggest that children’s self-assessment skills grow relatively more in

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environments where they are exposed to peers and role models that excel in different capabilities and intelligences, and also in environments that offer incentives for trying to apply effort in various endeavors (Arnold, 1976; Pretty & Seligman, 1984). The second component of life course rationality, which builds directly on the first, consists of a set of self-development skills. This set consists of an acquired mastery of the actual procedures, operations, and informational content that correspond with whichever of these intelligence(s) a child discerns she excels in most. For example, a child who particularly excels in “musical thinking” (intelligence type #4) will especially want to master, say, the knowledge connected with music theory, composition, and arrangement, the skills connected with performance on an instrument, and so on.8 Or again, it will be rational for an adolescent who perceives that he or she is particularly gifted in intelligence type #2 to strive to master the operations and content of areas like algebra, geometry, and calculus. Ideally, in terms of what educational conditions will foster autonomy for the greatest variety of children, schools will thus find ways to stimulate and strengthen children’s skills not only in traditionally recognized areas of intelligence (types 1 & 2), but in these other areas as well (cf. Gardner, 1991, 1995). It is worth discussing these self-development skills because, as it stands, many schools are structured around a two-track system that separates out children who are gifted mainly in intelligence types 1 and 2 (linguistic and mathematical types) from those who are not. While these separations and distinctions are advantageous in some ways, they too often engender avoidable and hurtful side effects in other ways. More specifically, it’s common for students who aren’t tracked as “fast learners” in terms of types 1 and 2, but who might be gifted in the other types of intelligence, to become demoralized; and as their academic efficacy beliefs slowly wither, these “slow-learning” students increasingly come to view themselves as second-class citizens (Peterson, 1989; Raudenbush, Rowan, & Cheong, 1992; SE, 245–247). As such, I would criticize so-called multitrack curricula if this was organized in such a way as to demoralize some students into thinking of themselves as slow and ungifted second-class citizens, rather than as potentially adept, equally valuable citizens who were gifted in their own unique ways and types of intelligence. For where such demoralization and withering does occur, it can only serve to undermine these other student’s overall sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy, and block other ways that they might have gained excitement about, developed, and pursued their own unique potentialities.

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The third cognitive component of life course rationality consists less of skills, per se, than of possession of specific information about the nature, requirements, challenges, entrance pathways, and benefits of a wide range of careers and postsecondary schools, especially those for which adolescents demonstrate strong inclinations and aptitudes. Possessing such information is not a given for many students. As Bandura points out, “students from low-income families are much less likely than more advantaged ones to receive informative guidance on what they need to master to gain admission to college and to realize occupational aspirations. Deficient information leads to poor academic preparation, which can foreclose entire classes of pursuits requiring advanced competencies” (SE, 65). Similarly, “Dornbusch (1994) presents disconcerting evidence that most students are grossly uninformed about the academic [and career] realities they will face” (SE, 65). Psychologist Gail Hackett, who has spent the last two decades studying self-efficacy in the context of academic and career development, emphasizes the importance of this informational preparedness in no uncertain terms: It is especially vital that career exploration begin in the elementary years instead of in high school. Effective career education at th[is] level includes self-exploration (e.g., of interests and work values), cultivation of career decisionmaking skills, and information about and exposure to a wide range of occupations. In order to make informed and satisfying career decisions, students must understand both themselves and the world of work, and have the necessary skills to obtain information about relevant career pursuits (Herr & Cramer, 1988). . . . Furthermore, although academic-track students usually receive some guidance in college selection, little career exploration occurs. College course work does serve as a sort of mechanism for career exploration but does not usually provide the sorts of experiences that will maximally enhance career decision making and eventuate in satisfying career choices. Although carefully planned career education programs can be effective in easing the school-to-work transition, they have too often been limited in crucial ways. (Hackett, 1995, 251) The way that these three cognitive components contribute to an adolescent’s developing autonomy works as follows. (One might also note that these components correlate loosely with our aforementioned three stages of autonomy development; cf. 2.1.) Through these compo-

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nents, adolescents should, first, gradually gain a sense of what personal strengths, weaknesses, and salient gifts and abilities they have (along with a sense of which life-goods they hope to pursue). As they gain these things, they should then acquire a much better sense of the specific cognitive and practical skills they especially want to cultivate— so that they can each play the best hand with the cards that Nature dealt them. Finally, when approaching adulthood, adolescents should then have well-informed plans about how they’ll apply these skills toward the college (in many cases) and career of their dreams—with the final product emerging as a self-standing autonomous adult. I’m obviously painting an ideal progression here. But this is in order to provide a clear standard to measure against, for all those other cases that fall short of the clear-cut and ideal development of these rational building blocks of autonomy. This progression can be illustrated through a simple scenario with teenager Tammy. If Tammy learned that she had a powerful intellect but also hemophilia, she might prudently plan to pursue an academic career (thus focusing primarily on the attainment of LG13 [knowledge] and/or LG19 [achievement based, in this case, on intellectual accomplishments]), and to exercise in her leisure time (thereby assigning much less priority to the attainment of LG5 [health]) and not pursue an athletic career in a contact sport. In contrast, if Tammy learned that her native intellectual gifts were limited but that she had an incredibly strong physical constitution and frame, she might plan with equal prudence to pursue an athletic career (thus focusing primarily on the attainment of LG5 and perhaps LG16 [fame] or LG12 [wealth] or LG19, in these cases based on athletic accomplishments), and to read during her leisure time (thereby assigning relatively less priority to the attainment of LG13) and not pursue a career as an Ivy-league scholar. The degree to which adolescents become able to master these life course rationality skills and bodies of information will obviously depend in large part on the quality of grade schools they attend. In many if not most cases, poor quality schools will assure poor cognitive development. It is worth noting, however, why and how exceptions to this rule occur. When these exceptions (adolescents who develop substantial cognitive skills, self-awareness and foresight despite poor grade schools) do arise, it is usually because of the presence of exemplary role models in their personal lives. Bandura explains the pattern of these exceptional “success-against-the-odds” cases: The way in which peer affiliations can affect the entire course of intellectual development is shown in studies of children

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN from impoverished backgrounds who went on to college and professional careers at a time when it required overcoming daunting barriers to do so. In these families, the parents themselves could not provide the necessary resources and preparatory academic skills because of their limited schooling. However, a parent or a family acquaintance who valued education highly usually played a key role in setting the course of these children’s intellectual development during their formative years. The valuation of education they instilled was further developed by teachers who took special interest in the children’s talents. These evolving value preferences led to selective association with college-oriented peers who, by their interest and example, promoted attitudes, achievements standards, and sociocognitive skills conducive to intellectual pursuits. (SE, 235)

So the quality of one’s cognitive development and, thereby, one’s emergent autonomy, will obviously not be merely a product of the quality of one’s schools. The role models and caring individuals that one is or is not exposed to, and the tenor of one’s home life, will also play significant roles in this development. There are other salient noncurricular influences on adolescents’ cognitive development worth noting. Centrally, the socioeconomic circumstances of their families strongly influence their educational opportunities and achievements (Douglas et al., 1968; Wadsworth, 1991), where these, in turn, strongly correlate with their eventual occupation and income (Wadsworth, 1991; Montgomery et al., 1996). And as Wadsworth notes, “parental concern for and interest in the child’s education are also powerful factors in determining educational attainment” (Wadsworth, 1999, 48). Likewise, “poor family cohesion and accord, poor parenting, low parental self-esteem,” and also parental divorce and separation are often accompanied by “children’s poor educational attainment, and increased risks of poor self-control and aggressive behavior” (Wadsworth, 1999, 48; Ely et al., 1999). Finally, ill-temperedness, low self-control, and lack of emotional preparedness for the school environment, which can be associated with adverse experiences at home (Pulkkinen & Hamalainen, 1995), also often predict academic failure, delinquent behavior, and early school exit (Caspi et al., 1991; Trembley et al., 1995). According to these last findings in particular it should be apparent that adolescents’ developing self-efficacy will not be merely be a product of whatever cognitive skills they develop; it will also depend significantly

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on whatever behavioral and self-management skills they develop or fail to develop in their school and home and neighborhood environments.

2.3.2. Self-Management Skills Even if adolescents have developed all the aforementioned cognitive skills, then, along with whatever specific expertise they need for their chosen careers, they still won’t be ready to live autonomous lives or succeed in their careers unless they also develop certain sets of personal self-management skills. These are skills that will lend dependability and fortitude to their lives and enable them to successfully avoid or weather various forms of risk and adversity (such as health problems, unplanned pregnancies, engagement in substance abuse, and unexpected layoffs). As Bandura explains, Although much emphasis is being placed on the need to develop higher cognitive skills, the capability to manage one’s motivational and interpersonal functioning is another set of foundation skills that largely determine success on the job. Hence, in preparing youth for the world of work, the development of self-management skills is crucial. It comes as no surprise that hiring decisions are based more on employers’ judgments of dependability of work habits than on potentiality for vocational learning. (SE, 186) So even if someone gets hired in a preferred job, because of possessing the relevant explicit abilities required for it, this provides no guarantee that they’ll also possesses the implicit personal abilities to succeed at the job in the long run. Young adults won’t be very autonomous if they have personal deficiencies, stemming from various undeveloped selfmanagement skills, which make them vulnerable to derailment from their careers and preferred life paths. What follows is an examination of a few of the most salient sets of these skills, namely management of one’s health (2.3.2.1), sexuality (2.3.2.2), and substance abuse (2.3.2.3). In each case, we’ll see how these skills relate to a person’s developing autonomy and also what background environmental conditions usually determine whether these skills, or their correspondent deficiencies, are developed. As it turns out, having a stable social bond with a competent, caring adult may be the most crucial factor in developing each of these self-management skills (Egeland et al., 1993). And as Bandura notes, “such care-givers

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offer emotional support and guidance, promote meaningful values and standards, model constructive styles of coping, and create numerous opportunities for mastery experiences. Enabling caretaking builds trust, competencies, and a sense of personal efficacy” (SE, 172). (“Mastery experiences,” as psychologists define them, are training routines which, through guided instruction and practice, enable the practitioners to master certain skills and situations.) 2.3.2.1. To a large extent, lifelong health skills and habits are formed during childhood and adolescence. In relation to physical health, children may or may not acquire nutritious eating patterns, recreational and exercise routines, and self-maintenance habits that facilitate lifelong fitness, decreased morbidity, and increased longevity. And in relation to psychological health, children may acquire habits of emotional coping that will lead to greater or lesser levels of depression and illtemperedness. When faced with life’s inevitable letdowns and misfortunes, they’ll also learn to respond either with perseverance and emotional buoyancy or with undue anger, frustration, and despondency (cf. Hamburg, 1992; Millstein, Petersen, & Nightingale, 1993). Granted, peak health and long life may not be altogether necessary for autonomy. But to the degree one is sidetracked with aggravating forms of sickness and dysfunction (and certainly premature death!)— especially when these could have been prevented by healthier selfmaintenance—a person’s autonomy will be relatively diminished. Immanuel Kant’s life serves as a case in point here. This great philosopher didn’t write the majority of his groundbreaking works until he was in his sixties. As is well known, he kept to ruthlessly consistent daily waking, walking, dining, and working habits. It seems likely that his longevity and productivity were largely facilitated by these consistent health habits. So while we can’t infer that he would have been nonautonomous without these habits, it does seem that the overall character and achievements of his life and work (not to mention the course of philosophy) would have been radically diminished without these habits. Arguably, then, these health habits significantly bolstered his autonomy. On our Autonomy Scale, we might say that they raised him from being an AL3 or AL4 to an AL5. Sometimes it takes just a few more years and a little more vigor to become what one really wants to become or to achieve what one really wants to achieve. Whereas schools are the primary learning ground for our cognitive skills, homes are the primary learning—or, more precisely, assimilating—grounds for these health skills (along with the other self-management skills) and their correspondent dysfunctions (Wadsworth, 1999).

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To illustrate, we know that family conflict is significantly related to reduced health in adolescence and, later on, to lower self-esteem and psychological well-being (Sweeting & West, 1995). In contrast, children’s long-term enjoyment of a close relationship with a stable parent or adult yields significant protection against being depressed, even into adulthood (Bifulco & Moran, 1998). On a broader level, many social scientists have in recent years become increasingly aware that numerous gradients exist between the background socioeconomic circumstances of parents and the health status of their children, even when these children pass through adulthood (Keating & Hertzman, 1999; Power & Hertzman, 1999; Kawachi, Kennedy & Wilkinson, 1999; Tarlov & St. Peter, 2000; and section 2.4.1 will explain these gradients and their importance). These findings suggest, as we might expect, that whatever health and health habits adolescents acquire come largely from influences in their early home environments; and of course, these habits can be either quite salubrious or quite deleterious to one’s health. 2.3.2.2. Some of the most turbulent challenges that adolescents face involve learning how to successfully manage their budding sexuality. During this period, they begin to feel the rush of newly emergent urges and hormonal effects and the push of peer group pressure to engage in sexual behavior. If they don’t learn how to manage these newfound sexual feelings and experiences properly, adolescents can reap consequences that irretrievably alter their plans, foreclose future life options, and thereby stunt the growth of their emerging autonomy. In particular, adolescents may contract sexually transmitted diseases, which range in virulence from the merely irritating to the lethal. Or they may have unplanned pregnancies, in which case they will choose either to abort or abandon the baby (usually maternal and paternal decisions, respectively, which, in themselves, can leave lasting psychological scars), or else carry the fetus to term and then care for it. If they choose the latter, the heavy strains and responsibilities of parenthood may easily impede their own personal development, by tightly constricting opportunities for continued education and career development. As Bandura explains, Teenage parenthood imposes socioeconomic hardships and jeopardizes certain life courses for young mothers and their offspring. Young childbearers are more likely to drop out of school and find it harder to secure gainful employment or achieve stable marriages than do late childbearers (Hayes, 1987; Hofferth & Hayes, 1987). [So] providing opportunities for continued education is an important vehicle for

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Unfortunately, these dangers and burdens are especially pronounced among those already weighed down with other hardships. “Early sexual activity is more prevalent among adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds and those who have low educational aspirations, [while] much of this sexual activity is unprotected by regular contraceptive use” (SE, 179). 2.3.2.3. Adolescents and young adults also need to learn how to maneuver through the dangers of substance abuse. They need to learn which more harmful substances are better left alone and also what personal limits (in terms of amounts and times consumed) apply to their consumption of less harmful substances. Of course, they also need to become adept at behaving consistently with what they learn. The relationship between (lack of) these abstinence skills and developing autonomy is straightforward: If adolescents do not learn these skills, they will prove vulnerable to periodic bouts with loss of self-control, addictive behaviors, and other detrimental effects to their lives and physical and mental health that these entail (Newcombe & Bentler, 1988). And as explained earlier (1.2.2), weakened self-control and addictions are inimical to volitional conditions that are essential for autonomy. In his studies on addictive and compulsive behaviors, Jon Elster has often made this clear: that addictions and their various forms of irrationality entail a clear and dramatic forfeiture of personal autonomy (Elster 1984, 1999a, 1999b). Despite grade schools that sometimes offer helpful programs in sex and drug education, it appears that, here again, one’s peer and family environments play the primary role in determining what selfmanagement skills or plainly bad habits adolescents acquire in relation to these dangers. But it isn’t clear which of these two social environments (peers or family) plays the stronger role. For although peers play an undeniably strong role in influencing these behaviors, parents play a role in influencing both these behaviors and, on a prior level, what peers their children hang out with (Jessor, 1986; Jessor, Donovan, & Costa, 1991). Notwithstanding, it’s certain that if an ado-

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lescent lives in a social environment that combines peers who encourage sexual activity and substance abuse along with caretakers who don’t discourage such things—and don’t provide guided mastery experiences to prevent them—this will make for a particularly virulent combination of influences (Pentz, 1985). Young adults’ susceptibility to substance abuse is also influenced by the prospects they have for work and social activities, if these offer more satisfaction and lasting fulfillment than what they can receive from a quick high (Stall & Biernacki, 1986). Bandura explains that those who lead bored or aversive lives are quick to seek escape in addictive substances. They need to find involvements in activities that provide some satisfaction and meaning in their lives. These broader changes enable them to realize a satisfying life without alcohol or drugs. Engrossment in meaningful pursuits contributes to the exercise of control over substance abuse (Gossup et al., 1990). Meaningful work provides structure to one’s daily life, a sense of purpose, and a set of communal relationships, and it contributes to one’s sense of identity. Joblessness and vocational drudgery foster substance abuse. (SE, 294) These patterns imply that the best way to save young adults from problems with drug abuse may be to act proactively, by providing them— when they’re adolescents—with the skills and resources to live autonomous lives, so that drugs or getting hooked on drugs won’t be too appealing to them. Translating this into life-good terms, we could say that, to the extent they’re given real prospects for enjoyment of the other 19 life-goods, young people won’t become fixated on or adaptively settle for the bare enjoyment of life-good #1 (pleasure)! There are still other factors worth mentioning that significantly influence whether these “drug-management skills” are acquired. We know the following: that children who grow up with poor or smoking parents are themselves more likely to smoke when older (Mann et al., 1992; Wadsworth, 1991, 1996); that children who are frequently beat are at a much greater risk for alcoholism (McCord & Ensminger, 1997); and that abused or neglected children much more frequently end up engaging in substance abuse, during both adolescence and adulthood (Widom & White, 1997). Conversely, studies show that adolescents who’ve been instilled with strong self-efficacy beliefs (about their ability to successfully manage exposure to various substances) are much more successful in controlling addictive behaviors, resisting unwanted social

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pressures, and avoiding slips and relapses (Marlatt, Baer, & Quigley, 1995; DiClemente, Fairhurst, & Piotrowski, 1996). So these three sets of self-management skills—involving their health, sexuality, and (non-)use of drugs—comprise some of the most important things that adolescents need to learn and assimilate if they’re to achieve at least a minimal level of autonomy. But it will also behoove them to acquire other more mundane self-management skills and abilities, including the skill of knowing how to prioritize their activities and commitments, the abilities to make short- and long-term plans (and to stick to these unless they find good reason not to), and the “skills” of industry, self-discipline, and proper organization. We might also include so-called versatility and resilience skills, which enable people to become lifelong self-taught learners, to keep abreast of their fields of work (including major technical and socioeconomic trends and changes that affect these fields), and to stay prepared for reemployment in case they’re laid off from work (cf. Kanfer & Hulin, 1985; Clifford, 1988; Vinokur et al., 1991; SE, pp. 186–190).

2.3.3. Interpersonal Skills Any list of skills that are developmental building blocks of autonomy would be incomplete without including interpersonal skills. For those adolescents who don’t plan to lead a desert-island existence, they’ll have to spend a lifetime maneuvering through a world of people. If they’re to successfully pursue their own hopes and plans, then adolescents will have to learn how to get along well with others, communicate clearly with them, and avoid unnecessary conflict and hostility. To whatever degree they don’t learn to do these things, their autonomy in life will be needlessly checked and impinged. This holds true as much in the context of work as in social and family contexts. For success or failure in this work context, and not only in these overtly social contexts, often stems as much from interpersonal strengths and weaknesses as any other causes. As Bandura attests, success on the job rests partly on self-efficacy in dealing with the social realities of work situations, which is a crucial aspect of occupational roles. Betz and Hackett have identified a number of skills that subserve this broader function (Betz & Hakett, 1987; Hackett, Betz, & Doty, 1985). They include the ability to communicate well, to relate effectively to others, to plan and manage the demands of one’s job, to exer-

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cise leadership, and to cope with stress effectively. These are the types of skills that enable people to create and take advantage of opportunities for their occupational selfdevelopment. Depending on its strength, a sense of personal efficacy in these skills aids or impedes career advancement quite apart from the technical skills one possesses. Indeed, interpersonal and self-regulatory skills contribute more heavily to career success than do occupational skills. Technical job skills can be learned readily, but psychosocial skills are more difficult to develop and often even more difficult to modify if they are dysfunctional. (SE, 430) The life of Charles Sanders Peirce (the father of American Pragmatism) serves as an illustration these points. In light of his intellectual stature and accomplishments, one might assume that he was highly autonomous. But if we look beneath the surface, by considering his social persona and interpersonal “skills,” assessing Peirce’s level of autonomy becomes a much more complex matter. He was vain and offensively arrogant, irascible and uncivil, aggressive and ill-tempered, and a notorious womanizer. These traits, in themselves, do not necessarily connote nonautonomy. But largely because of these traits: his first marriage ended in divorce; he was rumored to have physically abused his second wife; he was fired from Johns Hopkins; he was prevented from teaching at Harvard as his father had (because his manners irritated the administration so); he was permanently blackballed from the academy; he spent the remainder of his days living in obscurity in rural Pennsylvania; and after reportedly wrestling with starvation, he died in poverty and isolation! Surely he hoped and planned for better for himself. However “autonomous” his life was, then, it was far less so than it would have been had he not been so lacking in various interpersonal skills and in these social graces. And if such social deficiencies curtailed the autonomy of one so prodigiously gifted, how much more might such deficiencies curtail the autonomy of others not so gifted? The main determinants of undeveloped social skills and antisocial behavior (when genetic or physiological factors are not to blame) seem to lie, once again, in a child’s early family and peer environments. Neglected or abused children and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are at significantly increased risks of engaging in antisocial and criminal behavior (Widom & White, 1997; Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Tremblay, 1999, esp. pp. 61–66). Children and especially boys who are not taught or modeled alternatives to physical aggression when young, are much more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior when

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older (Tremblay et al., 1991; Vitaro & Tremblay, 1994). And as Richard Trembley documents, “learning to wait for something you want (delay of gratification) and learning to use language to convince others to satisfy your needs may be the most important protective factor for chronic physical aggression and antisocial behavior” (Tremblay, 1999, 69; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). As we saw in all these cases, then, adolescents’ acquisition of these skills is not decided only by the quality of their schooling or their own personal initiative or moral vices and virtues. Thinking so would be much too simplistic a way to view these developments or lack of developments. Rather, as we saw, the development of all these self-efficacy skills is influenced in large part by what early social environments and role models adolescents are exposed to and by what resources they do and do not have access to. But perhaps these conclusions come as no real surprise; although I’ve tried to document their veracity, I don’t expect that they’ll be taken as altogether revelatory. As Bandura admits, “proclamations that human development and functioning are socially situated are no longer newsworthy. Significant advances require moving beyond these truisms to verification of the paths of influence through which these various sociocultural practices exert their effects” (italics mine, SE, 227). The purpose of this next section is to do precisely this: to verify—in more specific, systematic, and developmentally prior terms than have been provided so far—the earlier pathways and preconditions (operative this time between birth and adolescence) that determine whether and to what degree children will be able to develop these selfefficacy skills.

2.4. Childhood and the Foundations of Autonomy (The Early Pathways of Development) The autonomy that young adults end up exercising flows directly from the sets of these skills they develop or fail to develop through adolescence. We might say that their emergent autonomy is an immediate product and manifestation of these self-efficacy skills. But our “genealogy of autonomy” cannot stop here, since this would simply remove the problem one step further. That is, it would provide only half an explanation if we explained adult autonomy in terms of the adolescent development of these skills, but did not take the final step of explaining what earlier childhood preconditions make this skill development possible or impossible in the first place. As we’ll now see, the preconditions

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that influence such development stretch all the way back to the earliest moments of infancy, through (what David Blane calls) “accumulating chains of advantage or disadvantage.” Indeed, according to the “life course perspective” that Blane and other social scientists take and that I wholeheartedly advocate here, later accomplishments or failures in personal development (especially the development of these self-efficacy skills) are inextricably linked to very early conditions of advantage or disadvantage, respectively. In what follows, I explicate these developmental chains, or pathways, primarily through an analysis of the latter (the conditions of early socioeconomic disadvantage), and in doing so, I continue my practice of backtracking from later to earlier periods of development. In section 2.4.1, I identify and describe these pathways of childhood disadvantage. In 2.4.2, I explain how these pathways are ultimately linked to processes of “neural sculpting” and “biological embedding” that occur during the first years of life. And in the final section (2.4.3), I use three organizing principles to recapitulate the ground covered, and to provide an overview of the relationship that these pathways of disadvantage have with the development of adult autonomy. Gaining a precise empirical understanding of these developmental pathways is a prerequisite for doing the normative work of later chapters. For without such an understanding, we won’t have a precise enough grasp of the structure of childhood injustice (qua the impairment of the development of autonomy) and consequently won’t be able to see clearly enough when and how and why the state should intervene, to address and prevent such injustice.

2.4.1. Pathways of Childhood Disadvantage Immediately when a child comes into the world, that child must experience through no choice of her own a whole host of psychological, cognitive, and physical conditions that are more or sometimes much less conducive to overall healthy development. The far majority of these conditions will be set the parents or caregivers who are present: they will establish what emotional and nurturing conditions the child will or will not enjoy; they will provide for whatever intellectual stimulation the child has available; and for the most part they will determine what material resources will be brought to bear to meet the child’s needs. So if parents are experiencing economic and personal struggles, it should be apparent how these struggles will often translate into less effective child rearing. The more difficulty they have in effectively governing their own lives, the more difficult they will find it to effectively help anyone else get along

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with her life. And as children are raised less effectively (given less attention, provided with less nurture, resources, and guidance, etc.), this in turn can only serve to retard their development, so that they become able to govern their own lives less effectively or at a slower pace as they advance toward adulthood. In a nutshell, this describes the transmission of social disadvantage; and when repeated across generations, this process defines self-perpetuating cycles of disadvantage. The importance of these mechanisms and cycles cannot be overemphasized! Glen Elder, Jr., Professor of Life Course Studies at Chapel Hill, UNC, describes these pathways of transmitted disadvantage as follows: Th[is] analytic model assumes that economic hardship (low income, unstable work, and income loss) has adverse consequences for marital relations and the well-being of parents when they sharply increase the level of economic pressure. The effect of such pressure may be expressed through emotional depression and/or more conflict in marriage. In the second phase, marital discord and individual distress serve as a master link between economic pressure and ineffective parenting. Marital conflict, depressed feelings, and hostility among parents increase the risk of destructive parenting. In the third and final phase, destructive parenting links marital and individual distress with child outcomes. The assumption here is that marital conflict and ill-tempered parents have consequences for children, primarily by undermining the quality of parent behavior. (Italics mine, Elder, 61; cf. also Conger et al., 1992, 1993) Elder and Conger and their colleagues found these patterns operative among rural Midwestern families during periods of economic downturn ranging from the Great Depression to the 1980’s. But similar patterns can be observed across the spectrum of kinds of families experiencing socioeconomic hardship, whether rural or urban, black or white, native or immigrant. From studies of impoverished urban British families, for example, David Blane reports that Analyses of the 1958 British birth cohort suggests a plausible chain: parental disadvantage and low birthweight; some or all of, financial hardship and poor nutrition, crowded residential accommodation and disrupted sleep patterns, and delayed growth during childhood. . . . Slow childhood growth may identify a particularly disadvantaged subgroup within

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each social class, who obtain lower educational qualifications and grades. . . . These educational disadvantages subsequently weaken their labor market position which, in turn, exposes them to the health hazards of unemployment and casual employment in the poorly regulated secondary labor market. It is probably unusual for any of these factors on their own to have a major impact on health, but an effect on health becomes plausible when these factors are assembled into an accumulating chain of disadvantage. Social mobility provides a further mechanism by which health and social factors can accumulate across the life course. Parental socioeconomic position influences many aspects of childhood which, in turn, influences the chances and direction of social mobility into a different social class where further advantage or disadvantage accumulates. (Italics mine, Blane, 68) When these patterns are viewed through the lens of socioeconomic gradients, it becomes apparent that, statistically speaking, children from disadvantaged backgrounds have significantly higher chances of achieving bad social outcomes, regardless of the specific social outcome variable considered (cf. Brooks-Gunn et al., 1999; Kawachi et al., 1999; Tarlov & St. Peter, 2000). (A “socioeconomic status gradient,” or “SES gradient,” refers to the commonly observed pattern of a monotonic increase or decrease, among a defined population, in an outcome variable related to children’s eventual well-being or achievement, in association with an increase or decrease in some input measure of parental socioeconomic status such as income, education, and occupation; cf. Keating & Hertzman, pp. 5–7. To put this in simpler terms, when social scientists observe one factor in parents or home environments, other things being equal, another correspondent factor in children or their development can usually be observed; and a gain or loss in the one usually correlates with a gain or loss in the other.) And as developmental psychologist Daniel Keating notes, these “gradients are pervasive; they are virtually always found” (1999, 10). Consider just a short litany of some of these important gradients and bad outcomes: Children who are born to parents from lower SES backgrounds are more likely: (a) to be born with low birthweight (Drever & Whitehead, 1997) and to be born but also end up with shorter height (Kuh & Wadsworth, 1989; these two indices are reflective of poor preand postnatal nutrition and care); (b) to have their basic needs go unmet (Currie, 1997); (c) to have behavioral problems and engage in crime (Tremblay et al., 1992, 1995, 1999); (d) to work at semi- and

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unskilled jobs, and to experience insecure employment and long-term unemployment (Walker et al., 1985; Montgomery et al., 1996; Bartley et al., 1999); (e) to earn low incomes (Kuh & Wadsworth, 1991); (f) to be chronically ill, and to suffer more from strokes and stomach cancer (Davey Smith et al., 1997, 1998); (g) to have worse morbidity and mortality rates (Marmot & Wadsworth, 1997, pp. 4–12; Rodgers, 1999; Wilkinson, 1999); and so on. (If only babies had some say in the matter, they would surely choose not to be born poor in America!) And it should be noted that these early gradient effects are in addition to all those mentioned earlier (2.3), which included many instances of lower academic achievements, diminished personal skill attainment, diminished self-control, increased aggressiveness and social maladjustment, and so forth. These are the sad facts that indisputably establish that early disadvantage and deprivation do not merely temporarily inconvenience children but more than this often permanently distort their life paths. It is time once and for all for the modern world to recognize poverty and disadvantage not simplistically as God’s punishment for laziness or immorality but rather as usually undeserved blights that bring with them a thousand slights and injuries. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and her colleagues at the Center for Young Children and Families, at Columbia University, have organized the myriad influences through which these SES gradients operate into 14 specific “micropathways.” (The first seven of these operate through the family and the last seven through the community.) The pathways through which SES gradients operate are: [1] nutrition and health behavior, [2] provision of learning experiences, [3] parental interactions with children, [4] parental emotional and physical health, [5] use of health care services, [6] choice of schools and child care, [7] household stability, and also [8] exposure to violence [and drugs], [9] environmental toxins, [10] neighborhood spirit and connectedness, [11] peer groups, [12] school characteristics, [13] existence of parks, playgrounds, libraries, community centers, and organized child-oriented activities, and finally [14] access to health care. (Brooks-Gunn et al., 1999, 116) If adequate nurture and resources are provided through these 14 channels or micropathways, then the relatively advantaged children who enjoy them should be able to develop into healthy, well-adjusted, and self-standing (or autonomous) adults. But to the degree that adequate nurture and resources are not provided through these channels, the relatively disadvan-

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taged children who are deprived of them will find it difficult, if not impossible, to become such adults. It is through these developmental pathways and gradients, then, that early advantage or disadvantage extends out through a child’s whole life course. Being born into a lower socioeconomic status (SES) bracket almost invariably narrows the channels through which these resources and blessings flow, whereas being born into a higher SES bracket almost invariably widens the channels through which these resources and blessings flow. And in almost all cases, narrower or wider earlier channels (or micropathways) of these things end up significantly withering or expanding children’s later life prospects and outcomes, respectively. And this is true of outcomes that include rates of homelessness and continued poverty, illiteracy, alcoholism and drug abuse, incarceration, early morbidity and mortality, and on and on. So is it just a coincidence that children born into lower SES brackets come to experience markedly more of these outcomes later in life when they’re adults? Or do these outcomes result from their greater inherent immorality? Or from their simply making immoral choices early on? Certainly not. But if not, then what is the explanation for these undeniable SES gradients and correlations?

2.4.2. Neural Sculpting and Biological Embedding Although this account in 2.4.1 provided a description of these pathways and SES gradients and corresponding influences and effects, it only implicitly suggested an explanation of how and why these earlier SES influences are linked so to these later outcomes. (As Hume famously noted, the fact that B follows A cannot be taken to automatically mean that B is caused by A.) In this section, I thus try to offer more of an explanation of these correlations, by briefly reviewing recent groundbreaking research that sheds light on the early causal mechanisms behind them. (For a more detailed account of these mechanisms, see Power et al., 1991; and Keating & Hertzman, 1999, esp. pt. II and pp. 25–29.9) In particular, I explain how very early family conditions and social interactions predispose children to different developmental trajectories, through processes known as “neural sculpting” and “biological embedding.” Depending on which trajectory a child is on, he or she may either end up mastering the aforementioned self-efficacy skills with great proficiency or else have trouble attaining them with any real degree of proficiency at all. In turn, the child’s success or failure in mastering these skills will directly affect whatever level of autonomy or nonautonomy he or she ends up attaining as an adult.

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Daniel Keating and Fiona Miller explain how a crucial early link in these pathways is infants’ and preschoolers’ development of various “regulatory capabilities”: The developmental pathway that captures these patterns may be described as follows. Infants who have developed good emotion, attention, and social regulatory capabilities are more likely to have habits of learning that contribute to their subsequent cognitive and behavioral development. They are also more likely to continue to acquire other developmentally appropriate regulatory capabilities. Preschoolers with good emotion, attention, and social regulation are likely to perform better in [school and] challenging situations, have better perspective taking skills, and [have] fewer behavior problems. If patterns of competence and coping present at school onset have their roots in earlier development, as our preliminary findings suggest, there are [serious] implications. One is that improving the prospects for success across the whole population of children requires attention to the quality of the social environment before children even get to the school door. (Keating and Miller, 1999, 231) The successes (or failures) that school-age children experience thus depends significantly on various self-regulatory capabilities that they develop (or, again, fail to develop) during their preschool years. This makes sense especially if we take these “emotional, attentional, and social regulatory capabilities” as being early prototypes of, and laying neural templates down for, the cognitive, self-management, and social self-efficacy skills that develop later. Although these early regulatory capabilities help explain another prior step in our “genealogy of autonomy,” they still don’t provide “the first domino,” the original link in our developmental chain. For the question What explains the development of these regulatory capabilities? still lingers. That is, we still want to know why some children rather than others develop these capabilities, and why gradients exist even at this preschool level (cf. Keating & Hertzman, esp. chs. 7–9). The answer cannot be merely that some children come into the world equipped with better genetic profiles and gifts than others. Although this is obviously true, it provides only a part, and not the whole, of the explanation of these differing regulatory capabilities and early gradients. It is not the case that rich babies are so uniformly more inherently or genetically gifted than poor babies. And even the better and worse prenatal nutritional habits of rich and poor mothers cannot

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explain these strong correlations. So environment must play a major explanatory role here, too, even during infancy. This can be seen through studies that isolate these genetic variables. In studies of programs that provided extensive mentoring to the preschool children of parents with socioeconomic or cognitive deficiencies, the children who underwent the mentoring went on to achieve normal, or even superior, cognitive and academic gains, whereas the control group children (who had identical parental profiles but did not undergo the mentoring) achieved consistently low cognitive and academic gains (cf. note 10). In other words, poor babies who were provided with early intellectual stimulation ended up scoring just as highly or even more highly later on in various cognitive and academic tests as did rich babies. Robert Case et al. (1999, 140) explain the relationship between these genetic and early environmental influences: The presence of these gradients does not mean that children from low-SES homes have some sort of neurological handicap. It does not even mean that they have some sort of psychological handicap. It simply means that their early home environment has not had such a strong [learning or nurturing] emphasis as has been present in middle class homes, and that they come to school with a knowledge base and a set of . . . capabilities that are less well developed. On the other hand, however, it seems clear that children from lowSES homes are at considerable risk that these early differences will be reified and that they will develop into a handicap. . . . There is great danger, therefore, that what starts out as a mere difference in knowledge may be misidentified as a difference in native ability and eventually converted into a difference of a much deeper nature—perhaps even one that includes some sort of biological component.10 The importance of these findings, again, cannot be overemphasized. And thankfully, these early “biological components” bring us to the first domino or link in our developmental chain. In what immediately follows, we’ll thus consider the important first step of how certain early social and socioeconomic conditions become biologically embedded, or hardwired, into the neural architecture of infants’ and young childrens’ developing brains. During the last decade, Clyde Hertzman and his colleagues in the Population Health Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced

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Research were preoccupied with certain related questions about the early developing brain. They had begun to be convinced that very early family conditions have many dramatic and far-reaching consequences, affecting biological pathways and structures of brain development throughout childhood and, in turn, affecting outcomes throughout adulthood. As Hertzman worked in conjunction with various neuroscientists at the Population Health Program, “the hypothesis began to emerge that the conditions of early life influencing brain development could set coping skills for life, and that the emerging fields of psychoneuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology [and nonhuman primate ethnology] might explain the biological pathways by which an individual’s competence and coping skills set health risks throughout life” (Keating & Hertzman, 1999, p. x). This hypothesis builds on the seminal twin notions of “neural sculpting” and “biological embedding.” For millennia, thinkers have hypothesized that conditions of early childhood and even of infancy might affect human development in various ways. This hypothesis is anything but radical. What is radical about Hertzman’s much more fine-grained hypothesis may be described as follows. According to it, certain conditions of early childhood (especially those concerned with the emotional support and cognitive and verbal stimulation that infants receive) serve to fundamentally influence and even sculpt various neural and cognitive pathways, on a fairly permanent basis. “Neural sculpting,” as Keating and Hertzman thus define it, is the process “whereby the social and physical environments of the infant and young child organize the experiences that shape the networks and patterns of the brain” (1999, 3). In this fashion, the way that people later process and store information, use language, handle stresses of different kinds, relate to others, react to various antigens and pathogens, and so on will have been substantially influenced by the neural pathways they developed earlier, during certain critical periods of growth in their first years and even months of life. Hertzman describes this process specifically in relation to disadvantaged children: Spending one’s early years in an unstimulating, emotionally and physically unsupportive environment will affect the sculpting and neurochemistry of the central nervous system in adverse ways, leading to cognitive and socioemotional delays. The problems that children so affected will display early in school will lead them to experience much more acute and chronic stress than others, which will have both physiological and life path consequences. . . . This process, whereby

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human experience affects the healthfulness of life across the life cycle, is herein called “biological embedding.” (Hertzman, 1999, 31) To illustrate, this biological embedding process may seem more familiar if viewed in the context of early language acquisition. Persons may learn new languages at any age. But as they grow older, it usually becomes increasingly difficult for them to master new languages, at least with the same facility and precision of nuance and articulation that marks original language acquisition, during one’s early years. And even if persons do manage to learn new languages later on with much facility, they often betray their originally acquired language with a skip of intonation here, or an inappropriately accented syllable there. (Anyone who’s tried to learn a new language later on in life should be familiar with this phenomenon, and the greater relative difficulty they have picking the language up later, compared to the greater relative ease they would have noticed if they learned another language very early on in life.) These patterns help to illustrate that children have early critical and sensitive periods when their brains are especially receptive for being linguistically imprinted (cf. Cynader & Frost, 180–181; hereafter C&F).11 It is crucial to note that these critical periods are prevalent not just in reference to language acquisition but also in reference to a wide range of other types of skill acquisitions, behaviors, and bodily activities. For instance, “there appears to be a critical period for gaining effective neural control over the stress response” (C&F, 182–183); for enjoying healthy visual development (C&F, 157–165); for gaining facility with certain quantitative skills (Case et al., 1999); for acquiring nurturing, affiliative, and emotional bonding capacities (C&F, 171–174); for learning how to assess others’ emotional reactions and facial expressions (C&F, 177–179); and so forth. There are thus certain early periods—or early windows of special opportunity—when the brain’s neural circuitry is especially receptive and primed to be sculpted and developed in certain ways, along certain pathways and for certain functional purposes. As ophthalmologist Max Cynader and neuroscientist Barrie Frost explain, what is not generally appreciated is that high-probability events such as what young organisms typically see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and experience, through interactions with their particular physical and social environments (their ecological niche in other words), also contain critically important information that is presumed and required to sculpt and mold

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Up to this point, we’ve been considering developmental processes and pathways that—whether sooner or later, directly or indirectly, or to a greater or lesser degree—influence the development of persons’ emergent autonomy or nonautonomy. Although these critical periods occur in the very first months and years of life, then, they are for that reason no less influential and important. If anything, they might be more influential and important (relatively more so than later experiences and influences). If young children or infants experience arrested development through these periods, then, as Cynader and Frost explain, they won’t be able to “successfully and competently cope with [their] environments” later; and if they can’t successfully and competently cope with their environments later, then it’s doubtful what autonomy, if any, they’ll ultimately be able to possess and demonstrate. This brings us to the end, or actually origin, of our genealogy of autonomy. An important fruit of our labor is this: Now we should be able to gauge what autonomy trajectory any young person is on at any age or stage. That is, by looking at a young person’s life and ascertaining various sets of markers (their advantages and disadvantages throughout, along with profiles of their early development, self-efficacy skills, career prospects, etc.), we should be able to estimate the future direction of their lives—in terms of the level of autonomy they’re developing and most likely headed toward as adults (assuming they don’t experience widely different marker characteristics at later ages). In turn, this knowledge should provide the foundation for enabling social practitioners to determine what interventions, if any, will be necessary for getting children on track to attain at least minimal autonomy by the time they’re adults. Hypothetically speaking, we might justifiably mandate special early child training and parental counseling programs for Janie and her household (if her autonomy trajectory indicates a high risk for her eventual nonautonomy), but no intervention at all for Johnny. Or again, based on their findings from cognitive tests and home inter-

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views, social workers might find that five-year-old Gene needs some intensive language training, whereas five-year-old Gina is doing just fine and needs no such help; and so on. (Much more on these kinds of practical responses and interventions will be discussed in 4.2.)

2.4.3. Three Organizing Principles At this point, we’ve examined the main details and empirical conditions that support or frustrate children’s development of autonomy. Subsequently, and so as not to lose the forest for the trees, it will help to look back and pick out a few of the main overall patterns suggested throughout, especially in reference to the so-called pathways of disadvantage. I designate these patterns as (a) the Clustering of Disadvantages (COD), (b) the Snowballing of Disadvantages (SOD), and (c) the Autonomy Impairment of Disadvantages (AID). a. According to the Clustering of Disadvantages (COD) pattern, socioeconomic disadvantages are not distributed randomly or evenly across any nation’s population of children at any given time; rather, the children of those who are worse off (those born to parents from lower SES backgrounds) usually experience the burdens of a whole cluster of social disadvantages. Although some nations display a milder pattern of this distributional clustering than others (with the northern Scandinavian countries displaying the mildest disparities and contrasts and shallowest SES gradients, and the United States displaying some of the sharpest), every nation displays this effect to some marked degree. COD is an expression of patterns that Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has drawn attention to in relation to those growing up in poverty. Contra more simplistic economic approaches, Sen has argued that poverty shouldn’t be viewed as an experience merely or even primarily of very low income, but rather as an experience of (what he calls) “multi-capability deprivation.” According to his perspective, children from lower SES backgrounds have to contend not merely with lower parental incomes and therefore less access to material resources, but usually with a wide range, or cluster, of many other crippling deprivations and stymied basic capabilities (cf. Sen, 1992, ch. 7; 1999, ch. 4). b. According to the Snowballing of Disadvantages (SOD) pattern, the disadvantages that any child experiences early on usually lead to

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inquiry: young people’s achievement of autonomy. AID draws the conclusion that: children who experience clusters of disadvantage earlier, and for longer periods, find it exponentially more difficult to achieve autonomy when they’re older.12 To recapitulate: the COD pattern highlights the fact that disadvantages tend not to occur singly at any point in time; rather, children who suffer from certain disadvantages tend to simultaneously suffer from a whole cluster of accompanying disadvantages during that time. Unlike COD, the SOD pattern isn’t static and doesn’t merely track what is the case at any one point in time. Rather, the SOD (Snowballing of Disadvantages) pattern is dynamic and tracks what occurs over periods of time, highlighting the fact that deprivations and disadvantages suffered early on often multiply and lead to snowballing problems, complications, and disadvantages later on. And this is why “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”: as we’ll see later, both justice and efficiency dictate trying to address such problems, disadvantages, and arrested development as early as possible, before they snowball and become intractable problems. Finally, the AID (Autonomy Impairment of Disadvantages) pattern synthesizes these points, in the observation that the more disadvantages a child suffers through and the longer she suffers through them, the harder it will be for that child to achieve even a minimal level of autonomy by the time he or she is an adult. So where does this leave us? We’ve considered how autonomy should emerge by the time adolescents become adults, how adolescents should be developing their budding autonomy through various self-efficacy skills, and how children should be enjoying various supportive conditions and influences from early on, to prepare them for adolescence. All along the way, we’ve also seen how and when things don’t go ideally according to these “shoulds,” when various disadvantages sabotage what should be a normal and healthy progression toward autonomy. After gaining this overview of the ways that autonomy does and does not develop through childhood, the next question that naturally arises is: “How should society respond when things go wrong, when a child’s development of even minimal autonomy is seriously threatened or sabotaged anywhere along the way?” This question will be the subject of what follows.

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Crippled Autonomy Development and State Intervention

There are other ways of doing violence to a person than by physically harming him . . . We can do violence to a person not only by harming his body, but also by physically or psychologically eliminating or diminishing his autonomy; under this heading would come all kinds of psychological violence and coercion. The parents who, in order to get their children to be passive and obey commands mechanically, constantly berate and scream at them, can do much more violence to their children in not respecting them as free persons, than would be done by even a considerable amount of physical violence. Psychological violence is often far more damaging than mere physical violence. —John Morreall

In light of evidence in the last chapter, we saw that children will develop autonomy at different paces, to greatly varying degrees, and with different material, familial, and social resources at hand—with the most unfortunate ones not developing autonomy at all. So as to ameliorate such disparities and dangers, would the state be justified or even obligated to intervene in certain family situations? The purpose of this chapter is to answer this question. 3.1. Crippled Autonomy Development and the Harm Principle There is one major legal principle in particular, the Harm Principle, that has significant implications on whether or not the state is justified 85

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in intervening to prevent nonautonomy.1 In what follows, I argue that, in accordance with this Principle, the state is justified in acting to prevent wrongful and serious harm, that children suffer such harm when their development (including their development of autonomy) is crippled under certain circumstances and, therefore, that the state is justified in intervening to prevent children from suffering such crippled and arrested development. John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, recall, essentially states that “the state is justified in restricting someone’s liberty in order to prevent him from harming someone else.” Without defending it at length, I assume that this Principle is itself justified.2 If the state may legitimately involve itself in any kinds of coercive or intrusive activities, I assume it should be at least in those activities that are aimed at the prevention or correction of harm. To deny this—by insisting that the state is not allowed to intervene to oppose harm (even assuming that such intervention does not itself cause or perpetuate more wrongful harm)—would ultimately condone self-contradicting and anarchic, or at least ineffective and unstable, states. Since much turns on our understanding of “harm” here, we also need to recall its specific meaning, per Feinberg, as “a wrongful setback to a person’s nontrivial interests (cf. Harm to Others, 36; and 1.2). In order to finish setting the table for what follows, we also need to recall a centrally important conclusion derived in chapter 1, namely, that “the state rightfully has as much or more business protecting children’s development of autonomy as it has with protecting other significant interests of adults” (1.5). A state should respond to these moral priorities through its laws and policies, we saw, precisely because it’s such an absolutely vital interest of these children that is being harmed or threatened with harm.3 We should note the implications of this conclusion for those theorists who typically allow the most limited space for state intervention. In particular, libertarians conventionally advocate a minimal nightwatchmen type state, a state that is supposedly justified in intervening in people’s lives only to redress the most obvious or direct threats to life, limb, and liberty, and to citizens’ property rights and interests.4 In contrast to such limited claims for state involvement, we might ask: Does it make sense to see the state as obligated to protect, say, a person’s already-acquired property, but to deny the state any role in protecting a person’s ability to acquire property in the first place?5 More broadly, on what basis can the state be seen as obligated to protect the alreadyformed interests of adults, while it is simultaneously denied as properly protecting the ability of children to develop interests that they may even call their own? As Charles Lockhart and Gregg Franzwa have argued,

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“If liberalism [of any stripe] represents a commitment to the right to pursue one’s own legitimate interests without interference, then by implication it must represent a commitment to the opportunity to develop legitimate interests in the first place” (1990, 166). If any legal or political theory such as libertarianism accepts the Harm Principle, then, but simultaneously denies that the state may properly intervene to protect these children’s interests, then this theory seems guilty either of inconsistency or morally specious bias or both. At this point, someone advocating only very limited state intervention might still object that I’ve proceeded too quickly. It would be one thing for the state to intervene if, say, Sam was robbed. But it would be quite another thing, they might argue, if Sam had merely grown up poor and had to suffer some material deprivation. Whereas the first case clearly merits public intervention (viz., police attempts to track down and punish the robber and to return Sam’s belongings), arguably the second case doesn’t warrant intervention with any such mandate or moral force. This difference is rooted in the fact that the presence of wrongfulness in the first case is so clear, so much more specifiable, focal, and direct. The robber was obviously at fault in committing the robbery and firmly deserves to be punished, while the person robbed is clearly a victim deserving some type of compensation. (The limited interventionist continues:) But such wrongfulness is absent in the second case. No one has done wrong and no one is at fault for Sam’s merely growing up poor, are they? Isn’t such deprivation merely an unfortunate and unavoidable—but not wrongful—part of life? Consequently, although state intervention would be mandated in the first case, in order to redress Sam’s straightforward victimization, it would not be mandated in the second case, in order to redress Sam’s mere bad luck or early deprivation. Such arguments don’t ultimately seem to hold water, though. For if a child not only grows up poor, but also has his interest in becoming autonomous wrongfully threatened or set back (for that harm, and not only mild economic adversity, is the relevant type of injury that is at stake here), then an element of wrongfulness is present and worthy of redress here. (For brevity’s sake, I will from here on refer to this crippling of a child’s autonomy development as “CAD.”) In other words, the precise and relevant wrong that’s being opposed here is not mere poverty, as we’ll see, but woefully irresponsible and inadequate caregiving; this “care-giving,” or really lack thereof, is such as would otherwise stunt and distort the child’s normal course of development so that, without intervention, he or she would not achieve even minimal autonomy by the time the child was an adult. By definition, this means

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that, under her current conditions and trajectory of arrested development, the child will attain subpar Autonomy Level Two at best () AL2). Recall what debilitating characteristics these low levels entail (1.3): AL2 persons, we said, “have so little maturity and wherewithal that they aren’t able to stand on their own two feet. In lacking the stability and independence that mark effective self-governance, they aren’t currently capable of ‘forging their own way’ ”; and these AL2s are defined by the same levels of dependence that characterize, for example, “many early adolescents, the mildly retarded, recidivist criminals who seem incapable of rehabilitation, persons with out-of-control psychological problems or neuroses, and serious drug addicts.” So we aren’t talking here about the common phenomena of merely slow-blooming twenty year olds, who still act or live like adolescents in some ways or aren’t yet able to govern their lives very effectively. Certainly, I am not advocating serious state intervention to prevent cases like this, since this would wrongly justify far too much state intrusion into far too many people’s lives. Rather, the relevant concern is for more critically needy young adults whose development is so stunted (by prior abuse and/or serious neglect) that they will need extensive help to become even minimally functional self-supportive citizens. Some parts of this argument need to be filled in here. It needs to be established that CAD is often caused by others’ wrongful action or inaction, and not just by mere misfortune or bad luck. For admittedly, the Harm Principle and state intervention would not necessarily apply to cases of CAD if these resulted from mere bad luck, or nonwrongful causes where others weren’t to blame. So as to reveal the common presence of wrongful human agency as the cause of CAD, my strategy will be, first, to describe a scenario (a) wherein a youth suffers CAD as the result of clearly blameworthy human action. Then I will consider similar scenarios involving specific, isolated differences in the actions causing the CAD: I will consider, in turn, scenarios wherein: (b) the acts causing the CAD are ones of omission rather than commission, (c) the acts causing the CAD are many and committed over long periods of time rather than single and committed at one instance, (d) the acts causing the CAD are perpetrated by many persons rather than by one person, and finally, (e) a combination of all these variables (from a through e) causing the CAD. For each type of case, I will show that these circumstantial differences do not amount to significant moral differences or, in other words, that since CAD is in each case caused by wrongful human action, it therefore remains a quite wrongful—and thus legally and publicly addressable—type of harm. Through this line

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of reasoning, it should likewise become apparent just how regularly CAD results from wrongful abuse and neglect—be it neglect by a single parent or neglect by society as a whole. a.

So imagine the following hypothetical enactment of the crippling of a child’s autonomy development (CAD): One evening, a bright and enthusiastic sixteen year-old boy named Joe sits down at the dinner table with his mother and younger sister. Joe is well-behaved and emotionally well-adjusted, has maintained an A– average in school, is a hard-worker with a part-time job, and is looking forward to some prospects after high school that are, to him, pretty exciting. On this particular evening, he falls into a bitter and heated argument with his mother, who has had an off-and-on addiction to crack cocaine. Joe has found a stash of her drugs and is waving them in front of her, threatening to throw them away. This confrontation comes on a particularly bad evening, since she’s had a hard day at work and is in a foul mood. Her felt “need” for a fix and all her desperate emotions about feeling trapped in (what she feels are) her lousy job, her lousy relationships, and her lousy dead-end life, are welling up within her. Joe and his mother begin to shout at each other over the drugs, until she becomes truly hysterical. She lashes out with a storm of pent-up rage and smacks her son in the head with a frying pan. Joe suffers mild but permanent brain damage as a result. He is never quite the same. As time reveals, Joe develops behavioral and emotional problems, his grades drop abysmally, and he has difficulty carrying out even relatively simple jobs and tasks. He spends the rest of his life only partially self-supportive, moving in and out of semi-dependent relationships with various family members, charity organizations, and welfare agencies—until at last he dies a forlorn death. How should we interpret this scenario, specifically in reference to the wrongfulness of the harm that Joe suffers? Obviously, as Feinberg would say, his welfare interests have been severely set back and, like dominos, these have derailed and delimited

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN whatever significant and autonomy-developing interests he would have had. (We could say that Joe’s autonomy trajectory changed dramatically immediately after receiving the blow on his head.) Just as obviously, these interests have been set back wrongfully. His mother committed a violent and unconscionable act and so is clearly responsible for the ensuing CAD. Furthermore, the harmfulness of her action properly transferred her and Joe’s welfare from the purely private sphere into the public legal sphere. After the blow on his head, that is, the state became justified in intervening in his family affairs—remedially for Joe and perhaps punitively against his mother. This much should be obvious. I will now use this fairly straightforward and uncontroversial case of CAD as a reference, in order to compare it with variations having particular circumstantial differences (but with equivalent set backs of interests), so as to be able to see whether or not these circumstantial differences amount to significant moral differences, that is, whether or not the CAD remains wrongful and thus appropriate as a target of state intervention. b. So imagine this similar case, wherein Joe’s harm is caused by an act of omission rather than commission on his mother’s part: It’s the same fateful evening around the same dinner table. But this time when Joe confronts his mother he starts coughing, apparently from getting something stuck in his throat. His mother’s anger is again ignited, except that this time her anger leads in another direction. Instead of lashing out at Joe, she grabs the drugs from him as he starts to choke and marches off toward the back door on her way to get a fix—even as Joe seems to be choking and gasping. She pauses on her way out and notices him turning red and gagging at the table, making clutching signs toward his throat. But no matter—she’s so angry and self-absorbed with her cravings that she doesn’t care. She storms off and leaves her son in this precarious condition. As it turns out, neighbors come over when they hear the younger sister shrieking. They call 911 but by the time the ambulance arrives and intervenes, Joe has suffered brain damage from partial asphyxiation, to an equivalent degree as in scenario (a). He then goes on to live the same later life as in (b).

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The mother’s actions, or really lack thereof, obviously are wrongful here, too. In the first case, her anger expressed itself through a brutal act of commission, whereas in this case it expresses itself through a cruel act of omission—walking out on her desperately needy son. This omission amounts to gross, even criminal, negligence in her parental duties (not to mention any “good Samaritan’’ duties she might have toward her son). The person she walked out on was her own flesh and blood, whom she brought into the world and thereby owed at least her parental care toward (cf. Blustein, 1977). So the wrongfulness and the injury of CAD in cases (a) and (b) seem equivalent. It is thus not a necessary condition of CAD that it be caused by an act of commission. This scenario emphasizes that the wrongfulness of harms that come to children through their parent’s actions or inactions often stem from breaches of caregiving duties. It is not as though the needed care that parents give to their children consists of supererogatory acts, of charitable acts above and beyond the call of duty. On the contrary, as Onora O’Neil and others have argued, the needed care that parents (who are never, save in cases of rape, forced to bring their children into the world) give is more properly viewed as consisting of obligatory acts, required by duty largely in response to their procreative acts (O’Neill, 1979, 25-38). It lands us in absurd conclusions to deny this and to allow that parents, having brought their children into the world, do not have substantial duties to care for their children’s needs (cf. 3.2.2). c. In this next case, imagine that Joe suffers the same CAD (crippled autonomy development) but only after it has accrued slowly over a long period of time rather than from a single episode: Joe is born with the same natural capacities and, in his earliest years, everything seems to proceed as in (a). There’s just one difference here. In this case, his mother, whom we may imagine is a stout woman, has a terrible habit of shaking the boy and smacking him in the head whenever she’s irritated or frustrated or angry—which isn’t infrequently, because of her drug habits and withdrawals. As a result, Joe’s progress by the time he’s eight years old begins to slow (his speech

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN begins to slur, his thought processes become a little less efficient, etc.). After eight more years of this abuse his condition is similar to that of an old boxer, so that, by his sixteenth year, Joe has gained as serious a mental handicap as he had in (a) and with an identical later life. Here again, the setbacks are the same and the mother’s actions are just as deplorable. Although no one of the insults is as severe as in case (a), the smaller ones still accrue and ultimately cause just as much damage to his mind and developing autonomy.6 Also, it’s worth noting that we need not imagine the woman harming her son only through periodic acts of violence. She might cause him just as much wrongful injury through gross neglect or incompetence, as if she let him eat lead chips or undergo severe nutritional deficiencies for years on end. So here again, the wrongfulness and the injury between this type of case and case (a) seem equivalent. In turn, it is not a necessary condition of harm that it come via one dramatic or patently criminal act; other things being equal, long strings of less severe and more subtle abuses serve just as properly as instances and causes of wrongful harm, and so of publicly addressable criminal actions. If there is any real difference in case (c), it’s an epistemic one. That is, the longer the period of time over which the harm ensues, the less we’ll often be able to know about its precise causes and etiology. But just because we might know less about such etiologies doesn’t necessarily make the CAD any less injurious or wrongful in itself. And if there are regular patterns of children suffering from CAD—even if the etiology or perpetration of these harms is more indirect and less focal or specifiable— than, say, when Colonel Mustard shoots Miss Peacock directly in the head with his revolver—this doesn’t necessarily imply that the state is less warranted in intervening. If anything, it may imply that the state is warranted in intervening more, for example, through heightened information gathering activities and family counseling programs. (As I explain in chapter 4, where the harm is serious and widespread but has longer more complicated histories, we have to balance the costs of intrusion into high risk families, in order to gain needed relevant information, against the developmental costs to children that will come if the state doesn’t “intrude” and inquire.) But to dismiss arrested development as simply beyond the bounds of proper state action, on the grounds that it’s too diffuse, indirect, or inscrutable, would constitute too crass and negligent an approach.

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d. In a fourth scenario, imagine that CAD comes at the hands of many persons rather than through only one parent: It’s the same evening as in scenario (a) except that here Joe leaves school late on his way home for dinner. Just before he gets home, he runs into a gang of twelve hoodlums who proceed to jeer him and beat him senseless. Joe then suffers equal set backs as in (a). Here again, Joe’s interests are clearly set back wrongfully; so it should be equally clear that it isn’t a necessary condition of CAD that it come through only one person or one person’s act. A more feasible qualification about CAD, when some group of agents is responsible, is to say that the action of any one of the collective agents might not be as wrongful or as causally efficacious as the action of someone who perpetrated CAD by himself. But regardless of this or of how difficult it proves to determine the causal role of any one agent among a responsible collective, the damage to the victim and its wrongfulness remain the same. e. In this final scenario—which unfortunately may be much more common and true to life than the previous ones—imagine that CAD comes through a combination of all the previous conditions: Joe grows up in poverty with no father, a neglectful and drug-abusing mother, unhelpful extended family, and schools that inadequately educate him, all in the midst of neighborhoods and peers that demoralize and corrupt him and of fellow citizens and legislators that do little to help him. After 16 years of such deadening influences and environments, Joe goes on to suffer equal setbacks as in (a). In this case, there is no one agent or event we can point to that is clearly and solely responsible for causing Joe’s crippled development. Rather, a whole host of agents and events are responsible. And while Joe has suffered social, psychological, and intellectual setbacks in scenario (e) here, rather than physical damage, he is still enough of a shell of his “counterfactually unharmed self”—in other words the normal Joe that would have thrived under better decent conditions7—so that, as we said, his eventual set backs are the same. In these ways, CAD is paradigmatically an accruing or emergent harm, that is, a harm that

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN usually results from a long and sordid history of many agents‘ insults and irresponsibilities. As Coleridge and Henry Shue would say, children who suffer CAD are victims who “die so slowly that none call it murder”;8 or as Jonathon Kozol would say, these are children who suffer “death at an early age” (Kozol, 1985). So whether a child suffers CAD at the hands of one parent by one blow—or at the hands of a whole “gang” of distant and deadbeat dads, overwrought and neglectful mothers, dysfunctional family members, uncaring neighbors, apathetic and ill-informed “fellowcitizens,” ill-prepared teachers, burned-out social workers, and self-interested and out-of-touch politicians—makes no difference to the child, whose interests are set back just as much, just as critically, and just as wrongfully, in each case.9 The bottom line, therefore, is that CAD remains a quite wrongful and deadening harm even when it’s caused by inaction rather than action, by incompetence or neglect rather than malice, over long periods of time rather than all at once, and by many agents rather than only a single agent. But the manner in which CAD comes about shouldn’t affect whether or not society addresses it. From whatever etiology or cause (except perhaps purely unlucky or natural causes), society should seek to prevent and redress such arrested development— precisely because of its wrongfulness and virulence and, therefore, its appropriate inclusion under the Harm Principle. The purpose of the next section is to examine a couple closely related conclusions that might be implied by this chain of reasoning, namely, that it is certainly permissible, and perhaps even obligatory, for the state to intervene to prevent and redress such crippled development.

3.2. Crippled Autonomy Development and State Intervention 3.2.1. The Moral Permissibility of State Intervention There are two claims that one might make to describe the relationship between the state and children who are at risk for having their autonomy development thwarted. The first claim, and the weaker of the two, is that it is morally permissible for the state to redress such harm. The second stronger claim is that the state is morally obliged to redress such harm. I will attempt to defend this weaker claim first. In the previous section, I argued that crippled autonomy development is often both a wrongful and vital harm; and I also embraced the

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fairly uncontroversial belief that one central role, if not always an overriding role, of the state is to redress wrongful and serious harm. (By “redress” here, I will be referring both to the rectification of and, where feasible, prevention of such harm.) From these considerations alone, one might conclude that it would be morally permissible for the state to intervene on behalf of children whose autonomy development has been, or very likely will be, thwarted. But this conclusion might be premature without first considering whether there are other countervailing reasons that indicate why it might be impermissible for the state to intervene so. I will now consider a number of these possible reasons. The most common reason and concern of this type is probably the following: Allowing the state to intervene to address the “arrested development of autonomy” might be impermissible because it might unacceptably disrupt family integrity and family autonomy. Such intervention, that is, could easily become stifling and damage the delicacy of family life, so that parents found themselves looking over their shoulders, hesitant to exercise their normal routines of family order, leadership, and discipline in any “improper” way, lest Big Brother or the Nanny State intrude. Such intervention could too easily lend itself to meddlesome and even coercive intrusiveness, disrupting family’s dynamics, intimacies, securities, plans, and privacies, and, thereby, causing more harm than good in the process. And such intervention would clearly be impermissible. But must a policy of intervention geared to protect children’s developing autonomy necessarily be so disruptive and inordinately intrusive? Not necessarily: the state wouldn’t have to intervene in families where such intervention wasn’t warranted, and it wouldn’t have to intervene too intrusively or heavy-handedly in families where some help was warranted. Surely having some policy of ready intervention in place is preferable to having no such policy in place based on the fear that intervention on behalf of children’s development must do more bad than good. And why should concern to prevent the one harm (to family integrity) take such precedence over concern to prevent the other harm (to children’s development)? Likewise, why should concern to guard parental autonomy have absolute precedence over concern to guard children’s development of at least minimal autonomy? (I am not, after all, advocating intervention among parents who have merely lessthan-perfect parenting styles, but only among parents who are egregiously failing in the most basic parental duties.) Doesn’t it make more sense to try to faithfully address both of these concerns, rather than to let concern for the former totally occlude concern for the latter? To reject such intervention in blanket fashion, for fear of its overintrusiveness or

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intrusiveness into decently functioning families, would be akin to rejecting the criminal justice system, for fear that innocents would be punished. The state would not necessarily have to stick its nose into private family affairs in all cases or to an unwarranted degree, then, but only in cases where there were clear signs of risk and only in proportion to the risks and harms that presented themselves. (I lay out guidelines for these boundaries and interventions in ch. 4.) These general concerns may be seen to raise another more specific concern, that get closer to the heart of the matter. Perhaps the fear is that such autonomy-protecting intervention, to have a chance of being effective, would require sweeping information-gathering mechanisms among all families, to determine which isolated children were indeed at risk in only some highly dysfunctional families. If so, perhaps the intervention I advocate would be impermissible because it might involve too great a balance of unwarranted intrusion into the many decent families over against warranted intrusion into the relatively few high-risk families. But this concern overestimates the amount of intrusion into families that would be necessary to effectuate such a policy. Most of the relevant information here, that would serve to mark out those children whose development was really being impeded because of deleterious home conditions, could be garnered through school and reports of clear signs of abuse and neglect. For the majority of children who were progressing normally or exceptionally in their academic and behavioral development, there would be no need for “further investigation.” We could safely assume that such children were becoming sufficiently autonomous, at a sufficient rate, so that no further intervention besides this routine monitoring of their progress was mandated. It would be only those schoolchildren who were having clear academic and behavioral problems, then, that offered grounds for further investigation. In such cases, it is already standard practice among some teachers, guidance counselors, and schools, that low-key “information-gathering” conferences be set up with the parents or guardians of such children, to ascertain what problems might be present at home and what services might assist these struggling children and families. Such readily available conferences are far more potentially helpful than hurtful to the overall state of families in any community. So the interventions I suggest need not be much more intrusive or disruptive than those sometimes implemented in schools now—with the exception that, as I envision them, these interventions would be more standardized and prioritized, so that the development of all high-risk children would be protected and not only that of children who were

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lucky enough to be around especially perceptive and conscientious teachers. This is all the detail about these information-gathering and assistance-rendering steps that I will mention here. (Again, I will discuss these out in much more detail in Ch. 4.) Suffice it to say at this point that development-protecting interventions need not be seen as impermissible, because of their having to be too intrusive or disruptive to families. Along similar lines, some might yet object that such intervention would be impermissible because it would be illegitimately paternalistic. There are a few different forms this criticism might take. In order to be able to clearly address each of these various forms, I will use David Archard’s illuminating and neutral definition of paternalism. (His definition is illuminating because it lays bare just what the relationship is between two parties who share in the paternalistic act, and it’s neutral because it doesn’t automatically assume that all forms of paternalism are either legitimate or illegitimate; rather it lets this be determined according to other relevant background features.) As Archard stipulates: P behaves paternalistically towards Q if and only if: (1) P aims to bring it about that, with respect to some state of affairs which concerns Q’s good, Q’s choice or opportunity to choose is denied or diminished; (2) P’s belief that this behavior promotes Q’s good is the main reason for P’s behaviour; and (3) P discounts Q’s belief that P’s behaviour does not promote Q’s good. (Archard, 1990, 36) With this in mind, the concerned critic might mean, first, that P’s (here the development-protecting state) intervention is illegitimately paternalistic because it denies or diminishes Q’s choices or opportunities, where Q is a parent. But this objection does not hurt, or actually even address, my account because, as I intend it, P aims to bring about a state of affairs that protects R’s (the child’s) good, not Q’s good, so that the paternalism is not properly relevant to, or directed toward, the parent. In other words, I am obviously not advocating intervention here for the parent’s sake; I am advocating intervention only for the child’s good, where the child is at serious risk of harm because of being denied essential developmental needs. When the critic charges that the state is improperly paternalistically concerned with the parent’s good, then, this criticism simply becomes misguided. And even if parents’ choices or freedoms must be restricted as a result of this child-directed intervention (in order to allow for an adequate expansion of children’s

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choices and freedoms), then so be it: for as I’ve already argued, it is legitimate for the state to deny or diminish one person’s choices or opportunities when they are substantially harming another person. If parental choices and “freedoms” have the effect of fatally nipping their children’s opportunities and development in the bud, then these parental choices and freedoms don’t necessarily demand respect in the first place. As Kant, Rawls, and many other theorists of freedom and liberty typically argue, we should expand and respect people’s sphere of freedom as much as possible, up to the point where these start to constrict and violate others’ freedom. Assuming that this critic was not being so misguided in his concerns, then, he would more likely mean that P’s intervention is illegitimately paternalistic because it denies or diminishes Q’s choice or opportunities, where Q is the child. This version of the objection does not hurt my account because children’s choices (say, to eat all the candy in the jar) and opportunities (to be able to stay up all night watching TV) are often routinely and legitimately denied and diminished. They are legitimately denied or diminished when these denials and diminishments prevent children from harming themselves. And such denials and diminishment are not illegitimate, as they would be in most adult cases, because they are properly under their parent’s tutelage and usually have less autonomy to violate in the first place. (I thus assume that this critic locates the illegitimacy of denying or diminishing Q’s choices in its inhibition of, or interference with, Q’s autonomy.) Of course, as adolescents get older, they normally come closer to becoming autonomous; and as this happens, my account allows for gradually diminishing intervention—unless they are clearly not yet autonomous and they or their family are still doing things that significantly harm them. I thoroughly allow for the fact, then, as Feinberg says, that “blameable ‘paternalism’ must consist in treating the child at a given stage as if he were at some earlier, less developed, stage” (1980, 141). In other words, I thoroughly allow that, the more autonomous or “grown-up” anyone is, the less will any kind of paternalistic intervention be justified. Finally and more broadly, the critic might mean that P’s intervention is illegitimately paternalistic because it denies or diminishes Q’s choice or opportunities, where Q is the overall family unit. This criticism presupposes the norm of family autonomy, and recapitulates our initial concern that the state may not legitimately interfere with this. Concerning this norm of family autonomy, James Fishkin notes that “Consensual relations within a given family governing the development of its children should not be coercively interfered with except to ensure for the children the essential prerequisites for adult participation in society” (37, italics mine).

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So the third possible version of this objection does not hurt my account, either, because I advocate intervention only within this “except clause,” that is, only when the child is being deprived of essential prerequisites (qua basic developmental needs) for adult participation in society. The bottom line here is that none of these concerns above undue or excessive paternalism seem to hurt my account. Such development-protecting intervention would not be impermissible, then, at least in the sense of being illegitimately paternalistic. And in turn, the reason why it would not be illegitimately paternalistic is because it would have the ultimate effect of supporting and enhancing, rather than denying or diminishing, the choices, opportunities, and autonomy of the relevant group targeted. In this way, the intervention I advocate represents a legitimate, empowering, and sometimes needed type of paternalism, rather than an illegitimate, stifling, or unnecessary one. Fourth, some might object that the intervention I advocate would be impermissible because, in throwing its weight behind the norm of autonomy and supporting all children’s development of this, the state would be violating its proper role of neutrality. According to this way of thinking, autonomy is not some neutral or universal norm demanding respect from all quarters, and it’s not compatible with all ways of life or essential to all conceptions of the good life. Rather, autonomy is a decidedly liberal norm that even in some ways conflicts with other worldviews. As such, the state, which should be neutral, would overextend its proper bounds by supporting this ideological norm through coercive intervention. These concerns mirror those expressed earlier (1.4). We can imagine communitarians objecting here again, on the grounds that state support of autonomy would wrongly lead children to develop individualistic and independent traits that undermined traits connected to solidarity, communal feeling (esprit d’corps), and interdependence. We can also imagine religious parents objecting here, insisting that it is right to and they reserve the right to raise their children according to the twin goals of faith (rather than “autonomous reason”) and dependence on God (rather than “autonomous independence”). In response, we should recall that autonomy is a much less particularistic norm than these criticisms allow for. It is one thing to insist that parents should be able to raise their children as they see fit, according to other values besides autonomy and where autonomy is not esteemed above all else. This insistence is perfectly acceptable; and the state should always act only so as to respect these parental prerogatives. But it is quite another thing to insist that parents may deny their children’s budding autonomy and may squelch it and allow it no room to grow. This would essentially amount to rendering the child incapable of her own

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free thought or valuations, and coercing her into robotically and permanently accepting everything that the parents believe and value. And this latter insistence goes too far and is unacceptable: the state need not stand idly by while this kind of child-raising—or really child-razing— occurs, that is essentially coercive and extends into the child’s adulthood. I should point out here that I do not condone state intervention in cases where the child’s autonomy was merely curtailed a little and not allowed to grow to maximal levels by his or her parents, to make room for other qualities such as communal solidarity, submissiveness, or deference to tradition and authority. I am not advocating, remember, state support for the maximization of children’s development of autonomy (* AL4). Rather, I am advocating public intervention only in cases when it is necessary to prevent children from not attaining even minimal levels of autonomy () AL2). And I freely admit that such cases almost always involve parents who are straightforwardly abusive and neglectful of their children, rather than parents who merely want to raise their children in nonliberal communities or in non-autonomymaximizing traditions or in “the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” So again, these last objections seem to misinterpret or exaggerate what I advocate. Furthermore, the valid concern that individualism and independence may be inordinately fostered should not blind us to the fact that dependence—in the sense that a person can’t take care of or think for himself and needlessly becomes a burden to others into adulthood—is an ill best avoided. Likewise, this valid concern should not obscure the fact that the ability to govern one’s life with at least some modicum of effectiveness is simply not incompatible with the ability to enjoy rich communal lives or religious traditions. Although I hope this adequately addresses these communitarian concerns, I need to say more about these specifically religious concerns. To address these complex questions, we might consider the Wisconsin v. Yoder court decision. In this decision, the court ruled on behalf of Amish parents who requested not to have to submit their children to post–eighth-grade public academic standards, on the grounds that these standards effectively served to inculcate their children with unwanted secular values. This ruling can serve to reveal the proper boundary between legitimate and illegitimate state intervention, in the following way: If these Amish parents acted so as to prevent any more development of their children’s cognitive faculties and educational enrichment, the judges ruled, it would have been easier to say that the state was clearly justified in intervening. For in that case, the children would have been prevented from being able to adequately function or think on their own, essentially becoming only like programmed robots

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of their parents. (In other words, we might say that if the Amish parents had been any more disruptive of their children’s development than they actually were, then this would have warranted intervention on the grounds that it was necessary to protect the child’s development of at least minimal autonomy.) Conversely, if the parents acted so as to support any more development of their children’s cognitive faculties and educational enrichment, it would have been easy to see that the state was clearly not justified in intervening. (Why intervene when nothing was going wrong and no one’s development was really threatened?) The judges in Yoder arguably made a wise ruling and achieved the proper balance in regard to the boundary of state authority, then: For, on the one hand, they rightly assumed that protection of some minimally adequate level of child development was in the state’s interest and within the state’s proper purview; and, on the other hand, they rightly discerned that the Yoder’s care here did not place their children at risk of falling below this level. The judges’ ultimate conclusion, therefore, was that even though the Yoder’s could have supported their children’s development more, the support that they did provide was not so inadequate as to justify state intrusion into their families. As I generally concur with the judges’ ruling here, this reinforces the balanced conclusion that the state is justified in supporting children’s development of at least minimal autonomy, but that the state is not necessarily justified in supporting children’s development of higher, more robust levels of autonomy.10 (If I were defending this latter claim, my position might be vulnerable to the communitarian and religious objections voiced above.) A further conclusion to be drawn here is that the state may take a more limited hands-off approach in regard to intervening in homes where parents have strong and well-intended, albeit non-autonomy-maximizing convictions and parenting styles—even while it takes a more involved hands-on approach in regard to intervening in homes where parents are simply very neglectful or abusive of their children, threatening their attainment of even minimal autonomy. Fifth, and on a more practical note, the concern might arise that this intervention would be impermissible for fiscal reasons, because of the prohibitive costs it would entail. If the state became a “nanny state” and entered the business of ensuring that children became autonomous, wouldn’t this require inordinate bureaucratic expansion and exorbitant budgetary allocations? It’s not likely; such policies would just as or more likely be cost efficient. To understand why, one merely has to consider how many public resources—in the form of costs for the criminal justice system, incarceral institutions, drug treatment, rehabilitation programs, and so on—currently go toward the guardianship and imprisonment of

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adults who never become autonomous. While all these costs would not be erased if such intervention was enacted, there’s no question that a large portion of them of them would be reduced—since children who would otherwise be practically abandoned and go on to become the nonautonomous dependents, derelicts, addicts, and criminals of the next generation, instead would be equipped with the tools to become selfrespecting, self-supporting citizens. In other words, it would be more cost effective (not to mention more humane) to allocate resources in the first decade or so of children’s lives, to enable them to support themselves, rather than to neglect them on the cheap early on and then be forced to allocate a relatively greater amount later on, to support them or keep them out of trouble for the remaining decades of their lives. As the old proverbs say: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” And “It’s easier to build the boy than to fix the man.” For these reasons, resources spent early on to help children become at least minimally autonomous adults would likely be more rather than less cost effective. Along similar lines, though, the concern might arise that this intervention would be impermissible inasmuch as it would require the growth and support of a huge and ballooning bureaucratic apparatus. But it seems that, for this objection to really have bite, it isn’t the size or extent of the bureaucracy alone that would necessarily be the problem, but rather the combination of exorbitant costs and potential for waste and abuse that these would entail. As for these costs, these merit my aforementioned response (in the previous paragraph). As for the potential for waste or inefficiency, this is admittedly a danger of any largescale public program. Such programs, aimed at protecting or supporting person’s welfare, seldom have the same built-in incentives and organizational mechanisms for efficiency and productivity that private enterprises have. Even so, it seems plausible that the enormous waste in human capital that would otherwise continue—in the form of so many children who would not develop adequately and then who would not become productive members of society—would far exceed the bureaucratic waste and inefficiency that would otherwise continue through the implementation of these programs. This doesn’t seem like a sufficient reason, therefore, not to try to implement such programs, especially assuming that, in due time and after preliminary trial runs, we learned how to implement increasingly effective programs. For example, although some conservatives have simply wanted to abandon various welfare programs out of concern that they hopelessly engender waste, progress in recent decades has shown how they could be made more helpful and streamlined, instead (Danziger, Sandefur, & Weinberg). And as for the potential for abuse, the logic behind this concern also

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seems inadequate as a reason not to implement these programs. If this logic was sound, then by the same reasoning we should do away with the military, the CIA, and all other agencies of government who prove prone to abuse and waste! (For example, what happened to all those billions of dollars that were supposedly lost, that were allocated to Halliburton and the military to build up and secure infrastructure in Iraq?) Many such public arms and agencies and branches of the military, since their inception, have proven time and again to be prone to waste, corruption, and abuse of power, and even to riding slipshod over the rights and interests of various parties. (Remember the Mai Lai Massacre, or the Iran-Contra scandal, or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle scandal, or the Abu Ghraib scandal, and so forth.) Why haven’t we simply done away with these public bodies and programs? Apparently because we assume that the public functions they serve are just too important. But is the protection of our children any less important or any less of a moral or public priority than the protection of our adult citizens or our national borders or our “national security”? No; and furthermore, there’s no reason to think that agencies and programs geared toward the protection of children would be more conducive to abuse or less amenable to safeguards against abuse than these other agencies and programs of government. So if there are good or necessary reasons for the existence of various public programs and bodies, fear of abuse does not automatically constitute a reason for their abolition. In each case, we can do no better than trying to meet whatever public needs arise, while simultaneously trying to watchdog and limit whatever potentials for abuse and waste arise. We might consider one final and more principled objection, concerning the supposed impermissibility of public programs aimed at protecting children’s development: One might object that protecting children’s development in these ways would be impermissible because it would amount to granting them a set of positive rights, which would exceed the state’s proper concern only with negative rights. According to this line of reasoning, if the state got integrally involved in, and assumed various responsibilities for, the raising of children and the meeting of their needs, it would essentially be assuming for itself a set of positive duties and provisions; and this activity, in turn, would take it outside of its proper and permissible sphere of activity, namely, the protection of citizen’s negative rights (i.e., protection against blatant violations and encroachments of citizen’s life, limb, liberty, and property). This is not the place to mount a thoroughgoing defense of the state as being properly concerned with positive rights (i.e., subsistence, social and economic rights) and negative rights versus only negative rights

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(i.e., only legal, political, and civil rights). (Others, like Henry Shue, have already provided such a defense, largely by showing that these supposedly fundamentally distinct kinds of rights are, after all, really not that distinct, and by showing that, in both cases, the state must: avoid depriving, protect from deprivation, and aid the already deprived, and that both entail basic rights to have one’s essential needs met.11) To address this last objection, it should suffice to point out the way it falls short on two counts in particular. First, it obscures the fact that the relevant intervention here is significantly negative, insofar as it would protect young people against serious infringements of their life, limb, liberty, and/or vital interests. (As I showed earlier, the crippling of one’s autonomy can be even more injurious and disabling than, say, the breaking of one’s bone or the stealing of one’s property.) Such intervention would not simply provide the recipients with some positive goods, like food and shelter, but would protect them against critical negative deprivations, against having the ability to live their own lives and support themselves be critically undermined. Again, we might ask which is worse here: robbing someone of a thousand dollars, or robbing them of their very livelihood, their ability to make a decent living? And if the state may justifiably concern itself with redress of the former violation (as we all agree it may), may it not with equal justification concern itself with redress of the latter? Second, this objection misuses some of the theoretical force against social rights in an inappropriate way, in a way that does not properly apply to children. Let me explain. Much of the force of arguments against positive rights trades on their weakening of adult citizens’ abilities and incentives to fend for themselves. When the state provides people with various social goods (public housing, unemployment payments, etc.), this provision may weaken the recipients’ ability and motivation to provide these goods for themselves, creating “welfare dependency” and thereby worsening rather than improving various social lacks. According to some social conservatives, this worry provides a strong reason (beyond that of mere resource scarcity) why the state should occupy itself with negative protections only, rather than with positive provisions as well. But—and here is the crucial point to notice—this worry does not apply to children as it does to adults. For contrary to what some “positive rights” or welfare provision programs for adults might cause, the child programs I advocate would undoubtedly strengthen rather than weaken the recipients’ abilities, ambitions, and motivations. They would make people more rather than less independent, and they would make them less rather than more burdened! As such, there seem to be no good reasons why the state may not properly concern itself with protecting children’s development—whether this is viewed as a “positive right” or “negative development right.”

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For all of these reasons, the claim that “it would be impermissible for the state to intervene in order to protect children’s development” does not ultimately hold up. This only confirms suspicions that we might have had intuitively from the start, namely, that any claim to this effect—that “protecting children in these ways would be impermissible”—is morally misguided and socially self-defeating. All these reasons and intuitions, in turn, imply that it would be permissible for the state to intervene so on children’s behalf. There are other arguments, however, which lead to an even stronger conclusion, namely, the conclusion that it is morally obligatory for the state to intervene so. I now turn to these arguments, concerned as they are with proper duties of the state and society towards children. (Although technical distinctions between the two concepts might be made in other philosophical contexts, I will take duties and obligations as being fairly equivalent in what follows.)

3.2.2. The Moral Obligation for State Intervention Regarding children whose normal development (including their development of autonomy) is being seriously thwarted or threatened, is the state morally obliged to intervene, to redress this arrested development? To answer this question, I will start by assuming that biological parents who act (through procreation) to bring a child into the world have, through those acts, acquired duties to care for, and meet the needs of, that child. (For a defense of this assumption, see O’Neill, 1988; also, exceptions might include rape, or cases in which previous arrangements, as in the case of surrogacy or IVF, had been carefully made so that others would assume these duties.) Neither intention nor explicitly articulated plans to conceive, however, are necessary for acquisition of these duties. If a couple conceives by accident, or even against their intentions, they’re still responsible to execute these duties, at least until they successfully pass on their duties, as by giving the child up for adoption. Why is this so? What are the bases for these duties? The three-pronged answer seems to involve a combination of: the causal complicity of the biological parents in the child’s existence, the gravity of the child’s needs (deep needs constituting substantial, though not always overriding, duties on the part of others who are best situated to meet these needs), and the basic moral injunction to take responsibility for one’s actions, when these actions significantly affect others. Granting that biological parents do incur child-rearing duties, therefore, makes more sense than assuming that they don’t have duties toward the newborn, that no duties toward the child exist, or (again, barring special

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cases like adoption, surrogacy, etc.) that others besides the parents have such duties. This much seems straightforward. But what about the situation of parents who are or would very likely be derelict—through incompetence, abandonment, neglect, or abuse— in their duties toward their children? Who should assume the duties and what should be done then? It’s implausible to assume that no others acquire these duties in the case of such dereliction; for if no secondary parties attain such duties, then there would be nothing wrong, nothing immoral, with our (whoever “our” may be) simply abandoning needy babies and children to starvation, serious danger, or even death, whenever their parents fail them. But this is unacceptable, at least for any society that wishes to call itself a decent, just, or civil one. For any society that held this morally callous view and subsequently allowed a significant number of “its” children to be abandoned, we can be sure that this would not only be a coldhearted and inordinately self-absorbed society, but one that, somewhere along the line, harbored morally irresponsible citizens. In lieu of these irresponsible and immoral alternatives, some appropriate party or parties should be determined and held responsible. As to this question of who these should be, or what secondary parties should assume responsibility when the primary caregivers prove derelict, however, there can be no a priori answer. Different societies, within different cultural and environmental contexts, will always arrive at different solutions. Spartan city-states, Iroquois nations, Pygmy tribes, Israeli kibbutzim, and so on, have each developed their own workable conventions for redistributing child-rearing duties and caring for neglected children (cf. Douglas). Apart from the moral requirement that the basic developmental needs of children somehow be met, it seems that only local ethical norms (Sittlichkeit) and not universal moral norms (Moralitäat) can determine how and by whom these needs can be met and these secondary duties can be fairly allotted. In determining who has duties toward children of derelict parents in our society (that of industrialized democracies), then, it seems that the most that can be hoped for, at least as a provisional starting point, is to logically reconstruct our ethical intuitions and convictions about this question, and then decide how our institutions might fairly and effectively apply these. This reconstruction may be captured, I think, by what I call the “Concentric Spheres of Duty” view. According to this view, biological parents carry the primary set of care-giving duties toward all children born to them. But if these parents prove derelict in these duties or incompetent to perform them, then next immediate family, and if not then extended family and friends, and if not then near and local com-

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munities, and finally, if all others have failed, the state should assume responsibility (through various social work and child protective service agencies). Each of these latter parties should take up duties toward the child when but only when the prior parties have failed to adequately care for the child. So taking this baton of duties entails, as a crucial first step, trying to get the prior party to responsibly care for the child (through various means of accountability, assistance, sanctions, alimony and payroll deductions, etc.). John Stuart Mill gave general expression to this view in a more compact form (deleting the middle spheres of duty), when he said that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and . . . if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent. (1975, 132) A couple qualifications to this Concentric Spheres Model need mentioning (and these, perhaps, explain Mill’s deletion). The first is that, despite the good efforts and protestations of various communitarians and traditional ethnic and religious groups, the middle tier of community (Gemeinschaft) has increasingly been missing in action the last century. For better or worse, it has become a historical fact that, when family members are in need, they often have nowhere to go except directly to the state (Gesellschaft), which has increasingly taken up many of the welfare and assistance functions previously assumed by extended family, community bodies, and private charity and religious organizations. For instance, the “babies taken in at the doorstep” that in times past were commonly raised and cared for by private orphanages and clergy must now, on a mandatory basis, be reported to, and cared for through public foster care and adoptive agencies. Second, it is the state rather than immediate families and communities that has come to bear the primary responsibility for providing educational instruction and training for young minds in our society. But even here, the reasons behind much recent growth in home-schooling suggest that a model of many concentric and graduated spheres of responsibility offers many advantages over the barer model of only two spheres (comprised by only the parents and the state) mentioned by Mill. The bottom line to see, though (regardless of how many intermediary spheres there might be), is that it is often the state which needs to take ultimate responsibility

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for children’s developmental needs being met—if not directly meeting these needs itself, at least ensuring that others fulfill their duties to meet these children’s needs. From these considerations alone, one might conclude that the state has secondary duties to insure that parents (and then feasible others, if necessary) fulfill primary care-giving duties toward children or, in other words, that the state is morally obliged to protect children’s development so. But rather than accepting such conclusions straightaway, it will help to consider the following auxiliary set of arguments. From somewhat different perspectives, these should also serve to reveal the moral rationale behind the state’s duty to intervene on behalf of children. Since at least the time of Plato, political theorists have debated what the proper functions and duties of the state are. As mentioned earlier, some social theorists of a more minimalist, conservative, or “negative” bent have argued that the state (qua “night watchman state”) may properly be concerned only with, or only possesses duties which concern, the maintenance of order and the protection of the most basic civil liberties. Other theorists of a more expansive, liberal, or “positive” bent, have argued that the state (qua “welfare state”) may also properly be concerned with, and possesses duties that concern, the protection and provision of certain forms of well-being. In the context of this contentious, long-standing and probably interminable debate, however, it is doubtful whether there is any “truth of the matter” as to what the proper and absolute set of functions and duties of the state really are. It is not as if the state is some Platonic or static external entity, whose properties we may simply read off objectively as we read off the properties of a piece of metal we find and test. Rather, the state is largely a socially constructed entity, whose properties (including socalled proper functions and duties) we determine on an ongoing basis, according to the exigencies and values recognized by each successive generation and culture. Largely for these reasons, my argument here will not take a categorical form—trying to persuade the reader that the state inherently or eternally possesses this or that duty toward children. Rather, my argument will take a hypothetical form, in the following sense: Consider this fairly uncontroversial and conventional duty of the state, namely, its duty to enforce contracts. I will establish that, as there are sufficient important similarities between the duty of a contractor (e.g., a seller toward a buyer) to fulfill the conditions of his contract and the duty of a parent to fulfill the conditions of caregiving toward his or her child—the following conditional claim holds: If the state has a duty to

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enforce contracts, then it also has a duty (and should be recognized as having a duty) to enforce certain care-giving standards toward children. This argument implies, by modus tollens, that “the consequent cannot be rejected without thereby also rejecting the affirmative.” Or more plainly, on the pain of logical inconsistency we won’t be able to deny that the state has duties to enforce standards of care-giving without also denying that the state has duties to enforce the conditions of contracts! This is a reasonable position to hold since, as we’ve seen, the interests at stake in the parent-child relation are just as important, and often more important, as the interests at stake in contractual relations. At this point, we might note a couple similarities between this view and the Concentric Spheres View. With this contract-comparison view, a couple different levels of duties are also operative. At the basic level, there are what we might call primary, or immediate duties—such as promisers have toward those who have been promised something, parents have toward children, and contractors (like sellers, who have presented their product in a certain light) have toward “contractees” (like buyers). Then, at a higher level, there are what we might call secondary, or enforcement duties, which the state has. In the case of these secondary duties, the state here also assumes the task of acting as a background enforcer, to ensure that parties who have assumed or undertaken certain primary duties, through contracting themselves out or committing certain duty-generating acts or promises, fulfill the conditions of these contracts and duties. Of course, this does not imply that the state is dutibound to itself care for abandoned or threatened children, any more than it implies that the state should itself pay for all the compensatory damage costs incurred by broken contracts. In both cases, the state duty will be only either to enforce conditions of contracts or to arrange proper compensation for victims of broken contracts. In this way, my argument may be taken as an extension of the logic behind paternity suits, whereby the state is commonly seen as having a (secondary) duty to coerce otherwise deadbeat dads into responsibly fulfilling their (primary) duties to care for, or at least support care for, children they’ve sired. In such cases, the state may take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that the children (as “indirect contractees owed certain services”) are given adequate care, if not directly by the dads then at least by mothers or surrogate caregivers who can raise the child with his support. Having said this, the rationale behind contractual relations, and also the state’s role in enforcing the terms of these contracts, must be made explicit. (I will assume that enough has already been said about the rationale, first, behind parent-child roles involving parental duties

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to provide much-needed care for their children, and second, behind the state’s role in enforcing the terms of this care, to protect children from the harm of having their developmental interests wrongfully and woefully set back; cf. 3.1.) As with the duties that parents have toward children, it should be fairly obvious why contractors have duties to fulfill the conditions of their contracts with each other. Not doing so would have disastrous effects, not only immediately for the contractors themselves but also more broadly for society. Consider: lying about the quality of their products; changing the terms of their contracts midstream; giving false credit reports; making promises for services that they don’t deliver; stopping payment under a schedule they’ve agreed to; and so forth. All of these things would undermine our abilities not only to make business plans, promises, and transactions, but also to conduct the normal business of social life. And as to the rationale behind the state’s role in enforcing the terms of these contracts, we might ask, along with Marvin Chirelstein (Professor of Contract Law at Columbia), “Why should the law—as of course it does—go to the trouble of enforcing contract obligations between private parties? Why should our costly legal apparatus be used to compel people to keep their promises”? (Chirelstein, 2). The answer that Chirelstein provides, in brief, focuses on the need to get parties who’ve agreed to terms that they thought were in their best interests at an earlier time, to live up to these terms at a later time, if or when they realize that (keeping) these terms would not be in their best interests. Since many contracts—such as ones based either on agreements to pay out fees later or on later provision of services after payment has already been made—thus extend over longer periods of time, this creates a need for some kind of long-term background assurance, assuring parties that the others will freely perform their end of the bargain, or else be made to perform it (or be made to pay compensatory damage costs) through the arbitrating force of some impartial outside party. In its role as background enforcer, then, the state serves as this outside party that allows contracts to be reliably struck in the first place. One should start to get an idea here of the parallels that exist, or should exist, with the “parent-child contract.” Admittedly, there are some differences between the details of this contractual relation and that of the parent-child relation: Parents usually don’t commit, explicitly or otherwise, to care for (or “render services to”) the children born to them, especially during the initial “consummating act”; and when this procreative act is performed, later and long-standing performance of care-giving services is often the last thing intended. Likewise, babies and children never sign “care-giving contracts” in expectation of these services; and they usually don’t or

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can’t sue for breaches, and so on. Also, whereas parties in breach of their contracts may be fined or punished to achieve compensation, fining or punishing parents who are derelict in their care-giving duties can seldom achieve real compensation for the adversely affected children. And finally, the nature of contracts (conceived as they usually are in more precise monetary and legal terms) is more conducive to public intervention, it seems, than the nature of family relations (conceived as they usually are in vague emotional and psychological terms). These are indeed important practical differences between contractual and parent-child relations. But, it must be asked, are these morally relevant differences, implying specifically that, whereas the state should enforce the terms of the contract relation it should not or need not enforce the terms of the parent-child relation? No; just because parents don’t “sign agreements on the dotted line” with their children doesn’t imply that they shouldn’t be held responsible to perform duties they’ve generated through their procreative acts. If people aren’t allowed to carelessly sign business agreements with impunity, but instead are held legally responsible for this commitment-generating act, should people who bring a child into the world but do not adequately support his or her development be allowed to do so carelessly and with impunity, without stricter public and legal accountability? Is this a rational or consistent policy to hold—in effect, to recognize the state as having a duty to enforce the terms of business contracts but to deny the state as having any duty to enforce the conditions of child development? No; for with both the contracting and parent-child relation, it remains true that: (a) parties commit acts that generate certain duties (whether this is done explicitly or not); (b) the other parties acquire needs or expectations as a result of these acts; (c) breach of the acquired duties can easily cause serious losses and damages to the other parties (although these losses and damages will often be more harmful in the parent-child relation); and (d) these breaches, if regularly condoned and not redressed, would cause extensive social problems (e.g., inabilities to effectively make transactions and exchanges, and child abandonment, truancy, delinquency, etc.). For these reasons, it seems reasonable to conclude that, if the state is recognized as properly having a duty to enforce the fiduciary conditions of contracts, then it should likewise be recognized as having a duty to enforce the equally (or more) important developmental conditions of child rearing. In conclusion of this section, consider what the denial of the above consequent entails. That is, assume momentarily that the state is not obliged to protect the development of at-risk children. In this case, its

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citizens (or at least its public officials and those who are supposed to represent its citizens) would recognize no obligation toward these children, to provide them with autonomy-respecting benefits that they themselves have undoubtedly enjoyed. In doing so, they would allow these endangered children to be denied the benefits of essential ingredients to a decent life and social inclusion that they themselves have come to enjoy. And in thus recognizing no obligation to share in a decent distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life (a property that characterizes just societies) with these at-risk children, this society is essentially treating them as fringe members or, really, nonmembers and noncitizens. In this way, this society essentially shows itself to bear a state-of-nature relation toward these children. For as John Simmons notes, “The moral condition that the state of nature describes is simply the moral condition of non-citizens—the condition of not being a member of the same legitimate society as another” (1993, 34). And surely “being a member of the same legitimate civil society as another” means not merely living within the same borders as others but also, as suggested, sharing the benefits and burdens of this society with those who are recognized as fellow members. But if this were so—if this society refused to acknowledge any obligation toward these at-risk children, by sharing no vital protections and benefits with them and, thereby, assuming a state-of-nature relation toward them—then why should these children (whether or not they prove lucky enough to grow up and attain some measure of autonomy on their own, despite their abandonment) later be seen to have any obligations to this society, or to its laws? In other words, why should abandoned cast-outs feel themselves beholden to any society that abandoned them? Why should children who are essentially treated—or actually mistreated—as pariahs feel beholden to obey the laws of any state if those laws never protected them? As Thomas Hobbes, would say, if one party (in this case, the “civilized” members of society) essentially bear an uncommitted “devil-may-care,” state-ofnature relationship to an other party (in this case children who are practically abandoned), then doesn’t this allow that other party the right to assert its “natural and inalienable right of self-preservation,” to claw and scratch its way toward survival in this “state” any way that it could. If Oliver Twist or Jean Valjean are cast out on the street to starve, how much can we really fault them for stealing a loaf of bread to survive (or to feed their family)? These unsavory questions and complications are best avoided, I think, by accepting my initial hypothetical argument about the state’s obligations toward these at-risk children. In recognizing these obligations, we will enable all our children to become upstanding citizens of our civil society, and thereby prove our society to

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be truly civil. And this will be far better than refusing to recognize and protect them, and thereby engendering what Hobbes called “wild beasts of prey” in our (uncivil) midst.

3.3. Possible Types of State Intervention In this section, I will explain the four possible types of intervention that states might use to prevent the arrested development of autonomy. Although much of what I mention here simply explains the current state of social work, it will be important to briefly provide this information in order to situate my own account within a broader institutional context, and to lay the groundwork for following chapters. In order to prevent arrested development and so to prevent children from ending up as nonautonomous adults, states might: (a) provide training and counseling to parents who, unless helped, will very likely fail in their parental duties (i.e., provide such inadequate care that their children will end up as non-autonomous adults); (b) provide development-supporting treatments and counseling to the children who live with such failing parents; (c) remove children from homes in which the parents or “caregivers” are failing, and then place them in foster-care or adoptive homes; or (d) prevent children from being born into such deprived homes, through such means as parental counseling and licensing, and incentive- or compulsory contraception. As may be evident, these types of intervention are listed in order of increasing intrusiveness. Although various practical questions might arise that are more germane to the context of social work and psychology (e.g., “What types of programs and intervention have proven most effective?”), I will not discuss these at any great length here. What I will do is briefly point out several general principles and guidelines, regarding intervention types (a) through (c) especially, that have emerged by consensus in recent decades (cf. Wald 1037–1040; Lane 240; Garbarino ch. 8; Trickett chs. 17–19). These principles and guidelines may be summarized as follows: (i) Parental autonomy should always be honored unless there are strong reasons to suspect abuse or negligence and to fear for the child’s safety; (ii) helping parents to fulfill their duties is generally preferable to taking over these duties; (iii) the seriousness of intervention should be commensurate with the seriousness of harm or risk of harm to the child; and finally, (iv) considering: that the history of state intervention into family life is largely a history of failure, that we have “limited knowledge of the nature, causes, [and cures] of psychological harm” (Wald, 1016), and that we do know what long-term psychological trauma

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the separation of parent and child can cause, coercive separation should be performed as a last resort, and only if we have good reason to believe the child will fare better afterward. (Also, to clarify, notice that whereas (a) through (d) above comprised a list of types of intervention, (i) through (iv) here comprises a list of guidelines for intervention.) Although these four principles seem generally sound, I should point out some qualifications to them, which point in the direction of relatively heightened intervention. Regarding (iii) and (iv), for instance, a history of frequent failed intervention does not necessarily imply that the state should intervene less, but rather that it should intervene more effectively. As psychology and medicine inevitably continue to progress, our knowledge of how to intervene effectively should progress as well. And assuming such progress, too little intervention might easily become more of a problem than too much intervention in the years ahead. And regarding (iii) in particular, we do need to develop more effective monitoring and information gathering systems, that accurately convey what risks of harm are present. But such increased effectiveness and accuracy need not entail excessive or undue intrusiveness. Sociologists and developmental health experts are continuing to learn much more about the signs and predictors of early harm, especially through fastgrowing data from longitudinal studies, so that real and rapid progress in our ability to coordinate more accurate assessments and effective interventions about these risks is taking place. (For instance, the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the 1990 Victims of Child Abuse Act have helped to bring significantly greater funding, resources, and information to bear, for the effective investigation, treatment, prevention, and prosecution of these problems.) And there are basic informational sources about parents (like their tax, medical, and criminal records) and children (that can be gleaned from their school records, pertaining to consistently failing performance and behavioral disorders) that child agencies can already avail themselves of, that require little disruption of family’s lives and that allow for more accurate risk assessments. These heightened information-gathering trends and sources seemed justified (against the possibility of heightened abuses or disruptiveness coming through these) because, as it stands, the fear of excessive intrusiveness has often prevented needed intervention until it’s too late, when the harm has already been done and taken an irremediable toll. Through these provisos, I want to suggest that much of our caution against intervention is based on practical, rather than principled, reservations, that is, based upon our limited knowledge of how effective intervention can be accomplished rather than on any intrinsic wrong-

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ness of the intervention. (For example, considering children’s needs for stable relationships and emotional support and intimacy, we still need to make more headway in discovering how, when parents do not meet these needs, surrogate provisions can effectively suffice.) In other words, since we have a good enough idea of what morality requires or what we should do (namely, save children from various harms so they can enjoy healthy development), the real challenges seem to be mostly practical, in the sense that we sometimes don’t know how to accomplish this. And this implies that as we do gain more knowledge about this, intervention should become increasingly effective and in turn increasingly justified. I generally embrace these more traditional types of intervention (a–d) and these conventional guidelines for intervention (i–iv), then, but with an inclination toward slightly heightened intervention (for the above reasons and for others which will become evident, and with these expectations of continued social scientific progress in mind).12 To really understand the details and distinctive elements of my approach, though, we need to examine my models both of parental licensing (ch. 4) and of educational justice (ch. 5).

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Intervention in the Family A Parental Licensing Model

The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. —John Stuart Mill There are some conditions under which it would have been better for a person not to be born at all. Under such deprivating conditions, one is, in effect, harming a person by bringing him into existence to lead such a life. [So] the harm principle can be extended to include regulation by the state of parental actions when sufficient harm to the child is in question. —James S. Fishkin

This chapter provides the nuts and bolts of my proposals for state intervention in the family for the purpose of protecting children from arrested development and other serious harms. I lay some important groundwork in section 4.1, by explaining why a proactive, forwardlooking approach to these harms is highly preferable to a merely reactive approach, that (re-)acts only after significant damage has already 117

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been done. In 4.2, I provide a Parental Licensing Model; and in 4.3, I carefully evaluate that most proactive and controversial form of family intervention, compulsory contraception (CC).

4.1. The Proactive Management of Risks Recall these two horrific and widely publicized events: in November 1995, Susan Smith buckled her two sons into their car seats and proceeded to drive her car into a lake, killing them both. And in June 2001, Andrea Yates methodically killed her five children, taking them one by one into her bathtub and drowning them. Unfortunately, these kinds of events are not altogether anomalous. In the state of Texas alone, as of 2002, there were 70 women serving time for killing their children. Of course, this doesn’t include men who are similarly guilty and all the parents who harm their children in less detected and less lethal ways. On a national level, more than three million victims of alleged abuse were reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) in the whole United States. And how many more thousands and millions of children, should we guess, were simply not reported in that year and more recent years? One aspect of the ghastly Smith and Yates events that was particularly troubling was that, despite clear early warning signs (including histories of mental disorder and suicide attempts), sufficient steps were not taken to act on these signs and prevent these crimes from happening. A common question that often surfaces after episodes like this is thus Why isn’t more done to prevent these things from happening? There are a couple salient answers to this question. The first answer is that communities (both legal and public) where these occur are not sufficiently accustomed to the idea of intervention into the “private” family sphere (such as would have been necessary to limit the chances of these Smith and Yates incidents from happening) and, correspondingly, that sufficient measures were not in place to coordinate information about Ms. Smith’s and Yates’s lack of parental fitness with intervention on behalf of their children. But in lieu of the harm to children that will otherwise continue, as I will argue, communities should accustom themselves more to such ideas and measures.1 The other perhaps more revealing answer is that social workers and agencies, whose job is in part to monitor such dangerous parents and to protect children from any dangers posed by them, are often criminally understaffed and underfunded. As is so common in most states, the staff simply don’t have time to notice the danger signals posed to

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children like the Smiths and Yates; or if they do notice the mental instability, suicide attempts, earlier episodes of neglect, and so on, they are commonly so overburdened with excessive case loads that they don’t have time to take adequate remedial and prophylactic measures, to prevent children’s deaths and injuries. This implies that the fault lay not merely with the Smith- and Yates-type mothers, not merely with the individual social workers assigned to the cases, and not merely with the social agencies responsible for these kind of cases, but also with the politicians and even society-at-large who have previously—and irresponsibly and immorally—assigned such low priority to children in need. As argued earlier, society-at-large, or at least the politicians who represent them and decide their budgetary priorities, might conceivably be charged with child neglect (at least in a perfectly just and informed world). While the Smith and Yates instances involved cases of lethal child neglect, the majority of other instances involve cases of “merely” lifethreatening neglect. In this sense, all too many cases serve as instances of the poet Coleridge’s infamous dictum that “they die so slowly that none call it murder.” The following excerpt, taken from an Op-ed piece in the New York Times about a not-uncommon case of neglect in New Jersey, serves to “bring these points home” and to show that they are not mere exaggerations: The country was horrified last fall when New Jersey officials found four emaciated children—including a 10-year-old weighing on 28 pounds—who had been systematically starved by their adoptive parents over a period of years, even though the family was supposed to be under the supervision of caseworkers from the state’s child welfare agency. The children have gained weight and been nursed back to health since being removed from the home. But thousands of other children will remain at risk until the state restructures its Division of Youth and Family Services along the lines of a plan that was recently approved by a panel of experts and forwarded to the courts for judicial review. A report by the state child advocate’s office shows that caseworkers are poorly trained and unfamiliar with basic department policies. They are also overworked, sometimes handling more than 80 cases at a time, a situation that can cause workers to miss obvious danger signs. The system failed to act in the starvation case, despite clear signs as far back as the early 1990’s that one of the children was being denied food. That child’s file contained

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN more than a dozen entries on nutritional problems and noted tips from informers who believed that he was being deprived of food. The file further notes that the emaciated child sometimes pleaded with caseworkers for food and once even ransacked a caseworker’s glove compartment in search of something to eat. When he ate away from home, he begged the caseworkers not to tell his adoptive parents. The family was nevertheless allowed to adopt three more children; each came with a government subsidy. This case was brought to light after the child welfare agency had been sued by an advocacy group, Children’s Rights, for failing to live up to its responsibilities. A panel of experts appointed in connection with the lawsuit has guided the state toward an ambitious plan that would lower caseloads and improve caseworkers’ training while adding new staff to the child welfare agency. Instead of dismissing reports of neglect and abuse—as clearly happened in the starvation case—caseworkers would be required to check out accusations and take specific actions. The budget for this beleaguered, underfinanced agency will need to be sharply increased. Atrocities like the New Jersey starvation case almost always begin with caseworkers who are expected to do too much with too few resources, and a state or local government that is strapped for money. Poor children don’t have much lobbying clout. The only remedy is a decision on the part of political leaders that protecting the most helpless members of society is the most important thing that government does, and deserves the highest priority when the resources are doled out.2 (Italics mine)

If anything is essential to achieving justice for children, it’s a realization of these last points. Another important question may be seen as arising from events like these, namely, How severe or probable must the (potential) harm to a child be, for the state to be justified in intervening? In what follows, I will elaborate answers to this question via the basic principle that the state is warranted in intervening in proportion to the probability and severity of the harm to the child and, in broader terms, via a certain Model of Parental Licensing. Before offering this model, however, I need to establish an antecedent claim, only hinted at so far—that proactive interventions (aimed at preventing harm from occurring in the first place) represent a far more appropriate and effective response to CAD and other childhood harms than

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traditional, merely reactive interventions (aimed at punishing those responsible or trying to help those who have been hurt after the harm has already been done). There are several reasons why this is so. First and foremost, once someone has suffered seriously arrested development and emerged as a nonautonomous adult (assuming they even live to adulthood), the damage will usually prove difficult if not impossible to rectify. This is due to the vital importance of critical periods in a child’s development. As explained earlier, children are not infinitely adaptive or resilient: if a child undergoes restricted development of various competencies during earlier critical periods, he or she may be able to develop these competencies during later periods, if at all, only to a very limited and refractory degree, and with extreme difficulty. It is thus a myth—but a deadly myth—that, if someone suffers arrested development during an earlier stage, they can simply be assisted at a later stage to develop whatever is lacking, with this assistance comprising adequate rectification. As Cynader and Frost have shown, arrested development often remains arrested, permanently (recall the all-important neural sculpting and biological embedding processes here; 2.4.2). As such, it will often prove impossible to rectify CAD (crippled autonomy development) after damage to the child has already been done. Second, to give equal attention to the punishment of parental wrongdoers here seems like an inappropriate, misguided, or merely vindictive response, since in many cases these wrongdoers are themselves needy and nonautonomous individuals, already highly burdened with more than enough personal problems of their own, and who thus harm their children more out of incompetence or desperation than intentional malice. To such persons, certain forms of treatment or “therapeutic punishment” (like mandatory personal and parental counseling, vocational assistance, and self-management training) will be a much more appropriate, humane, and effective response than retributive punishment. If purely retributive punishment is ever called for against such abusive or neglectful parents, then, it would seem to be only in those cases wherein the child would not be made worse off by such punishment (viz., by extended incarceration of the parent) and wherein prospects for enabling the parent to more responsibly fulfill his or her care-giving duties and get on with his or her life seem slim. And such cases are rather rare. A third reason why a punitive and after-the-fact response seems misguided is that, after children suffer CAD harms due to their parent’s lack of proper care, this will seldom be rectifiable in a court of law. This is not only because the harm will often be difficult to verify historically and evidentially, but also because assessing the harm will often involve

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the assumption of counterfactual courses of development. To illustrate, try to imagine a wrongful parenting suit filed on behalf of “Wolfgang” later on, against his parents when he is about twenty years old. Wolfgang, let us stipulate, had the prodigious gifts of a Mozart and might well have become a musical prodigy and recording artist if only his parents had, as he often begged, let him go to a nearby School for the Performing Arts on a scholarship, or let him receive free tutoring from a talented and willing music instructor. But they never supported him in this endeavor, and even cruelly neglected and abused him, so that Wolfgang never developed his talents or achieved any success. Certainly if Wolfgang had been able develop his talents and achieve success, and his parents had then simply stolen his music money (in the amount of m), they would have been liable to a lawsuit. But in our no-development scenario, if Wolfgang’s parents had been sued for wrongful damages suffered (let us say for the same amount m, that he never made or enjoyed), could we imagine him winning the case? Almost certainly not, for the simple reason that counterfactual losses, damages, and courses of development aren’t too amenable to reasonable standards of proof and aren’t the stuff of hard legal evidence. How could we know, the defending attorney might reasonably object, that Wolfgang really did have such prodigious “Amadean” potential, that he would have developed his talents so, or would have earned or reaped m, even if his parents had not abused and neglected him? How could Wolfgang’s liability damages, in the amount of m or whatever, be reliably assessed? The conclusions to be drawn from this thought-experiment are as follows. While many children like Wolfgang have their significant and autonomy interests (Feinberg’s b and d; 1.5) wrongfully set back—or “crushed in the egg”—by the neglect, abuse, incompetence, and/or gross irresponsibility of their parents, so that their later lives are vastly worse than they would have been if their parents had provided decent care, nevertheless it seems doubtful that we can tell who these “Mozarts in waiting” really are, that we can adequately get them back on track or, even if we could do this, that we could reliably assess what compensation was due them (cf. note 7, ch. 3). (And of course, this logic applies to normal children as much as to exceptionally gifted children, even if the latter might end up deserving relatively greater compensation.) In turn, it seems doubtful that merely reactive interventions, or ex post facto legal redress (e.g., via “wrongful life- or parenting” suits3) could be appropriate or effective types of responses to CAD. Such responses might mitigate, but certainly could not eliminate or adequately compensate, seriously arrested development. Similarly, proactive interventions should be prioritized much more than merely reactive interventions because of the latter’s greater relative

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inefficiency and waste. If children become autonomous adults, by definition, they will require relatively little resources from others, being able for the most part to carry their own weight. But if this doesn’t happen and children end up as nonautonomous adults, they will require extensive resources from others, both to help them become selfsupporting (if possible) and to keep them out of trouble during this process. The public funds and resources that will be necessary to support adults who are nonautonomous (during the last 20 to 60 years of their lives, as they travel through various welfare agencies, courthouses and halfway houses, treatment clinics, jails and prisons, etc.) can easily exceed the funds and resources that are necessary to help them achieve autonomy in the first place (during the first five to 15 years of their lives, through schools, family counseling centers, etc.).4 So for any concerned with the costs of early proactive intervention, there is strong reason to believe that this intervention would be much cheaper, requiring much less overall tax revenue (especially in the long run), than the same old merely reactive intervention. And this logic does not even begin to take into account what would be the greater gains and benefits of proactive intervention. That is, do we have any idea how much greater the (per capita and overall) productivity could be, of a society that engendered so fewer nonautonomous adults? For all these reasons, it will be best to prioritize proactive interventions, to prevent serious forms of arrested development from occurring in the first place. In adopting this forward-looking stance, it becomes absolutely essential that some reliable system of risk assessment be in place. If the state does not have such a system in place, without enough relevant information at hand, it will not be able to reliably gauge when a child (or potential child) will be at high risk for being born into this or that particular household or being raised by those particular parents. And in turn, if the state cannot accurately gauge these things, it will inevitably fail to intervene in many cases when it should and intervene in many other cases when it shouldn’t. Without the proper proactive stance, then, whatever intervention comes will either be too late or too little or too much.

4.2. A Model of Parental Licensing In view of such dangers, and especially the danger of seriously arrested development, what should be done? Ethicist Hugh LaFollette (1980), among others, has advocated a system of parental licensure as an appropriate and needed proactive response to the various risks that befall children. (See also de Ruyter & Spiecker, 1994; and Hedman, 2000.) His rationale for such a system is as follows: Society already regulates

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and licenses a whole host of important but risky activities such as driving vehicles, operating dangerous equipment, practicing law, medicine, and psychiatry, and so forth. Society does so and is obliged to do so, he argues, since activities like these are “potentially harmful to others, since safe performance of the activity requires a certain competence, and since we have a moderately reliable procedure for determining that competence” (LaFollette, 1980, 183). And since parenting is just as potentially harmful, demands just as important competencies, and is also amenable to determination of these competencies, then, by extension, parenting should be licensed, too! So it would be inconsistent, by these reasonable criteria, to regulate the ones and not this other. LaFollette’s logic here seems more than plausible. But since he isn’t too specific about the type of licensing program he envisions, I will now propose such a program with a little more detail. I should point out, though, that the proposals which follow are general and normative in nature; they are not intended to fill in all the practical details of actual programs (I admit that these are best left to social workers and public administrators), but rather are intended to provide ethical guidelines within which any good program will fit. With this in mind, the Parental Licensing Model I envision can be understood through the following steps (a) through (c): a. Let’s assume that we could classify all (potential) parents as belonging to one of three categories: (i) those posing low or no risks to their (potential) children and their children’s development, (ii) those posing moderate risks to their (potential) children, and (iii) those posing high risks to their (potential) children. (I say “potential” parents and children here because, as will become evident especially in 4.3.3, the state might be warranted in intervening with some very high risk persons before they conceive, or are conceived.) These risks should be understood in terms of past statistical data and of methodological AID guidelines, and according to the following methodology. (Note: remember that in 2.4, I outlined 14 guidelines or “micropathways” of advantage and disadvantage—such as a history of violence, alcoholism, and drug use; educational resources and level of schooling; use of and access to public resources such as health care services, community centers, parks; emotional environment; nutritional environment; etc.—that most significantly correlate with and affect children’s development. All these will come into play here. As will be seen, then, my model assumes the availability and use of some fairly detailed informational data sets and longitudinal studies, so that I would not

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necessarily advocate the implementation of the more intrusive parts of my Parental Licensing Model until such information was available. In turn, this should serve to remind us that our social policies will only be as good as our social data and social sciences.) Pardoning the methodological jargon, we could say that, of a certain population cohort of parents with some specific set s of micropathway characteristics, that x% of this cohort already “raised” children that ended up as nonautonomous adults, that is, falling below Autonomy Level Three and thus, by definition, not able to function with even a minimal level of effective selfgovernance. So if some parent or prospective parent John (or Jane) Doe currently exhibits all the characteristics that make him belong to set s, then, I will assume that John also has an x% chance of crippling his child’s development. In other words, under these circumstances it seems that we may safely assume that any child born to or parented by this John Doe runs a corresponding risk of suffering seriously arrested development under John’s care (or actually lack thereof). Or more simply, if on the basis of well-documented evidence we can see that suchand-such a type of parent abused his child in the past, it seems plausible that a parent who now shares such-and-such characteristics will abuse his child in the present and near future, if allowed the chance. b. Moving on from these points about how general risks should be assessed, another crucial theoretical question arises, namely, What specific percentages and criteria we should use to demarcate these “low-” from “moderate-” to “high-risk” parents? I suggest that we use the following as provisional answers to this question: Let “low-risk parents” be all those who (again, based on data profiles and longitudinal studies of the background micropathway characteristics that they share with other previous cohorts of parents) show a ) 10% chance of harming their children, by causing or allowing them to suffer crippled development (CAD). Why 10% or less? Because parents who present such chances of harming their children just seem to pose a low danger, or at least (as we shall see) a low enough danger as not to warrant very intrusive intervention by the state. The case seems different, however, if we think of cohort sets of parents who, for every 100 children that they raise, will end up seriously harming, say, 15 or more of them. Greater than 10% risks for serious harm seem no longer to be low or trivial.

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN So next, let “moderate-risk parents” include all those who pose an 11% to 49% chance of harming their children, or seriously crippling their development, or allowing it to be crippled through neglect. For in this range, although the dangers are still “less than likely,” nevertheless the dangers are no longer low, and so would merit more than a low degree of attention and concern. Also, the specific characteristics and micropathways that these moderaterisk parents share include having a history of violence, of felonies, of drug use and alcoholism, multiple teenage pregnancies with accompanying illiteracy, and mental disorder. With these moderaterisk parents, the assumption is not that they would definitely (or even probably) harm any children under their care, but rather that any children living with them would run a sufficiently high risk of being harmed that at least some forms of monitoring and, if necessary, helpful supervision would be warranted. Finally, “high-risk parents” would be all those who (again, based on empirical evidence of cohorts of parents who shared certain characteristics) had a * 50% chance of harming their children and crippling their development. If parents are more likely than not to cripple their child’s development through abuse and/or neglect, then this seems like too great a risk for the state not to intervene early and significantly. The high-risk parents in this category show evidence of characteristics that include: recent histories of violent crime, recidivism, serious drug abuse and alcoholism, and severe mental disease. (I discuss further criteria of, and possible modifications to, these risk boundaries and parental classifications below.) These two steps (a and b) thus lay the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the preliminary classificatory schemes of my Parental Licensing Model, and lead to the following important practical conclusions (c). c. According to this “trichotomy” of risk categories, it seems reasonable to conclude that the state would be justified in imposing only trivially invasive intervention on low-risk parents, only moderately invasive intervention on moderate-risk parents, but significantly invasive intervention on high-risk parents. And I define these three increasingly intrusive types of intervention as follows. “Trivially invasive intervention” would include (no more than) forms of screening, testing, and/or background checks, whereby (potential) parents would be assessed for gross evidence of parental incompetence and other high-risk factors that might indi-

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cate a greater likelihood of parental failure. (These high-risk factors, again, would include past reports of child abuse and neglect, serious drug abuse, a history of violence and felonies, and also suicide attempts and severe psychological problems such as Andrea Yates and Susan Smith had, etc.) The kind of screeningintervention I envision at this point is essentially based on information-gathering, then, and need be no more inconvenient or intrusive than the driving tests that people periodically endure at the Motor Vehicle Administration, or the loan application questionnaires and background credit checks that people endure at their banks and real estate agencies. The inquiries at this stage need not even be as exhaustive as those that potential adoptive parents undergo through adoption agencies, although this screening would be along similar lines, gathering the same types of information that would be relevant to questions of whether parents (or potential parents) would be patently unfit to rear (or conceive) children.1 Would such information-gathering measures be justified? It seems so. For imagine denying that they would be justified (and remember LaFollette’s argument): Do we really want to insist that, say, buying a car or taking out a bank loan are more important, or warrant more background informational checks, than bringing a human life into the world? Do not each of these activities (buying, borrowing, and birthing) entail not only certain rights, but also serious dangers, and otherregarding duties as well? Second, “moderately invasive interventions” would include everything in the previous stage of intervention, but also—although no more than—various forms of home visitation and monitoring programs, mandatory classes, tutorials, and counseling, and respite care programs. In relation to the parents involved, these would include things like periodic evening child development classes, health and nutritional classes, and family- or selfmanagement counseling sessions. In relation to the children involved, these types of intervention would also include counseling, along with the assignment of case workers who would follow the development of the child and schedule occasional medical and psychological check-ups, to check for further signs of neglect, abuse, and regress, or (hopefully) progress. The most dramatically helpful and important interventions at this level could include mandatory Head Start–type programs, introduced within the first several years of life. (Such programs have made striking differences in the past; cf. ch. 2, note 9; & 5.2.) These would

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN help to safeguard children’s earliest critical periods of cognitive development, and thereby prevent various patterns of the clustering and snowballing of disadvantages (COD and SOD; 2.4.3) from getting started in the first place. I must emphasize again that these types of interventions at these early stages of development, and for these especially disadvantaged children, might be the most morally pressing but also most practically worthwhile parts of any system of justice for children. In any case, we should also note that the overwhelming emphasis up to and including these moderately invasive types of intervention would be on helpful and remedial, rather than punitive, measures. Last, “significantly invasive interventions” would include everything in the previous stages of intervention, but also, if necessary, adoptive or foster care intervention (if the high risk parents had already conceived) and compulsory contraception (if the potential parents posed a sufficiently high risk of harming any children born to them). Even at this stage, the interventions would not be primarily punitive in nature; but they would be strongly deterrent in nature, taking more forceful measures to insure that children in danger would not be harmed, or harmed any further. In addition, one key aim of these measures would be to administer them for as short and temporary a period of time as possible. That is, a key aim even with these very invasive measures would be to bring or restore the parent to a normal and unencumbered position in their family lives, with as little intervention from the state as possible, as soon as possible. As for adoptions or foster care, I advocate these kinds of intervention according to traditional criteria: for those parents who have already seriously neglected or abused their children and whose behavior shows no signs of imminent improvement, so that the only safe alternative seems to be removing the child from his or her parent(s)—at least until improvements become evident. (For a review of the practical and ethical issues related to these traditional types of criteria and interventions, see Wald, 1975.) And as for compulsory contraception, I discuss it on its own merits (and demerits) in the next section, since it is a much more complex and controversial type of intervention. The assignment of these three risk boundaries, along with these corresponding three types and levels of intervention, comprise the nuts and bolts of my Parental Licensing Model. If this Model was implemented, the great majority of parents (and potential parents), especially those who showed no signs of so-

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cial or economic or psychological disadvantage, would remain largely unaffected, at most having to allow the state access to certain information that was directly relevant to their fitness or unfitness as parents. A small minority of parents—namely, those who exhibited signs of serious parental needs and deficiencies (such as having histories of violence, mental disorder, long unemployment, etc.)—would be required to participate in various monitoring, remedial and/or counseling programs. And an even smaller minority of parents—namely, those who demonstrated stronger evidence of more serious parental unfitness (such as having recent histories of violent crime and recidivism, serious drug abuse, and psychological signs like the Yates and Smith parents exhibited)—would also be required to participate in firmer forms of child abuse deterrence. Broadly speaking, there are three areas of concern in particular that this Model might trigger, concerning: (a) legal boundaries that should be in place, to protect innocent parents and potential parents from inordinate intrusiveness and unwarranted interventions, (b) the (im-)propriety of this particular assignment of risk boundaries, and (c) more fundamental ethical worries, particularly involving wrongful infringements of family privacy and parental prerogatives. Let me address these concerns in order. a. Admittedly, any public measures intended to protect the interests of one party are susceptible to abuse of the rights (especially rights of privacy and rights to maintain integrity of one’s person, personal effects, property, and family) of other parties, who are suspected of threatening the former party. In this case, public efforts to protect the interests of children (or potential children) obviously do not give unimpeded carte blanche authority to officials to search, interrogate, punish, or intervene in the affairs of just any parents (or potential parents) who are suspected of threatening children. Legal and administrative safeguards need be in place to prevent such meddling and public abuse of power, so that parents can raise and discipline their children without unwarranted government interference. In what follows, then, I will outline the safeguards that need to be in place, to limit abuse of all three of the aforementioned types of intervention (namely, informational, supportive, and deterrent types). As far as informational safeguards go, much of the relevant information that would need to be collected, such as reports of

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN prior abuse and of criminal records, would already be accessible by relevant personnel, without any addition intrusions needed into the lives of family members. And for additional information that might need to be obtained, the searches for this would be subject to the normal legal statutes of due process. In particular, when more invasive searches (such as through home visits, interviews, consultation with the parent’s psychologists or family physicians, or searches for physical evidence of abuse) would seem to be required, these would be subject to Fourth Amendment conditions for reasonable searches and seizures. These conditions would include “only reasonable” search warrants approved by family court judges, wherein “no warrants shall be issued but upon probable cause” of abuse or neglect. “Probable cause” here, in turn, would imply concrete signs of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or tangible signs of child neglect, as reported by the appropriate personnel—including educators, guidance counselors, child protective service (CPS) agents, social workers, medical personnel, and law enforcement officers. Since the early 1970s, all these personnel have in fact been required by law to submit official reports of any such signs to child protective- and law enforcement agencies, who have then been required to conduct investigations. Of special note here is the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which mandated procedures and allocated funds for the identification of child abuse and the protection not only of children so endangered, but also of parents so suspected. Notice, too, the multidisciplinary network of checks and balances in play here: Certainly legal statutes and interagency safeguards are in place to protect children from parental abuse; but other statutes and safeguards are in place to protect children from the harms that would come from disrupting their home life or separating them from their parents without sufficient cause, and also to protect parents from abuse—from undue state interference—by any one agency or set of personnel. For example, before intervention in any family can occur after reports of suspected abuse have been filed by, say, educators, state statutes first require the educator’s reports to be verified by Child Protective Service (CPS) agents; other statutes specify fair procedures for investigating child abuse and for substantiating (or repudiating) the reports; even if abuse or neglect is substantiated, CPS agents cannot implement remedial plans without prior consultation and approval from medical and/or mental health professionals; and

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law enforcement agents cannot intervene without satisfying prior legal and judicial constraints, and so on. Intervention is thus seldom (and never should be) left up to any one public agency or the discretion of any one agent. Especially in the most intrusive cases, when children might best be removed from their original homes or parents, or (as considered in 4.3) when parents might forfeit their custodial or parental rights or be candidates for compulsory contraception, the targeted families will be subject to all the legal protections of the judicial system. Toward these ends, the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act required each state to have statutes clearly delineating proper and improper bounds for reporting laws, juvenile and family court laws, and criminal laws (specifically when parents are criminally indicted for abuse or neglect and subjected to consequent possible forfeiture of their parental rights).5 No child should be removed and no one’s parental rights should thus be suspended without a court order, issued on sufficient and proper grounds—namely, that the parent poses a clear and imminent threat to the child(ren) under his or her care. Accordingly, parents who are in danger of forfeiting their parental rights must be granted access to legal counsel and defense; and sufficient evidence must be produced establishing that the suspected caregiver is indeed unfit to parent. These measures need to be in place to prevent the damage that would otherwise come from false accusations of parental unfitness and from unwarranted interferences into family’s lives. The hope is that, when these measures and guidelines are in place, a proper balance will be struck between protecting the interests of children and protecting the interests of their parents and caregivers. To summarize, then: First, personal and parental information (that goes beyond what is publicly available) should be searched for and obtained only after reasonable warrants have been issued on probable cause of abuse or neglect. Second, remedial intervention should be implemented only after children have shown signs of abuse or neglect—including behavioral, emotional and/ or health problems that cannot be accounted for from merely genetic or physiologic causes; and only after investigation and joint approval by the various relevant bodies (especially social work and CPS agencies in conjunction with medical and psychological professionals) has been issued. And finally, deterrent intervention (including removal from families and compulsory

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN contraception) should be administered only after the above conditions (for informational and remedial intervention) have been met; and after children have shown evidence of serious abuse, neglect, and arrested development (including regular bruisings, marked behavioral conflicts, deep emotional disorders, emaciation or malnutrition); and after negative sentences or findings of unfitness have been rendered against the parent, through fair and thorough due process. If children show evidence of these kinds of things and are being “raised” by parents found thus unfit, there is no doubt that their health and development of even minimal autonomy is in serious jeopardy, and thereby in need of serious outside protection. b. Let me now address the second concern, concerning this Parental Licensing Model’s placement of risk boundaries. As mentioned, I offered these boundaries provisionally, since some borderline parents, who exist at the margins of the boundaries I’ve set, might deserve a little less or a little more intervention than initially indicated. For those who don’t reject this model for more fundamental theoretical reasons (which I address shortly), then, the main bone of contention may be the placement of these boundary lines of risk demarcation—at ) 10%, 11%–49%, and * 50%. I realize that some conservative critics, who advocate less or less aggressive intervention than I have, will ultimately want to increase these numbers—for example, by insisting that significant intervention is called for only with parents running at least, say, an 80% chance of causing CAD, and that moderate intervention is called for only with parents running at least, say, between a 40% and 80% chance of harming their children. Conversely, some critics, who advocate more or more aggressive intervention than I have, will ultimately want to decrease these numbers—for example, by insisting that significant intervention is called for with parents running even, say, a 33% chance of harming their children, and that moderate intervention is called for even with parents running between, say, a 5% and 32% chance of harming them. If these risk categories are adjusted either way, it should be in response to a certain kind of public responsive equilibrium (akin to John Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium”). Remember that, in the face of inadequate information or faulty risk assessments, the state will err in one of two directions. It will either fail to intervene in cases when it should or intervene in cases when it

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shouldn’t. If it turns out that this first kind of problem (of what we may call “underintervention” or state aloofness) comes to predominate—so that cases of CAD (continue to) occur much more than cases of wrongful or overly intrusive state intervention—then we should respond by swinging in the aggressive direction. (This would include states where there were very many young adults who showed signs of being nonautonomous, such as being homeless, drug addicted, and in prison, alongside relatively few reports or signs of excessive state intrusions into families.) This would mean adjusting the risk boundaries downward, so as to achieve more intervention in risky family situations. But if this second kind of problem (of what we may call “overintervention” or state meddlesomeness) comes to predominate—so that cases of CAD come to occur much less than cases of wrongful or overly intrusive state intervention—then we should respond by swinging in the conservative direction. (This would include states with very many and common reports of excessive state intrusions into families, alongside relatively few young adults who were nonautonomous.) This would mean adjusting the risk boundaries upward, so as to achieve less intervention in family situations. Such potential adjustments to my risk boundaries do not reflect a weakness in my overall Model. If anything, it seems to be an attribute of this Model that it can accommodate such adjustments. As we gain more reliable information (from the growing number of longitudinal and cohort studies that are being conducted) about these risk factors, it is to be expected that we will simultaneously gain a more precise picture of what types of traits and parents pose serious (as opposed to only moderate or low) risks to children. But it would be ethically preferable to apply such a Model now (considering the reliable information on risk factors, gradients, etc., that we already have) and then to make any needed fine adjustments later, rather than to forego such a Model indefinitely, thereby continuing to allow so many children to slip through the cracks—as so many disadvantaged children, especially, but also “Yates children,” “Wolfgangs,” urban and, increasingly, rural youths are already doing.6 c. Finally, I realize that some will have deeper theoretical objections over this model than concern about legal protections or the mere placement of these risk boundaries. (And for discussion of more practical objections to my type of proposal, see 3.2.1, and LaFollette, 1980, 190–193.) Probably the greatest

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN objections will be that, if implemented, these proposals would violate parent’s rights to procreate (also called “reproductive autonomy”) and, similarly, rights to family privacy. But few if any rights are absolute, being conditional on the faithful execution of certain duties, or the possession of certain properties, connected with these rights. For instance, my “right to worship” as I choose does not mean that, if I conscientiously worship the god Molech, I may thereby take your child and offer her up on a flaming pyre as a human sacrifice to my god. Likewise, my “right to procreate” does not mean that I may sire as many children as I like—if I will very likely leave them at your doorstep or out in the forest. So we must make sure that, among other things, the exercise of our adult prima facie rights does not infringe or trample upon other persons’ and children’s rights and interests. Onora O’Neill, among others, has provided a similar rebuttal to these types of concerns: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his mistress had five children, whom they took to the foundling hospital and abandoned there. If we believe that persons have an unrestricted right to procreate, then Jean-Jacques and Thérèse acted within their rights. But plainly, most people, when they speak of a right to procreate, don’t have in mind a right to do as they did, but rather a right to become a parent, where being a parent includes rearing as well as begetting or bearing children, and is sometimes confined to rearing without biological reproduction. [So] the right to beget or bear is not unrestricted, but contingent upon begetters and bearers having or making some feasible plan for their child to be adequately reared by themselves or by willing others. Persons who beget or bear without making any such plans cannot claim that they are exercising a right. (Italics mine)7 In the same way, parents who are abusing or seriously neglecting their children, or who pose a high risk for doing so, do not have an absolute or unlimited right to “family privacy.” If I hear bloodcurdling screams from my neighbor’s child next door, especially if I hear these screams on regular occasions and observe many welts and bruises on the child, then this gives me the moral “right”—and really the moral duty—to go and knock, to see what is happening in order to make sure that no harm is

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befalling the child. If I do not go and knock, then far from doing something morally commendable in respecting my neighbors’ “right to family privacy,” I am actually doing something morally contemptible, in failing to act to save a vulnerable child from (at least the risk or appearance of) serious harm.8 The duty to respect other’s family privacy should thus be counterbalanced by the duty to respect the interests of others’ children who are in serious danger. As such, this raises the question of levels of care-giving duties toward children. Let us say that, within the confines of a family’s “private” home, a child is being seriously neglected or abused, so that the parents are thereby failing in their care-giving duties toward the child. In such cases (and let us assume that others can or do know about these failures), do others have any protective or care-giving duties toward this child? As argued earlier, in any just society (or “decent society,” as Avishai Margalit would argue), fellow family members, neighbors and community members, and then distant citizens, if necessary, would have and accept some moral duties toward this child (cf. Margalit [1996], esp. pp. 201-211). As explained in 3.2.2, these responsibilities could be expressed according to a concentric sphere pattern of duty, whereby citizens would fulfill their “secondary duties” to aid these children through their tax and legislative support of various child-protective services. For, again, it leads to absurd ethical and social conclusions to deny that others besides the biological parents—specifically in cases where these parents are failing—have any moral duties toward such needy and vulnerable children. What motives, besides mere apathy, selfishness, or “adult bias,” could motivate the denial of such duties? Far from nonfamily members (neighbors, community members, and fellow-citizens) having a sole moral duty to respect other family’s privacy, then, it seems reasonable that nonfamily members have additional counterbalancing moral duties to intervene in other family’s affairs—when but only when these other family’s parents are seriously harming, or at great risk of harming, their own children. A slightly different variant of this “family privacy” objection is that my licensing proposals, as suggested earlier, might violate parental autonomy, or the prerogative of parents to run their families as they see fit. Granted, such parental autonomy should be carefully guarded and respected. But is it necessarily more important or hallowed than the latent autonomy of a parents’ child? Should the child’s developing autonomy be disregarded

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN in relation to the parent’s? If so, why and to what degree? And more to the point, should the parent’s “autonomy” be respected if it involves the undermining or sabotaging of the child’s developing autonomy? In such cases, shouldn’t these parent’s (really overreaching or illegitimate) autonomy be curbed somewhat, so as to allow their children to blossom and develop their own autonomy?9 On top of this, there is a sense in which this familiar concern is misleading, in that it obscures an important and fundamental distinction. There is a significant difference between (a) parents who fail in their care-giving duties to support even their child’s basic development—out of serious neglect and abuse, and (b) parents who fail in their care-giving duties to support their child’s development of autonomy out of too inhibiting and constrictive a home environment, a smothering lack of freedom, or too forceful an imposition of their own “autonomy” (or really their own narrow plans and prejudices). In the former case (a), the parents simply do far too little for their children, while in the latter more rare case (b), in a sense, the parents do too much for their children. As illustrations of this latter (b) kind of failure, I have in mind the father in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (who demands that his son live out his own, and not the son’s, career dreams), the white racist mothers who refuses to allow their babies to adopt any “damn nigger-loving ideas,” the fundamentalist home-schoolers who won’t allow their children to even look at biology textbooks containing “evilutionist heresies,” and the Muslim (or Catholic) parents who won’t tolerate the thought of their daughter marrying a Jew (or Protestant) whom she happens to love deeply. These all seem to represent unduly restrictive ways of parenting. Even so, the former more basic type of parental failure (a) would by far be the primary main target of any interventions proposed here. But with this (a) type of failure, it is not “the parent’s autonomy” that is usually the problem (in part because many of the parents I advocate intervention toward here are not autonomous to begin with, themselves existing only on Autonomy Level Two), but rather it is, again, simply the parent’s incompetence, abuse, or neglect that is the problem. Another way to put this is to say that I advocate firm state intervention not against parents who just happen to have stifling or nonliberal worldviews or highly restrictive parenting styles, but rather against parents who are egregiously failing in basic care-giving duties. And again, I advocate state intervention not so much for the promotion of high levels of autonomy above AL3, as much as for the prevention of

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nonautonomy, below AL3. So these last criticisms—that my proposals would violate parental autonomy or condone inordinate intrusion into the privacy of families—are based on a misreading of my intentions and/or a misapprehension of the situations to which my proposals would apply.

4.3. Compulsory Contraception The types of intervention discussed so far targeted prevention of crippled development when the child is alive and growing or, more simply, when the child exists. What I will evaluate in this section is a temporally prior kind of intervention—concerning prevention of the child’s very existence through compulsory contraception (CC) when he or she, if conceived and born into a certain environment, would likely suffer crippled development. To address this issue, I consider various arguments for CC (in 4.3.1) and against CC (in 4.3.2); and at the end of this section, I conclude that the cumulative weight of various arguments against CC, at least in certain contexts where dangers of state abuse and misapplication weigh heavily, outweigh the previous positive ones, all things considered. Finally (in 4.3.3), I close by considering a common and important Parfitian- (or future-persons) type objection to CC. Before commencing the main discussion about CC, I should say a few words about sterilization, in contrast. As I will use the terms, forms of “contraception” will refer to procedures that are temporary (ranging anywhere from a few months to a few years) in their effects and thus reversible, while “sterilization” will refer to procedures that are permanent and irreversible. I will also assume that surgical procedures to reverse sterilization, like reverse vasectomies, are unreliably effective at best. But if medicine learns how to implement reliable reversals for sterilization, then but only then what I have to say about CC might apply also to cases of sterilization also. (For discussion of some of the medical, practical, and ethical aspects of, and distinctions between, sterilization and various types of long-term contraceptives such as Depo-Provera, Norplant, and ParaGard, see the many helpful articles in The Hastings Center Report on Long-Acting Contraceptives; Jan., 1995; and for legal precedence of CC, set by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, see Lewin, 2001.) Therefore, I will assuredly not defend the use of compulsory or state sterilization here (such has been disastrously and ruthlessly used in, e.g., India, China, and early-twentieth century America), for the following reasons. In the face of the reversibility and availability of contraception, sterilization becomes simultaneously an unnecessar y and heavy-handed type of intervention. For it generally assumes that the

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potential parent who is now ill suited to bring a child into the world and to raise him or her in a healthy environment will always be so ill suited. It would be presumptuous and overly coercive of the state to make someone permanently incapable of conceiving children when, at some future point, they might be capable of rearing children in a quite competent and healthy way. Since there is always the chance, however small, that a person will develop the abilities and resources to become a good caregiver, then, sterilization assumes too much about the future and acts too forcefully on the basis of these assumptions.10 And even if someone never developed the needed care-giving qualities, CC, if repeatedly applied, would accomplish just as much as sterilization.

4.3.1. Arguments for CC 11 The very thought of CC—wherein the state coercively but temporarily prevented certain adults from being able to conceive—might strike some as part of an Orwellian nightmare, whereby helpless innocent subjects would be tied down against a ruthless and irresistible state power. But would the state have to apply CC in a ruthless way, and against “helpless innocents”? Could it not rather apply it in a fair way, against recipients who deserved it? Arguably so; and to show this, my strategy will be to describe a certain of “worst-case scenario” type of parent and then argue that, surely in this case, CC is warranted. (Although I could make these points as above, in statistical terms of the high-risk micropathways of my Parental Licensing Model, it might make the case more transparent here to present it in terms of the following scenario.) Having established that CC should not be ruled out in all cases, or on grounds of necessary or intrinsic immorality, I will then offer criteria that demarcate who proper candidates for CC should be. In other words, after first trying to establish that CC might sometimes be justified, I will then establish when it might be justified. Imagine the following type of recipient: “Terry” is an unmarried 17 year old who already has a child, and a criminal record of serious violence and drug and child abuse, and the equivalent of only a fourth grade education (with a corresponding lack of literacy and numeracy and job skills), and kin are not willing or able to help with child raising. In addition, Terry is promiscuous and untrustworthy to use self-administered contraceptives. In such cases, the administration of CC would seem to be warranted for at least four salient reasons. (Also, we should note, this “administration,” as threatening as it might sound, need consist of little more than Terry having to receive a shot in the arm once every six months or so, until her parental competence improve.)

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First and foremost, CC would prevent another child from being born into a very risky and harmful environment, so that he or she would almost definitely suffer crippled development. And note the differences here between the moral dilemmas attached to the administration of CC versus the administration of abortion. Unlike the abortion case, which entails tendentious questions about the moral status of fertilized ovum and embryos, and so forth, there would be no embryos, persons, lives, or even fertilized ovum that would be terminated in the case of CC, since it is the conception itself that would be prevented. Second, CC would help to ensure that relatively more time, attention, and resources would be devoted to Terry’s first child, who would otherwise likely suffer more blatant harm. By freeing Terry up from even greater pressure and responsibility with a second child, CC would thus decrease the chances that this already-conceived child will end up suffering more from various forms of abuse, neglect, and arrested development. Third, CC would help to prevent Terry herself from being more overwhelmed and irresponsible. It would be of great benefit in helping Terry become autonomous and getting his or her own life on track. When a teenager or grossly immature young adult should be developing his or her own life plans, but already has hardly any capacities for this, along with serious disadvantages to overcome, the last thing s/he needs is another person’s life to be responsible for. Someone might object here that some teenagers might autonomously want to begin their young lives as parents. Granted, some teenagers—perhaps those who are precocious and have achieved a good degree of maturity early, who are otherwise well off and well-prepared for life and parenting, or who come from a culture where early childbirth is a normal and respected part of life—might make such a decision autonomously. But the degree of “autonomy” of such preferences, even in these exceptional cases, is rather doubtful. For how good an idea can teenagers really have of the implications of such a choice—of the weighty commitments and self-sacrifices that will be necessary for adequately caring for another human life? And these “possibly autonomous” cases would not only be rare, but also significantly different from those I have in mind, where the conception would usually come not as the result of autonomous choices and plans, but as unplanned inconveniences. Since it will be a challenge for dysfunctional and disadvantaged people like Terry to acquire the skills necessary for autonomy, self-sufficiency, and being good parents (even if they had only themselves to worry about), it is certain that these things will be more challenging to attain with other needy children to have to worry about. Finally, CC would allow others to carry a relatively lighter burden than they would otherwise have to. Other family members would have

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fewer children that they would need to help Terry raise. And the low cost of CC will be far cheaper on balance to taxpayers than the exorbitant costs they will have to pay, without CC, for supportive services— for various welfare, child protective, and criminal justice system services. These services would surely come into play and be needed if CC were not used and Terry were allowed to continue to have more children. So the relevant welfare and child protection agencies, along with the whole criminal justice system, would have markedly fewer nonautonomous persons to have to carry and work with, thanks to CC. (This practical reasoning does not even begin to factor in all the benefits of CC that environmentalists and those worried about excessive population growth will notice.) Surely all these benefits—both moral and material—would outweigh the “moral cost” of infringing Terry’s procreative freedom. For notice, Terry’s freedom here would significantly infringe on the freedom of others—all those children, family and community members, and taxpayers who would otherwise be forced to carry and bear the brunt of her burdens for her. Accordingly, it is highly doubtful whether Terry has a right to, or is morally entitled to, such irresponsible “procreative freedom” in the first place. There seem to be some very good reasons, then, why the state might be justified in administering CC to people like Terry. (I will discuss various negative reasons below.) I could be melodramatic here and paint Terry as an even worse potential parent or “worst case scenario.” What if he or she already had four children, who were all being seriously neglected? What if he or she was like Andrea Yates and Susan Smith, before any children had been murdered but yet showing signs of intractable psychoses? Or for that matter, what if he or she was a sadistic serial ax-murderer? Obviously I’m being somewhat facetious here; but the point is that surely some persons merit CC, even if this has to be applied on a coercive basis. (I should point out, though, that the patches or injections of CC would not need to be coercively administered to all suitable recipients, since many would consent to these, welcoming the greater relative freedom and lessened burdens that they would entail.) Rather than continue to leave these “worst case scenarios” to the imagination, though, let me mention a couple actual recent cases, wherein judges decided that certain parents were so irresponsible and dangerous that they forfeited their parental and procreative rights. In this first case, a reporter explains why a certain Judge Lawless determined that a couple from Lansing, Michigan had forfeited their parental rights for murdering one of their sons:

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Two parents sentenced in the death of their 7-year-old adopted son have lost their parenting rights. Ingham County Family Judge Janelle Lawless said Monday that Lisa Holland, 33, can’t care for her children because she’s serving life without parole for killing her son, Ricky. Even if she could care for them, Lawless said, there’s a reasonable likelihood the children would be harmed. [And] Tim Holland, 37, voluntarily gave up his parental rights Thursday. . . . He led police to Ricky’s remains in January and admitted dumping his son’s body. He told authorities his wife hit Ricky in the head with a hammer while he was away from home. (Italics mine; Manchester Guardian, 12/19/06) Judge Lawless’s ruling was in accordance with the landmark federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997, which mandated, among other things, the termination of a parent’s rights to all of his or her children if the parent had murdered, committed a felony assault against, or conspired, aided, or abetted in the abuse of any of his or her children. In a less morbid case involving the forfeiture of procreative rights, Tamar Lewin reports this incident: In an unusual action against a “deadbeat dad,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld a probation order that bars a man convicted of failure to pay child support from having more children unless he shows that he can support all his offspring. The 34-year-old man, David Oakley, who has nine children by four women and owes $25,000 in support, faces eight years in prison if he violates the condition. . . . A spokewoman for the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support said the group approved of the decision as a useful tool for ensuring that children are taken care of. Writing for the majority, Justice Jon P. Wilcox pointed out that child support collection was an enormous national problem, that one family in three with a child support order received no money at all and that parents who did not pay deprived children of about $11 billion a year. The opinion defended the restriction on Mr. Oakley as “narrowly tailored to serve the state’s compelling interest of having parents support their children.” It noted that the condition would expire in five years, when probation ends, and said the alternative of sending Mr. Oakley to prison would further victimize his chil-

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JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN dren, ages 4 to 16. . . . Many more such cases may follow Mr. Oakley’s, Justice Bradley said. (Italics mine, New York Times, 7/12/01, A14)

Wouldn’t CC would be justified in such cases? If not, why not? (For instance, why would it be morally preferable to lock someone up for a number of years, leaving their reproductive capabilities intact, rather than to apply CC and let them get on with their lives outside of prison?) And if not—if CC and even the temporary loss of parenting rights wouldn’t be morally or legally justified against parents like the Hollands—would it be justified against parents who had, say, murdered two of their children? or three or four? If not—and CC and even the temporary loss of procreative rights wouldn’t be justified against parents like Mr. Oakley—would it be justified against parents who had sired but abandoned twelve of their children? Or fifteen . . . ? Why is it still unreasonable to think that CC would be justified at least in such extreme cases? Denying any such possible justifications for CC essentially and speciously absolutizes parental and procreative rights. Such denial also drives us to the absurd conclusion that it is morally acceptable, even obligatory, for us (“us” being citizens and agents of any state that has the technological means to apply CC in a safe, physically painless, and relatively inexpensive way) to allow anyone and everyone the freedom to procreate whenever and however many times they want, and regardless of how responsible they would be, or have been, in caring for their offspring. But these seem like repugnant conclusions that it would be better to avoid, by admitting that CC might be justified in at least some extreme cases. In part so as to avoid these repugnant conclusions, then, the line should arguably be drawn somewhere. But where? Just to clarify, at least the following conditions would have to be present in order for CC to be justified. Of first importance, of course, is the central condition that the children, if born, would enter a seriously high-risk environment and be “brought up” by people who would almost certainly abuse and neglect them. Again, at least previous serious child abusers and sexual molesters, violent felons, untreatable or hardly treatable psychotics, and murderers would qualify here. A second condition, perhaps equally obvious, is that the potential recipient must have a decent chance of becoming or making pregnant, and also demonstrate neither competence nor reliability in using self-administered contraceptives. Third, it must be the case that the potential parent does not have family members who are willing and competent to help raise the potential child.

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Family members should not be forced to help raise young children out of necessity, because of the irresponsible, selfish, or unthinking procreative acts of other family members. (If a family mutually and gladly agreed to help raise someone’s children, though, especially if everyone planned on this before conception, then the state would not be warranted in administering CC.) If but only if each of these conditions held, there would appear to be very good reason for the state to apply CC. My illustration with Terry might suggest an additional condition— that the unfit parent already has a child whom he or she is endangering and raising inadequately. In light of those who might still be concerned about the legitimacy of CC, perhaps this condition should be added too. But this might be a sufficient rather than a necessary condition of CC. For must we always wait until someone’s life has already being ruined or endangered, before applying CC to save another child’s life? We might consider one final argument for CC, before considering objections to it: In a perfectly just world, no child would be born into a seriously dangerous or disadvantaged environment or, at least, society would be responsible enough to help all children successfully survive such environments. Of course, our world is far from just, offering many children only horrendous environments to be brought up in. Faced with these far-from-just conditions, then, any society that has the ability to administer CC must face a choice about its use as a tool against these unjust conditions. Either it can responsibly support those disadvantaged children and parents that need extensive help (a responsibility which, so far, states have been reluctant or unwilling to perform) or at least it can responsibly implement a system of CC, for all those families or potential families where the child would otherwise enter a lethal or crippling environment. (And this is a responsibility which, since the medical advent of various forms of CC, the state at least now has the ability to perform.) To not take this first course of action (not providing enough help for disadvantaged children to overcome their disadvantages as they grow up) is unjust and blameworthy enough. But to not at least provide this other fair and relatively efficient course of action (implementing CC in these extreme cases) seems even more unjust and blameworthy. For it would be one thing to stand idly by while a child was drowning in a pool, and not spend a little effort in jumping in try to save him. But it would be another thing—and arguably a more morally reprehensible thing—to refuse to spend even less effort, if one had the chance, to prevent the child (whom we’ll assume can’t swim on her own) from ending up in that pool in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of

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cure. In other words, then, however much it’s wrong to not pay for a pound’s worth of cure (by not helping the worse-off children survive danger and deadening disadvantages), it seems even more wrong to not pay for an ounce’s worth of prevention (by not applying CC and thereby not preventing the worst-off children from being killed or suffering crippling setbacks in the first place).

4.3.2. Objections against CC As convincing as they might seem, however (and I hope the reader will not too quickly dismiss their persuasive force), these positive arguments for CC certainly do not tell the whole story. There are also many strong objections and potential problems with CC that must be considered, before we will be in a position to judge its overall merits or demerits. Accordingly, I will now consider various prominent objections to CC, starting with several common ones that may not really count against it, but then finishing with some more robust ones that might ultimately count against it. I will conclude by explaining why these last objections might outweigh the previous positive arguments and caution against the implementation of CC, all things considered. First, some might object that CC would simply be too heavy-handed an intervention, or too physically forceful and intrusive to be an acceptable public program. But this obscures the heavy-handed, or rather firm and severe, punishment that some people deserve and bring on themselves. Is a five-year probation, requiring close monitoring and regular counseling, too intrusive? Are sentences of twenty years or life imprisonment too severe? Is the quarantining and even coercive treatment of a contagious medical patient unwarranted? It should be clear that these questions cannot even begin to be answered until we first answer certain prior questions about the recipients of such measures: What if anything have they done to deserve such treatment? Why should we think that such punishments are (or are not) merited or appropriate? And perhaps above all, what risks, if any, do the recipients pose to others, both now and in the future? If someone has a highly contagious strain of Tuberculosis or SARS, for instance, it would not be unreasonable to insist that he be quarantined and given treatment—assuming he didn’t plan to live on a deserted island. And remember the otherregarding elements of the Harm Principle here: persons who ordinarily possess certain rights (including the basic right not to be coerced or interfered with by others) are commonly understood to forfeit these rights, if they’ve harmed or would very likely harm others. From these considerations, we might reasonably conclude that “persons do indeed

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possess the right to procreate—unless they would be unable or unwilling to adequately care for children born to them (and had made no arrangements with willing, competent others to provide this care).” If offered with these reasonable provisos in mind, then, CC would not necessarily have to be too harsh or heavy-handed. Second, some might object that CC would be unacceptable because it would be inherently racist, or hopelessly counterproductive to minorities. Clearly, and particularly in the United States, minorities have suffered disproportionately from various discriminatory public health and “correctional” programs.12 We need think here only of the Tuskegee syphilis trials or sterilization campaigns of the early- to mid-20th century, among myriad other cases, to remind us of this historical truism. These programs often applied prejudiced standards of judgment, treatment, and punishment to minorities, with systematically unjust and dehumanizing results (cf. Massey & Denton, 1993; and Tonry, 1995). But do these things automatically imply that CC should never be applied in societies with such histories of racism, like the United States? Although I suspect so (and come to this provisional conclusion at section’s end), it will help to pause here before accepting this conclusion too hastily, and consider some arguments that might suggest otherwise. It’s possible that CC could effectively help minorities, if implemented impartially and under the right circumstances. For consider that a significant part of the injustice of these past programs was rooted not only in their immediate racism but also in their bad results—their tendency, far too often, to effectively “keep minorities down.” “Correctional” institutions have seldom corrected, rehabilitative programs have seldom rehabilitated, welfare programs have sometimes not improved welfare but increased dependency and splintered families, and so on. So these previous forms of intervention have often done as much to perpetuate cycles of racial disadvantage as to break them. In contrast, one appealing feature of CC might be its effectiveness in breaking cycles of disadvantage. If administered with good discretion and impartiality (by applying it only in those “homes” where children would almost certainly be hurt), then relatively less minority children would have to enter the world into immediately hostile environments, and thereby into all-too-common cycles of deprivation and crippled development— since these worst-off children wouldn’t even be conceived in the first place. If CC were administered so, a relatively higher proportion of minority children would thus be born into supportive environments, where they could grow up and flourish with the same chances for success and respect that nonminority children enjoy. CC thus might well contribute to the following: There would be a relatively lower proportion

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of minority children who withered, from day one on, from crippling environments and disadvantages, and a relatively higher proportion of minority children born immediately into supportive environments, with correspondingly higher chances to develop and flourish. (In addition, CC would also help struggling minority parents realize their autonomy more, by their not having to bear the additional burdens of raising children until they were at least minimally competent to do so and also minimally competent to run their own lives.) In the long run, then, on both an individual and group scale, CC might very well help these minorities to emerge out of, rather than continue in, the stultifying living conditions and cycles of disadvantage that they have too long suffered under. Imagine the long-term effects of these possibilities 30 years from now: If CC is not implemented, it is easy to imagine that, say, nearly 40% of all black males will still end up having experiences in the criminal justice system at that time. But if CC is implemented, it is conceivable that, say, only 10%, or perhaps the same percent as white males, will end up having such bad experience. The later-generational effects of CC could be quite helpful, then, in allowing higher percentages of future generations of minorities be in much better shape and end up living much more autonomous, self-standing, and self-respecting lives. At this point, however, certain eugenics fears might arise, namely, that programs of compulsory contraception (CC), even if initially undertaken for such benevolent reasons, might sometime thereafter turn into nightmarish population control techniques, to decrease or seriously curtail the population growth of various minorities. Perhaps no society should ever be so smug about its moral progress as to rule this possibility out. Racist and nationalist evils might rear their ugly head in practically any setting. But at least where there seems to be very little danger of these nightmares or evils emerging, we might ask the following hypothetical questions: Considered as a future people, who would be in better shape overall? Or who would gain more and be able to command more respect: members of a racial group who had relatively a few more members, but where proportionally many more of these led miserable and nonautonomous lives; or members of that same group who had a few less members overall, but where proportionally many more of these could hold their heads up high, being clearly the equals in stature and attainment of all the others and other groups of that society? Arguably the latter would be in better shape—perhaps not in terms of sheer numbers but by any other standard of well-being, selfrespect, or life attainments. With the implementation of CC, therefore, it seems plausible that, after a number of generations, any currently disadvantaged minority would have proportionally many more mem-

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bers who were better off, rather than the same relatively high proportions of members who were worse off. (Incidentally, we could extend this reasoning to whole national and global populations, rather than only to the populations of minorities. That is, we might ask: Which of these following two possible worlds would be better? One, very much like our own, which did not administer CC and which contained proportionally more destitute children and, thereby, also proportionally more adult misery and nonautonomy? Or one which used CC and thus (though having a slightly smaller overall population) contained proportionally fewer destitute children and, thereby, also a much higher per capita level of adult health, wellbeing, and autonomous self-realization? Surely the latter “CC world” would far outshine the former, and this without anyone’s rights being violated! Cf. Barry and Sikora.) What should we say about such race-based arguments for and against CC? It seems to me that neither the negative objections nor positive defenses, in themselves, offer conclusive, knock-down reasons why CC should be rejected or implemented, respectively. The objections do not establish that CC is inherently unacceptable, or that it must be rejected for necessarily being applicable only in racist ways. The negative but also positive arguments both rest on empirical contingencies of whether or not, or to what degree, any society currently manifests racist attitudes, inclinations, or practices. Admittedly, societies that currently manifest virulent forms of racism should probably not implement CC, for fear of only entrenching racial injustice. But societies who have largely put racism behind them may find that implementing CC is a great boon, for breaking cycles of disadvantage for minorities. Before we can render a conclusive judgment for or against CC, then, we’ll need to consider other aspect and effects of it. Third, then, but along similar lines as the above concerns, some might object that CC is unacceptable because it would be patently sexist, or inherently biased against women. Here too, it must be admitted that historically, women have suffered disproportionately from illegitimate violations of their sexuality and procreative liberties. But again, this seems to imply not that CC is inherently sexist or wrongful, but rather that it should be administered only to appropriate recipients, where these are chosen on a fair gender-impartial basis. Admittedly, though, such impartiality might prove challenging to implement for medical reasons. One of the reasons that sterilization and contraceptive measures have been disproportionately applied to women in the past is because of their physiology: it just so happens, as Ellen Moskowitz et al.

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explain, that “the male reproductive biology is more difficult to interrupt” and, correspondingly, that the female reproductive biology is medically much easier to interrupt.13 Consequently, it’s tempting to conclude from this that it would be unfair if CC were administered solely or disproportionately to women. If so, this would necessitate not administering it to women at all until a safe and reliable way were found to administer it to men. On the other hand, fairness might not dictate that CC be suspended until this later point (when forms of CC that are as safe and effective for men are developed). For although it might seem unfair to women that appropriate male candidates cannot receive this intervention now, it might be more unfair on balance—considering the children harmed in the interim—if we did not administer CC at all. The one apparent injustice (of not administering CC to certain men who merit it, when women with the same criteria are receiving it) should not preclude, and does not excuse, the other injustice (of continuing to allow children to be born into pernicious environments). I say “apparent injustice” in the former case because, if we view this dilemma in terms of methodological individualism rather than holism, there may be no injustice to any individual woman here. For if applied with discretion and impartiality, there would be no woman who was not a proper candidate for CC who received it. According to this standard, the fact that some men (who are proper candidates for CC) are not receiving it, may present no injustice to any individual woman in particular. If there were truly an injustice toward women here, it would seem to be only toward the group of women, taken as a whole gender. But since this claim (that the delivery of CC only or disproportionately to women, even for purely medical reasons, would comprise an injustice to women in general, although to no individual woman in particular) does not seem altogether coherent, I will assume it lacks sufficient weight to warrant the suspension of CC until male forms of it are developed. Ernest Van den Haag has made a similar point regarding capital punishment, which applies to both these racist and sexist objections to CC. Van den Haag notes that capital punishment has been applied more to blacks who kill whites than to blacks or whites who kill blacks. Even so, he argues, this does imply that capital punishment is wrong in itself (in se), or that those blacks who were executed were executed wrongly (unless of course they were innocent of the murders for which they were tried). All it implies is that the distribution of capital punishment—specifically in terms of those guilty whites who were not punished—was unfair. And as he concludes, “a wrongful distribution of [anything] does not make that thing wrong in itself” (Van den Haag, 1986, 1662). The relevance of this to the case of CC is as follows: Even

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if it is unfair that some men who are proper candidates for CC do not currently receive it, this does not imply that it is unfair if some women who are proper candidates for CC do receive it. Any injustice here would arguably obtain only if women who did receive CC were not proper candidates for it, or perhaps if society were not trying to develop the medical means to apply it to the proper male candidates. Or again, it isn’t clear—on the basis of any kind of group or “gender parity” reasons—why it would not be fair for proper female candidates to receive it until such medical means were developed. Fourth, and again along somewhat similar lines, some might object that CC is unacceptable because it would be inherently classist, or would disproportionately target the poor while leaving the middle and especially upper classes relatively unaffected, so that it would only further exacerbate the inequitable distribution of benefits and burdens in society. The general response given in the previous case (that a fair application of CC would be unjust to no poor person in particular) seems appropriate here as well. The only poor persons who would be “burdened” by CC should be those who merited it, namely, those who would otherwise conceive and almost certainly harm the child born to them. But preventing such persons from conceiving, as noted earlier, would serve to decrease, rather the increase, their burdens—by allowing them to more easily overcome their own struggles and disadvantages, without (or before) having to worry about also bringing others through these. So CC might serve to do the opposite of what critics fear here: in the long run, CC could well serve to ameliorate rather than exacerbate current inequities. For without CC, many children of the poor (especially those whose parents are poor and largely nonautonomous) will more likely continue to remain poor and nonautonomous themselves, when growing up. But with CC, relatively many more children of the poor would be able to escape poverty, by being born only into environments where mild material adversity is all they would have to overcome to become autonomous and, conversely, by not being born into more noxious environments where material poverty is combined with other crippling disadvantages. (Remember COD again, and the clustering of disadvantages pattern.) Furthermore, CC would not inherently or necessarily have to be “classist,” because a parent’s poor socioeconomic status would certainly not be enough, in itself, to warrant CC. For CC to be warranted, it must be the case that the poor parent would bring the (potential) child into an environment consisting of some crippling combination of disadvantages (per my COD, SOD, and AID guidelines)—such as an environment combining poverty with a documented history of psychoses, abuse and violence. So even if CC might be disproportionately

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applied to impoverished (potential) parents, this would not necessarily mean that CC would be classist in a pejorative sense. Rather, this COD pattern might simply emphasize the unfortunate fact that poverty—in terms of what Amartya Sen calls “multi-capability deprivation”—is often clustered together with a host of other disadvantages and risk factors besides mere material deprivation, and that it rarely exists as purely material deprivation (Sen 1992, esp. ch. 7). To see this contrast, graduate students often serve as illustrations of these rare purely materially poor people. But the fact that these students seldom remain in poverty for long, after their graduation, reveals the purely material nature of their poverty, accompanied as it is by relatively few other forms of deprivation and undeveloped capabilities. Grad students may often be “poor” (with their expenses and debts greatly outweighing their income), but they usually have intellectual and social resources, marketable skills and capabilities that other “truly poor” lower class people rarely have. And this explains why the “autonomy trajectory” of grad students and the working poor is so radically different. Notwithstanding, the point is that CC would not be administered to poor parents, simpliciter, but rather only to parents who had some seriously dangerous combination of dysfunctions and deprivations. In turn, the provisional conclusion is that CC would not necessarily be classist, or inherently biased against the poor, but at worst only wrongly misapplied toward some poor parents who did not meet all the criteria for its application. At this point, it is time to directly consider one final objection, that has been suggested only indirectly so far and that may ultimately be the most damning criticism of compulsory contraception (CC). Even if CC was not inherently racist or sexist or classist, and thus not wrong in itself, as Van den Haag would say, there is still the possibility that it would simply be too prone to abuse, and misapplied in racist, sexist, and classist ways. Even if CC was defensible or morally justifiable in principle, then, we would still need to consider its real-world application, and the effects it would have when implemented in nonideal societies by imperfect public officials with flawed judgment and discretionary powers. In this sense, any family or parent or potential parent could suffer wrongly if this policy were enacted, by allowing officials to inappropriately intrude into their confidential information, their private lives, and especially their procreative liberties and abilities. And it is hard to believe that this would never happen, that officials who were entrusted with powers to apply and enforce CC would never end up targeting recipients who weren’t appropriate candidates for it. Of course, it should be noted here that perfect or never-erring implementation is not an ethical requirement for implementing any

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public program. If it were, no programs of any kind would ever be implemented. In each case, whether the question is the implementation of, say, mandatory schooling, or immunizations, or long prison terms, or capital punishment, and so forth, the costs, benefits and risks of implementing the program should never be considered alone, regardless of how weighty these might seem, but must always be weighed against the costs, benefits, and risks of not implementing that program. For example, with the death penalty, some abolitionists argue that it should be abolished if even one innocent citizen has been (or runs some sizable risk of being) executed. But things are obviously not that simple, despite the rhetorical appeal of this argument. To really make his case, such an abolitionist would have to show why the death of one innocent man so outweighs the good that results when some number of guilty men are punished, or outweighs the bad that would result— if there were no such penalty—when some number of guilty men would escape punishment. This is another form of the age-old dilemma: In the nonideal world that we live in, is it better to more certainly punish the guilty—with the risk that some innocent persons might thereby be punished in the process, or to more certainly protect the innocent, with the risk that some guilty persons might not be punished in the process? And if we reason that its better to protect an innocent person even if the guilty go free, are we willing to extend this logic to the point of protecting an innocent person at the cost of letting, say, a hundred guilty people go free, or a thousand or a million? If we assume that in our nonideal world it is sometimes practically impossible to punish all and only the guilty, it seems to go too far to insist that the protection of the innocent, or the prevention of their being punished unjustly, has absolute value, that completely trumps the value of the detection, apprehension, and punishment of the guilty. These considerations bear directly on the question of whether or not CC should be implemented. It is too easy to say, “No program of CC should be implemented because the state would sometimes be too intrusive, by invading the privacy and family life and procreative rights of some innocent persons who did not deserve to have these things invaded.” But this objection, at least framed in these singular terms, is too simplistic. If we insist that CC should never be administered for this reason, then wouldn’t we be committed, on pain of inconsistency, to insist also on not administering various other intrusive or punitive measures of the criminal justice system? For example, why is it morally acceptable to lock someone behind bars for a long time to prevent him or her from harming others, but morally unacceptable to temporarily restrict someone’s procreative liberties to prevent him or her from harming others? To justifiably conclude that CC should not be administered, one

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would have to consider all the children who would be born into seriously harmful environments and go on to live miserable lives if CC was not enacted, and weigh this against the suffering and misery that would be prevented if CC was enacted. In addition, one would also have to show why some violation of privacy and procreative liberties somehow outweighed the allowance of all that human misery and suffering! And this is a tall order. Might the unfortunate violation of one person’s procreative liberties conceivably be outweighed by the avoidance of 10 lives of misery? or 10 thousand lives of misery? Or is there no amount of human misery and no number of abused children that society would be justified in preventing, at the cost of one innocent person’s parental or procreative rights being violated? Why not? It would seem to involve hopelessly simplistic or wishful thinking to insist not or, in other words, to insist that CC could never be justified under any circumstances. At this point, I will not try to offer a magic calculus showing how much state intrusiveness (that would result from applying CC) would be justified or outweighed by how much human misery (that would otherwise continue to result if CC were not applied). Rather, I will offer a provisional and conservatively safe conclusion that, I think, takes all these cautions and arguments into consideration. To illustrate this conclusion, let us imagine a litmus test case of some society wherein neither the dangers of state overintrusiveness nor the risks of children growing up in misery (risks and societies, for example, that recent Sierra Leone or Charles Dickens’s London might have presented) clearly outweighs or overshadows the other. In this case, since we are considering the introduction of an admittedly intrusive type of program, it seems that we should err on the side of caution and reject or at least postpone the administration of CC—if this hypothetical society has much history of racism, sexism, or class conflict. In other words, I do think that this society should forego CC because, in this case, the prevention of the one set of proximal risks (viz., the intrusions that would more likely come into the lives of innocent parents or inappropriate recipients, being more likely because of the presence here of racist, sexist, and/or classist abuses) would seem to overshadow the prevention of the other set of more tenuous or distal risks (viz., the misery and nonautonomy that might come to children born of appropriate recipients in the absence of a policy of CC). To avoid any confusion here, let us consider how this line of reasoning (about when CC should not be administered) would apply to a more concrete litmus test, in this case to the southern United States. Would states like Alabama or Mississippi be better off enacting a policy of CC? Here (as with all other states in the U.S.), there have been growing concerns about an increasingly intrusive federal government— as a result of the war on terrorism and the Patriot Act, and a subsequent erosion of various civil liberties. But there have also been

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longstanding, moderate levels of children being born into poverty and unsupportive households here (compared to, say, some more northern liberal states like Vermont and some more egalitarian European welfare states like the Netherlands). So neither of these trends seems to weigh definitively against or definitively for the implementation of CC in these southern states. But when we also consider the class divisions and especially history of racism and Jim Crow laws of this society, this tips the balance of our scales. Due to these last considerations, one might justifiably conclude that CC, if it were enacted here, would be much more prone to abuse and misapplication so that, all things considered, CC should not be enacted. This conclusion would seem to hold for any other societies with significant problems of racism, sexism, or deep class divisions, or of meddling, overintrusive Big Brother–type states— since all these factors would suggest a relatively greater danger of abuse and misapplication of CC. And of course, this includes a great many societies today where CC would thus seem inappropriate. But this conclusion (that CC might be warranted only in states that were already fairly just) should not be taken to mean that CC could not be implemented in a fair and effective way anywhere today, or at anytime. Any state that exhibits a recent history or decent prospects of overcoming the three virulent “isms” (racism, sexism, and classism) and has strong institutional protections for civil liberties is a state that, in turn, shows promise of being able to implement CC in this way. (And there are some states, perhaps in Northern Europe or “down under” or in northern America, that do manifest these qualities or prospects today.) For what it’s worth, here is a provisional, all-things-considered conclusion about CC, then: On the one hand, we should not be Utopian or blind to the dangers of rights violations and overintrusiveness that CC presents, and then try to implement it in a state too prone to these dangers; but on the other hand, we should not be dystopian or overly pessimistic, by assuming that CC could never be applied fairly, or never be used as an instrument of justice to bring a much higher level of autonomy and well-being to future generations of children. Some societies, at some point in time, might find that CC could be such an instrument.

4.3.3. A Parfitian Response to CC In this last section, I will consider one more objection to CC of a more Parfitian variety or, in other words, that considers more directly various counterfactual questions about the future generations and future individuals that would be affected by CC. (Since this discussion concerns the defense of CC on more principled or theoretical grounds, readers

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who are more concerned about the practical merits or demerits of CC may skip over this section.) This objection sets itself against the following logical distillation of the pro-CC argument: 1. M1 and/or f1 (a high-risk mother and/or father) will bring c1 (a child) into the world through a1 (an act of procreation). 2. (Definition, per Feinberg:) A harm is a wrongful setback to a person’s nontrivial interests. 3. The crippled development of autonomy (CAD) constitutes a severe form of harm (1.5, 3.1). 4. As a result of a1, the development of c1’s autonomy will likely be crippled (since, by definition, m1 and/or f1 are “high-risk” parents). 5. C1 will thus probably be severely harmed by m1 and/or f1. 6. (Definition of the Harm Principle:) The state is justified in interfering with someone (in this case m1 and/or f1) when but only when that person has harmed, or will very likely otherwise harm, someone else (in this case c1). 7. (Definition:) CC is the prevention of (what would likely be) harmful types of a1 acts. 8. Therefore, the state is justified in interfering with m1 and/or f1, by preventing a1 through CC. Against this argument, the Parfitian-type objection I have in mind famously responds as follows. “Granting that all the other premises are relatively unproblematic, the questionable premises here are 4 and 5 (and the validity of 8 seems to hang on the validity of 4 and 5). As it turns out, a fatal problem emerges out of 4 and 5. Consider: If m1 and/ or f1 had not committed a1, then c1 would not even exist. So had it not been for a1, c1 would have had no interests to set back. And surely having some interests, even if these are set back, is better than having no interests at all—through not even be(com)ing alive. Therefore, it is just incoherent or false to say that m1 and/or f1 have harmed c1 by a1. This implies, in turn, that the state would not be justified in interfering with m1 and/or f1, by preventing a1 through CC.” I will not attempt to resolve all the philosophical twists and turns of this paradox here.14 What I will do is show that this objection is flawed in such a way that it does not discredit CC. So I will stick to points directly relevant to that end. First, it must be pointed out that it is not a1 alone that harms (or will harm) c1. Rather, we may assume (since they are by definition high risk parents) that m1 and/or f1, would inflict a whole set of abusive and neglectful acts (and omissions) against c1, so that, without substantial intervention, c1’s development would be crippled, so that he or she would end up a nonautonomous adult. As

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such, m1 and/or f1 would most likely harm c1 by way of a whole series of acts, a1, a2, a3, . . . an, and not just through a1 alone. Accordingly, the state would seem to have sufficient reason to implement CC—to prevent a long train of harmful abuses and neglect. At this point, Parfitian critics might stick to their guns and insist that I have not really addressed the point. That is, they might insist that, all things considered, the child still cannot properly be considered “harmed” since even a nonautonomous or deprived life (assuming that it is not so bad as to be “a life not worth living,” that has no bright points or enjoyments, or that contains intense and unremitting pain) is better than no life at all. But here is where we should notice that this objection operates from an inappropriate perspective. What do I mean by this? Consider the key but contentious underlying claim that a life characterized by nonautonomy or deprivation is still better than no life at all. Granted, this claim may seem acceptable from the perspective of an already living person, largely because any living person, even a neglected, abused, or nonautonomous one, might still come to experience something better. (For instance, a nonautonomous pauper might someday become an autonomous prince.) But is this the perspective we should be considering this question about the justifiability of CC from? No; we should be considering this question from the perspective of future, prospective lives, not from the perspective of currently existing lives. In other words, the crucial comparative question before us is not Would a current miserable life be better stamped out and ended, in midcycle? but, rather, Wouldn’t it be better not to conceive someone if he or she would almost certainly go on to live a miserable life? In considering the justifiability of CC (and so the prevention of the conception of people who would suffer miserably), we are assuredly not considering the justifiability of procedures like suicide or euthanasia (and so, the eradication of substandard lives), or even abortion (the eradication of zygotes or incipient lives). I am not, after all, advocating execution or euthanasia for nonautonomous persons who already exist. This Parfitian objection thus seems to miss these considerations and blur these perspectives two together (the perspective that looks at someone who is already alive versus the perspective that looks to the future and contemplates whether it would be better if they were conceived or not). A proactive, before-any-life perspective (as is assumed with CC) is thus distinct from a reactive, in-the-midst-of-life perspective (that CC does not assume). The latter perspective advocates trying to preserve life that has already begun, even if that life is nonautonomous and marked by terrible suffering—since there is always hope for improvement. It is not that I disagree with this perspective concerning the deep value of every human life (for I wholeheartedly agree with it); rather, this perspective is simply irrelevant here.

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Just because every life is valuable does not imply (as this critic wrongly seems to assume) that we shouldn’t try to stop some life from coming into existence if it will be marked by terrible suffering. We can’t make the logical jump from “Every life is valuable” to “The more new lives there are, the better or the more value will be in the world.” For if these new lives will be marked by such suffering, and we allow that, then we’ve arguably allowed a greater net amount of disvalue to come into the world. A world with a total of 10 happy people would be better than a world with a total of 11 happy people, where 10 of them were still happy but the 11th was suffering untold agonies. And it would not make sense, if we had the power to prevent or allow this 11th life ahead of time, to allow it, on the grounds that preventing it would be wrong or on the grounds that it would bring more value into the world. Such confused thinking and conclusions, in fact, were just the kinds of things that Derek Parfit had in mind when he condemned them as being “repugnant conclusions.” To make sure we are clear here, then, the misguidedness of this type of objection may also be understood from this “repugnant conclusion”: If there is no harm in conceiving high-risk children who will almost certainly end up living nonautonomous lives, and if it is better for such children to be alive rather than not to exist at all, then it follows that it would be better for all high-risk parents (including murderers, psychotics, recidivist felons and violent offenders, child abusers and sexual molesters, etc.) to reproduce as much as they can or want, with our allowance or even blessings. For by such logic, the world would only gain in value as more and more of their children were allowed into the world! But surely such logic is flawed. And where it breaks down can be traced back to its rejection of the arguably more reasonable logic of CC. (But I should point out that although my rebuttal here might defend CC against this Parfitian-type objection, that should not be taken to mean that CC may be defended or justified overall. My previous allthings-considered cautions and conclusions against the use of CC, arrived at in 4.3.2, still hold.) This concludes my discussion of why and in what ways the state might be justified in involving itself in the private family sphere, in order to protect children’s attainment of at least minimal autonomy. In this next and last chapter, I focus upon a particular issue which, although of crucial importance to children’s development of autonomy, has so far been addressed only indirectly—namely, children’s educations. So I will continue to examine what obligations the state might have toward children, but this time regarding standards that should govern the provision of public grade school education.

5

Intervention in the School An Educational Justice Standard

The state may require that children be educated up to a certain standard; and this coercive interference, when necessary, is justified in order to prevent severe harm both to the child and to others in society at large. —James S. Fishkin

As was noted in chapter 2, children’s education will be almost as crucial as their family life in expanding or constricting the level of autonomy they eventually come to possess. The quality of their education will largely determine the degree to which they’ll be able to: (a) assimilate various cognitive skills; (b) develop various career skills and pursue careers well suited to their unique talents, plans, and preferences; and (c) become aware of the world’s opportunities, challenges, and complexities, and so on. With a good education, the range and quality of life-goods a child will eventually be able to choose from will be limited only by her ambition and innate potential, not by ignorance, incompetence, or undue compromise.1 But with an inadequate education, other things being equal, this range of life-goods will be severely limited, as will the child’s commensurate and emerging level of autonomy. By now, this much is old news. In this chapter, I extend these claims by proposing a Standard of Educational Justice that, I argue, any just and decent society will provide in support of all its children’s developing autonomy. A corollary here will be that societies that do not embrace such a standard will be 157

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substantially unjust, with this injustice gauged by the percentage and distribution of children who are inadequately educated and thereby left ill-prepared for adult independence and autonomy (cf. Appendix). To introduce the need for this Standard, I start with arguments similar to those used previously: in section 5.1, I argue that, since the state already strictly regulates such enterprises as hospitals, restaurants, and many worksites—because of the risks and serious interests at stake—the reasons for such regulation also apply, and should be applied, to schools. In 5.2, I specify the content of this Standard as consisting of six independent but mutually supportive conditions; and as I explain, mandatory provision of these six educational conditions will give children the resources they’ll need to stay on developmental trajectories aimed toward their attainment of at least a minimal level of autonomy (* AL3) by the time they become adults. This will complete the bulk of my account of justice for children, based as it is on the moral injunction to provide children with what they’ll need to attain at least this minimal level of autonomy. But in an addendum (5.3), I consider questions that go beyond, and test the boundaries of, the framework I’ve maintained throughout. Here, I consider whether it might be fair to prepare children for more than this minimal threshold level of autonomy, so that they attain a less tenuous and more robust autonomy (* AL4) that would enable them to actualize options from a much wider range of careers and life-goods (cf. Winch, 2002). Although I think my account up to 5.2 stands on its own as a coherent whole, then, I broach this important possibility in 5.3 in order to suggest some of the implications my autonomy-based account might have in relation to other more aggressively egalitarian educational norms (especially equality of opportunity).

5.1. The Need for Educational Justice Inadequate schools can have deadening effects on children and can stymie their developing autonomy every bit as much as abusive parents and dismal home environments. The following scenarios may serve to bring this point home (in a way that the more empirical information of chapter 2 did not). In his landmark books Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools and, more recently, Savage Inequalities, Jonathon Kozol allows insiders to inform us of conditions that are still prevalent in many contemporary American grade schools. Christopher, a seventh grader from Clarke Junior High School (which is, supposedly, the premier junior high in East St. Louis), has this to say about his school:

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“Don’t tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet if you would like to know what life is like for students [here].” Before I [Kozol] leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boy’s bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilet stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotten wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll. “This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St. Louis.” (Kozol, 1992, 36) Kozol lets Smokey and Serena, two nine-year olds from another “lessthan-premier” East St. Louis school, tell us about the environment of their school: Smokey says his sister was raped and murdered and then dumped behind his school. Other children add more details: Smokey’s sister was 11 years old. She was beaten with a brick until she died. . . . Serena describes this sequence of events: “They told her go behind the school. They’ll give her a quarter if she do. Then they knock her down and told her not to tell what they had did.” I ask, “Why did they kill her?” “They was scared that she would tell,” Serena says.2 And Kozol allows the Chicago Tribune to recount another anecdote, this time about Lathrop Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side: There are no hoops on the basketball court and no swings in the playground. For 21 years, the school has been without a library. Library books, which have been piled and abandoned in the lunch room of the school, have sprouted mold. Some years ago the school received the standard reading textbooks out of sequence: The second workbook in the reading program came to the school before the first. The principal, uncertain what to do with the wrong workbook, was told by school officials it was “all right to work backwards. . . .” (1992, 53) Although similar depressing scenarios could be provided ad nauseum, these few should suffice to highlight our central concern: that, without better regulation, inadequate schools such as these will undermine, rather than sufficiently contribute to, children’s developing autonomy. In the

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case of Smokey’s sister, not only her budding autonomy but her life itself was cut short, due in part to inadequate security on the school grounds. But in the less scandalous and more typical cases that are relevant here, children’s autonomy will be cut short merely by an inadequate cultivation of various cognitive and self-efficacy skills. As I detailed earlier (1.2.1 & 2.3), these skills are necessary components of autonomy, in that, without at least some minimal cultivation of them, young adults will not be able, for example, to exercise certain meansends rationality (including the ability to discern what steps are necessary to achieve one’s adult and career goals). On a basic level, it’s hard to see how young adults who haven’t even acquired basic literacy and numeracy skills could be considered truly autonomous members of their society (assuming that their society isn’t a preindustrialized one). Admittedly, these claims might not be fully apparent in relation to only this first set of necessary conditions of autonomy (these cognitive and self-efficacy skills); so to more clearly understand the way that a decent education is essential to the development of autonomy, we should also consider another important condition of autonomy, namely, an “adequate range of options.” I argued at the outset (1.2) that, when confronted with an inadequate range of options to choose from, an agent will be hindered from governing her life autonomously, since someone can do so, and can exercise truly autonomous preferences, only if she’s able to make choices from among some decent variety of options, with these representing more than a ubiquitous uniformity or narrowness of choice. For example, if my only really feasible career options are between being a janitor, a dishwasher, and a garbage collector, and I ‘choose’ to be a janitor, the ‘autonomy’ of my choice will be dubious. (One should recall similar arguments from 2.2, that no one qualifies as being truly autonomous unless they have a decent range of life-goods available, from which they can nonadaptively realize some life-goods of their preferred choosing.) At the time someone is entering young adulthood, then, there are two distinct ways that a person might be confronted with an inadequate range or paucity of life options, so as to render him or her nonautonomous. First, the person might be an eminently competent young adult, possessing the capacities and abilities for a wide range of careers, enjoyments, and life prospects, and yet be denied access to these because of, say, racial and/or gender discrimination. We might imagine a young highly talented black girl living under a Jim Crow regime here who, despite being suitably qualified, simply can’t get accepted into her preferred colleges or fields of work, in turn so that only

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unsteady, menial and demeaning jobs are available to her, along with the low wages and financial and social struggles that accompany them— all ill effects suffered merely because of her gender and skin color. In contrast, a young adult might have the same paucity of life-goods and career prospects to choose from, not because of any such blatantly unfair exclusion or prejudice, but simply because he lacks the skills to manage his own life and financial affairs competently, and because he never cultivated the tastes to enjoy any but the most crude “life-goods” (such as come only from the pleasures of, say, sex, TV, and cheap alcohol). In the first case, whereas the talented person possesses autonomy but is unjustly prevented from exercising it, in the second case, we can say that, insofar as this stultified person lacks many basic cognitive and self-efficacy skills, he lacks even the possession of autonomy. There is one additional distinction with this second case that bears pointing out: if this virtually nonautonomous person never attained essential cognitive and self-efficacy skills merely because of moral lapses, or because, despite having gone to exemplary schools, he or she was simply very lazy and did not apply him- or herself at all, we need not suspect any systemic institutionalized injustice as the root problem. But in contrast, if the incompetent person never had a decent chance to attain various cognitive and self-efficacy skills—largely because of attending only deplorable “East St. Louis–type” schools, so that only the most gifted prodigies could have endured that environment without becoming deadened and stultified—then we could conclude that some type of systemic institutional injustice was a root problem. It is this last institutional pattern or process of injustice that I’ll target in what follows. According to this process, society does not merely prevent many young people from exercising their newly developed autonomy (as was the case in the Jim Crow regime); but at a prior stage, it prevents them from developing their autonomy, by denying them needed training and education early on, that would equip them with the building blocks (various cognitive and self-efficacy skills) of autonomy. In this process, therefore, society essentially functions as an inexcusably negligent parent, harming its own by not providing for their developmental needs and essentially abandoning them to arrested development and maladjustment. A natural response here might be to say that parents bear the primary responsibility for instilling these cognitive and self-efficacy skills in their children, so that: (a) a public system of education is meant, or should be meant, to serve only as a secondary supplement to this instilling process rather than as a replacement of it, and that, in turn, (b) society-at-large should not be seen as responsible or culpable or as

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“harming its own,” merely because some parents fail to adequately prepare their children for adulthood. While this response might appear to offer a more balanced perspective on the responsibilities of parents and states to adequately raise children, nevertheless it obscures some very important factors. First, this response obscures the fact that many, and probably the wide majority of, parents are simply unable (with too little time, money, and academic resources) to adequately equip their children with the knowledge and cognitive skills that will be required for these children to survive on their own later, as free-standing autonomous citizens in our complex, technological age. Yes, parents should be expected to instill a variety of skills and virtues in their children; but nowadays it’s simply unreasonable to expect that parents should also be able to equip their children with all the cognitive skills and training they’ll need to be able to branch out later, in careers and life paths of their own choosing. Similarly, this response (that “parents bear the only or primary responsibility . . .”) obscures the fact that modern society has adopted a public system of education as the most efficient way to prepare children to become self-standing citizens. After having shed (the strictures of) the feudal system of apprentices and journeymen, where children were usually expected to learn and resume their parents trade (or else prepare for life as beggars or adventurers), we “enlightened moderns” have come to realize both that early family circumstances should not limit children’s range of future options and careers and enjoyments, and, concomitantly, that the most efficient way to prepare children for a decent range of careers and life-goods is through public systems of education, that surpass (in terms of gains in freedoms and effective training) what any paternal system of apprenticing could pass on. Gesturing toward a more parent-based and less publicly instituted system of education, therefore, would amount to an insensitive, regressive and counterproductive, rather than progressive and pragmatic, reaction to my arguments about the culpability of modern society. My earlier arguments, remember, were basically that whenever society allows children to go without adequate training and education, it functions like criminally negligent parents who harm their own by not providing for crucial developmental needs (3.1). Assuming that this is so, the next question becomes: What kind of social and legal action would be appropriate, even morally mandated, to redress such deleterious school conditions, to prevent children from ending up as “arrested” nonautonomous adults (or as Alasdair MacIntyre would say, to prevent them from having to “step onto the adult stage as anxious unscripted stutterers”)?

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Our common resort, in cases where innocents are harmed, is to criminal and tort law. But such stultifying school conditions do not seem amenable to these remedies. This is in contrast to the sorts of stultifying home conditions that were discussed in the previous chapter, where (we saw how) criminal law applications could be derived straightforwardly from the Harm Principle, to hold irresponsible caregivers accountable for their duties towards children. Although children’s development may be stunted and harmed just as much from bad schools and educators as from bad homes and parents, however, the criminal law is ill suited to address the former causes of harm. A central reason why is that it would seem rather inappropriate to indict or arrest on criminal charges those public officials and citizens whose actions were causally responsible for poor school conditions. We can imagine here: Budget Appropriations Committee members that divert limited public funds away from desperately needy schools and schoolchildren and toward their own pet boondoggle projects; or a “Senator Stoneheart” who blocks legislation that would mandate much needed improvements to ineffective school boards and systems; and on a more mundane level, we can imagine citizens who are simply so self-absorbed and caught up with their own adult interests that they don’t back candidates and policies that would improve terribly subpar schools. Likewise, tort law seems to offer no better prospects for addressing the harms that children suffer through inadequate schooling. How could we assess what reparations were due a (grown-up?) child who attended shoddy schools? Could we rely on children to defend their own interests in a court of law? And how, and to whom, could we assign fault? As might be apparent, the direct fault that abusive parents often have toward children is substantially different from the indirect or complicit fault that apathetic or ineffective legislators and citizens have toward children. Even when the latter’s votes and acts squarely set back children’s interests, it seems that their fault—in terms of mens rea culpability, liability, or irresponsibility—is just as or more difficult to establish as the fault of abusive and neglectful parents. More broadly, then, as Bill Keller notes, “It’s hard to apportion individual blame for a dysfunctional system.”3 Even if the criminal law and tort law are ill-suited to address the harms that children suffer through terribly subpar schools, though, some legal principles and social interventions should be found to remedy these systemic disorders. For the central, unshakable concern here is that, without such intervention, the harm to this one set of children (whose minds, dreams, and imaginations wither indirectly at school, at the hands of underfunded, overworked, and incompetent educators) will continue to be every bit as deadening and autonomy-impairing as the harm that

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comes to that other set of children (whose brains and bodies are damaged directly at home, as a result of “shaking” and other forms of abuse at the hands of cruel or neglectful parents). So whereas parental licensing (geared to regulating the competencies of individual parents) might suffice to redress those harms that come to children at home, a more basic form of licensing or regulation will be needed to prevent the harms that come to children through bad schools and the lack of adequate early cognitive stimulation. Another challenge is that however complex homes are, schools are more complex—in the sense of operating on more extensive and intercoordinated levels of organization. Problems with bad schools stem not only from “bad teachers” (as would be the parental equivalent of the roots of bad homes), but from a vast array of additional disorders, including incompetent, overwrought, unaccountable, and inefficient personnel and management structures (which will be more complex than the simple husband-wife and parent-child relational structures), run down facilities and equipment, inadequate resources and curricular materials, and so forth. Consequently, forms of licensing and regulation that are suited for more complex enterprises—like workplaces, hospitals, and restaurants—will serve as helpful and appropriate models here. Consider the justifications for OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and JCAH (the Joint Committee for the Accreditation of Hospitals) regulations, along with regulations that impose standards of hygiene and cleanliness for food selling businesses: Because of the risks that arise in these and other public sites (due to outdated and ineffective equipment, inadequately trained personnel, fire hazards, food poisoning, etc.), and because employee(r)s at these sites may not consistently be relied on to maintain their own decent standards of risk and quality management, the state has rightly reasoned that it may send out behind-the-scenes inspectors to determine whether or not suitable standards are being met.4 And if these standards are not being met, then sanctions, reallocation of funds, and replaced or improved management will then result, where such changes, in turn, provide incentives but also resources, if necessary, to help these enterprises come into compliance. Why should school systems not operate according to regulatory standards and mechanisms that are just as strictly and efficiently managed? Surely not because the risks or interests involved are any less substantial. Of course, educational boards already gesture at systems of accreditation to accomplish such purposes. But since so many children and schools and districts (especially in the inner cities) “fall through the cracks” of these systems, they should, I suggest, be modified towards

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the more stringent and prioritized guidelines I will offer. For are our children’s minds so much less important than our own bodies? Is it fair to insist that all those doctors who treat our bodies be competent, while allowing teachers who train our children’s minds to be far less competent? Is it fair to demand that all our workplaces be safe, while allowing so many of our children to not attain the skills necessary to work in these places? Is it reasonable to insist that all our food servers—who prepare our meals for us—have adequate hygiene standards and facilities, while so many of our teachers—who prepare our children for us (and for their own futures)—do not have adequate standards and facilities?5 Or perhaps more to the point, is it morally defensible for adult citizens to continue to order their budgets and public affairs in such a way that the exercise of their own autonomy remains a high priority, while the development of children’s autonomy remains a relatively low priority? For any morally responsible and conscientious generation of adults, would not the latter be just as much of a priority as the former? For all these reasons, a more aggressive and comprehensive solution— perhaps drawn along the lines of Civil Rights or Equal Employment Opportunity legislation—is called for, to address the pervasive problems that continue to plague so many of our schools and school systems. (Incidentally, my proposals here will apply primarily to public schools, since there are relatively few private schools and home-schooling programs that present unacceptably dangerous school conditions. These regulations need only be applied to private schools, then, if these schools presented such deleterious conditions that they threatened to undermine children’s attainment of even minimal autonomy. And these cases would be quite rare if not nonexistent, pertaining only, perhaps, to cases that were worse than those in Waco, Texas, where children were raised and taught under the “tutelage” of David Koresh. So although I personally think that liberal, multicultural educations best foster children’s attainment of autonomy, I assume that the far majority of private, religious, and home schools provide conditions that do not hinder children from attaining at least minimal autonomy. And of course, it should also be mentioned that many of these schools do an exemplary job of training their children and of preparing them to lead highly autonomous lives.) It is not my intention to offer detailed practical proposals as to how such educational regulations and standards could be effectively implemented. Rather, my intention is to expose the indefensible lack of stricter regulations for schools, and to suggest that there are no insuperable practical or moral obstacles to their implementation. When any society as affluent and technologically advanced as ours allows so many

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of its school systems to operate below decent standards—and thereby essentially neglects the developmental needs of so many of its children— it seems likely that this happens not because society simply “can’t figure out how to do better,” but rather because it lacks the will, the moral resolve, to do better and to organize its priorities more responsibly.6

5.2. The Educational Justice Standard (to Support at Least Minimal Autonomy, * AL3) Let us thus assume that some kind of broad Educational Standard—that laid out a set of legally enforceable and practically realizable educational standards and regulations, that all grade schools would have to meet or be brought up to—is morally mandated. I have said nothing so far about what its individual standards and regulations would look like, or what the specific components of this overarching Standard would be. To deduce these components, we might start by looking back at the kinds of horrid educational conditions that Smokey and Christopher and all had to endure. As a provisional answer to this “What components?” question, we might say that any such “East St. Louis” conditions are unacceptable and inadequate because, even if they would not positively subvert children’s development, they would yet likely place all children (except perhaps the exceptionally gifted or resilient) who were subjected to them on a developmental trajectory that would land them below the autonomy threshold (< AL3) by the time they became adults. In lieu of such dismal projections, Amy Gutmann and Harry Frankfurt have offered substantive hints as to how a minimal standard of educational adequacy or “sufficiency” could be filled out. Gutmann has argued that the content of children’s right to education will depend upon what is adequate for living a full life within their society—for being capable of choosing among available conceptions of the good and of participating intelligently in democratic politics if they choose. I have no doubt that this criterion imposes substantially greater obligations upon us than we fulfill by our current educational practices.7 In this light, a proper Educational Standard would entail whatever educational conditions would be necessary to give children a fair and decent chance to live rational, self-supporting, socially involved, and autonomous lives.

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Similarly, Frankfurt has contended that, in regard to questions of the just distribution of social and educational resources, what really matters is not whether people enjoy an equal or near equal share, but whether they enjoy a sufficient share—that meets their vital needs and enables them to live decent and tolerable human lives. Those below a utility threshold are not necessarily benefited by additional resources that move them closer to [us]. What is crucial for them is to attain the threshold. . . . What I believe [egalitarians] find intuitively to be morally objectionable, in the types of situations characteristically cited as instances of inequality, is not the fact that some individuals in those situations have less than others but the fact that those with less have too little. . . . What directly touches us in cases of this kind is not a quantitative discrepancy but a qualitative condition—not the fact that the resources of those who are worse off are smaller in magnitude than ours but the different fact that these people are so poor. . . . In the doctrine of sufficiency the use of the notion of “enough” pertains to meeting a standard. (Frankfurt, 1987, 32, 37) Let me elaborate this last suggestion. In the context of grade school educational resources, insufficiency carries a temporal implication. It implies that educational insufficiency can easily have permanent repercussions for children, preventing them from living decent lives and having decent self-supporting characters in the future when they’re adults. As Frankfurt explains, The lives of those who are stuck on the short ends of socioeconomic and political [and educational] inequalities are often severely and sometimes irreparably impaired. . . . The hardships that such disadvantaged situations inescapably impose may seriously damage a person’s character. The deprivations and injuries that people suffer may be so penetrating that they go beyond merely making it hopelessly difficult for them to conduct decent and fulfilling lives. Far more drastically, those people may be psychically impaired in ways that render them incapable even of understanding what it would be for them to try to live such lives. The catastrophically unfavorable circumstances that people in radically inferior positions must endure may not only cause them to live badly. Those circumstances may play a more harshly destructive

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Taking these suggestions as general guidelines that the Educational Justice Standard, or “sufficiency standard,” should consolidate, then, the next question becomes, “What specific educational conditions will provide children with ‘what is adequate for living a full life within their society’ (per Gutmann), or with ‘sufficient conditions for (at least) a minimally tolerable life’ (per Frankfurt),” or, in accordance with my account, with ‘what is necessary to enable them to become at least minimally autonomous, self-standing adults’?” In response, these conditions might be spelled out further in terms of “educational resources provided.” As such, the Standard would mark out whatever resources will provide children with decent chances of attaining tolerable and autonomous lives as adults. Unfortunately, this move is still too vague and general to suffice. For even if a school had the resources of, say, many millions of dollars at its disposal, to spend in whatever way it deemed best for students, administrators could still spend the money ineffectively, allowing the students to end up, say, with marvelous gyms, lunchrooms, and playgrounds, but still inadequate instruction. So although we’re moving in the right direction, more specificity is needed. The Standard might then be defined as “that level of educational resources (understood in a broad and not just financial sense) sufficient to prepare all educable students to have a decent range of college- and career options at the post-high school starting gate from which to choose, thereby gaining the chance to attain at least minimal levels of young adult autonomy.”8 Kozol’s negative anecdotes, such as were mentioned at the outset, provide suggestions as to how the first part of this formulation (a “sufficient level of educational resources”) might be elaborated. Christopher, recall, had to endure loathsome bathroom and sewage facilities; Smokey and Serena had to maneuver through dangerous, even murderous, school and playground environments; and the students at Lathrop Elementary lacked proper library books and textbooks, and competent or caring administrators. We might systematize

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these resources (or lack thereof) as follows, by saying that all students require, and so should be provided with: (a) adequate facilities (clean and functional bathrooms, lab equipment, lunchrooms, playgrounds, etc.), (b) an adequate (safe, nonthreatening, and decently maintained) school environment, (c) adequate materials (up-to-date textbooks, a good and “nonmoldy” variety of library books, etc.), and (d) adequate personnel (competent administrators, teachers, counselors, security guards, etc.). Each of these should be acknowledged as necessary conditions of the Educational Justice Standard; for without any of them, children would thereby lack an essential ingredient of a decent education, and an essential component to a decent chance for a tolerable and autonomous adult life. Are these four conditions enough for educational sufficiency, and for preparation for an autonomous life? Not quite; for obviously unless children also receive a certain amount of academic preparation, they still won’t be on a secure path toward the attainment of at least minimal autonomy.9 As I suggested earlier, if children are not trained to master the basic “Three R’s” (reading, writing, and ’rithmetic), along with a moderate level of grade school curricular content, there will still be too great a chance that they will fall below the autonomy threshold by the time they reach adulthood (i.e., that the children won’t be able to actualize options from decent enough range of adult careers or lifegoods). For instance, if someone is illiterate, or can hardly do the math to keep his or her budget in order, or (as Albert Bandura et al. would insist) is largely ignorant of the workings of his or her culture and job market, it’s hard to imagine the person maneuvering through life in a very effective or autonomous way. Consider persons who receive less than a middle-school level of intellectual preparation and curricular content: More often than not, such people will have only menial or service-sector lines of work to choose from. And considering that the hardly livable wages attached to these kinds of work will often make it difficult, if not impossible, to support themselves financially (as after personal mishaps or bouts of bad health and costly medical bills) and to enjoy any of the finer things in life (with a commensurately narrow range of life-goods), it seems reasonable to forecast these people’s lives will be governed as much or more by frustration as success and by nonautonomy as autonomy. If so, this means that one of the most important prophylactics against a frustrating nonautonomous future will be the academic training that comes from at least a middle-school level of curricular education. Might these five conditions be considered jointly sufficient, then, as providing all the components of the Educational Justice Standard? Not

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quite: there is still one more crucial missing piece of the puzzle that would have to be included if this Standard were to be truly fair and complete. If schools also provided decent academic curricula—even starting from the first few grades up—many underprivileged children would still fall through the cracks and not end up enjoying adequate intellectual progress. To see why this is so, we must recall something that was emphasized earlier as being of the utmost importance for children’s cognitive development—namely, the processes of neural sculpting and biological embedding. According to these processes, remember (2.4.2), the very early intellectual stimulation and supportive social environment that a child has or fails to have plays an absolutely crucial role in developing his or her neural pathways; and it is through these pathways, in turn, that he or she will develop—or fail to develop—basic cognitive skills such as being able to concentrate and to screen out superfluous stimuli, to memorize, to listen and process information linguistically, to speak and communicate, to perform basic quantitative operations, and so on. And the templates, neural pathways, and mental habits for these type of fundamental cognitive skills, we saw, were laid down—or not laid down—within the very first years and even months of life. In addition, it should be obvious that acquiring or failing to acquire these fundamental skills early on will make it exponentially easier or harder to acquire more sophisticated cognitive skills later on. (Recall the SOD effect, or the snowballing of disadvantages.) So if in the first few years of life, for instance, a child is frequently left alone and in silence for hours on end, or allowed to sit for afternoons and even days on end with only the stimulation of a television, or left without anyone ever reading to him or providing books to read, or never taken to zoos or libraries or museums, and so forth, then all these things will easily have devastating and even permanent adverse effects on his or her cognitive development, especially if they are combined. (Recall the COD effect, or the clustering of disadvantages.) Clyde Hertzman, we saw, explained these processes this way: Spending one’s early years in an unstimulating, emotionally and physically unsupportive environment will affect the sculpting and neurochemistry of the central nervous system in adverse ways, leading to cognitive and socioemotional delays. The problems that children so affected will display early in school will lead them to experience much more acute and chronic stress than others, which will have both physiological and life path consequences. (Italics mine; Hertzman, 1999, 31)

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And Daniel Keating and Fiona Miller draw out further implications of these processes: The developmental pathway that captures these patterns may be described as follows. Infants who have developed good emotion, attention, and social regulatory capabilities are more likely to have habits of learning that contribute to their subsequent cognitive and behavioral development. They are also more likely to continue to acquire other developmentally appropriate regulatory capabilities. Preschoolers with good emotion, attention, and social regulation are likely to perform better in [school and] challenging situations, have better perspective taking skills, and [have] fewer behavior problems. If patterns of competence and coping present at school onset have their roots in earlier development, as our preliminary findings suggest, there are [serious] implications. One is that improving the prospects for success across the whole population of children requires attention to the quality of the social environment before children even get to the school door. (Italics mine; Keating and Miller, 1999, 231) In turn, these are the implications these processes have for the Educational Justice Standard: they imply that the earliest periods of cognitive development are just too important, and bear too much of a crucial impact on later intellectual development, to be left purely to chance, without some background monitoring and assistance programs in place. It makes little sense to devote significant resources to a child’s later academic development, if his failure for this has already been practically guaranteed during an earlier stage of more basic cognitive development. The types of programs that would be relevant here would monitor high-risk disadvantaged children early on for signs of seriously arrested cognitive development, perhaps a couple times during each of the first several years of their lives and during mandatory medical and psychological check-ups. If such signs were not demonstrated, then no more assistance would be called for; but if such signs were in evidence, then preschool development programs would be mandated. These programs would be geared toward educational assistance and remediation rather than toward separation from the family or punishment of the parents; and they would consist of home visits and/or required trips to specialists offices, where various reading-, cognitive stimulation-, and mental training exercises were provided. The Carolina Abecedarian

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Project, the High/Scope Perry Pre-school Programme, and perhaps especially various Head Start Projects all come to mind as shining examples of these programs (cf. ch. 2, note 9). Chris Power and Clyde Hertzman have documented great success with such programs, and shown how high-risk and disadvantaged children, and children born to cognitively challenged parents, when undergoing these preschool developmental programs, ended up achieving normal or even superior academic and cognitive outcomes, compared to other control-group children with the same family backgrounds, who did not undergo these programs and who achieved the expected lower outcomes! (Cf. Power & Hertzman, 1999, 52– 54; Case et al., 1999, 132–143; Wadsworth, 1999, 54–56.) I cannot overemphasize the importance of such measures and programs as being integral components of any valid Educational Justice Standard. For if things go well with this “first domino” of cognitive development, then that will prepare the way for success at every other age and stage thereafter. But if arrested development and mental stultification are allowed during this crucial first stage of cognitive development, then all the later stages of intellectual and academic development, even if they are perfectly provided for, may simply be for naught. If the neural sculpting in Humpty Dumpty’s head is essentially allowed to turn to mush “before he even gets to the school door,” as Keating says, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to get his mind going again. If but only if this last crucial component is added to the other five, then our Educational Justice Standard may finally be said to be complete. To recapitulate, then, these seem to be the six necessary conditions of any valid Educational Justice Standard: All children should be provided with adequate facilities, an adequate school environment, adequate personnel, adequate materials, adequate academic preparation, and adequate early cognitive stimulation—where “adequacy” is defined in each case as I have above. If but only if children are assured of being able to enjoy these six conditions (other things being equal in regard to their parents, native abilities, and personal diligence), they should be able to govern their lives with at least minimal effectiveness (*AL3) by the time they become adults. And even if the state should not be held responsible to directly provide all these things, at least it should fulfill the roles of quality controller and fair comptroller and background enforcer (as it does with the enforcement of business contracts), to assure that other proper authorities—the school administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, home-schoolers, parents, and so forth—each fulfill their roles properly and responsibly. If

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the state guarantees the six conditions of this Standard in these ways, this should be enough to help each child reach the “autonomy threshold” of AL3 by the time he or she becomes an adult. In this next and last section (Addendum 5.3), however, I consider what may be taken as a lingering question about this threshold in relation to the Educational Justice Standard. Specifically, I consider whether this Standard is too conservative and whether a more radically egalitarian standard— that would help all children enjoy equal educational opportunities and attain more robust levels of autonomy—might be more in line with the demands of justice. The reader should not consider this more radical standard as part of my account proper of justice for children since, technically speaking, it introduces elements that are inconsistent with and go beyond the proper bounds of this account— specifically, it advocates the support of equal and more-than-minimal levels of autonomy and thereby also raises much greater dangers of excessive state interference. Hopefully, readers will have found my account up to this point progressive and challenging enough. But for any readers who suspect that an educational standard of justice might be even more progressive and challenging, or that the state should educate children so that they attain higher or equal levels of autonomy, the following Addendum may prove appealing and relevant.

5.3. Addendum: Educational Support for More than Minimal Autonomy (* AL4)? Up to this point, then, I’ve argued that the state should support children’s development by providing, or requiring relevant caregivers to provide, whatever is necessary for children to attain at least a minimal threshold level of autonomy by the time they become adults (* AL3). Recall what kind of life, and what level of self-governance, this bare threshold of autonomy marked out: people characterized by AL3, I said, seem to lie in the gap between autonomy and nonautonomy. Their lives are not a total mess, but neither are they running smoothly or free of significant frustration. While seemingly effective at some areas of self-governance, these people nevertheless have other significant personal and financial struggles, hurdles, and challenges to overcome; and it isn’t clear whether these people have, or are able to follow, a clear plan to emerge from these struggles, et. al. Also, to a large extent these people seem to be products of their social

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On the one hand, this bare threshold marks out a quite progressive standard, insofar as it requires society to do far more, and be more consistent, in its protection of children than is already the case. (In contemporary America, there are currently far too many thousands, even millions, of nonautonomous young adults who are below even this bare threshold, who are languishing in prisons, trapped in poverty, and mired in drug addictions—with no idea of how to get out of these dire straits and govern their lives effectively—who’ve ended up in such straits largely because they were never equipped with the skills and resources to do otherwise.10) On the other hand, some might feel that my standard marks out too conservative a compromise and that true justice requires preparing children for a more secure and effective level of autonomy than what this threshold marks out. After all, might it not be too unambitious, even morally lax, to aim for children attaining only the level of effective self-governance that, as I mentioned, even many prostitutes and drug users and illiterates might possess? Consistent with this way of thinking, a more ambitious normative requirement would be to provide children with whatever is necessary for their attainment of at least a moderate—rather than minimal—level of autonomy, designated by * AL4. Recall what kind of life and what level of self-governance this moderate level of autonomy marked out: people characterized by AL4, I said, govern their lives with functional effectiveness and so possess a secure measure of autonomy. Despite various obstacles, they stick to their plans and chase their dreams with a fair measure of circumspection and perseverance. While it isn’t clear whether these persons can significantly transcend the assumed norms and behaviors of their culture and immediate peers, at least they can independently determine their own personal goals and plans of action. And they’re able to reflect

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on the assumed norms and practices of their culture and peers with at least some degree of critical detachment. We can view this raised teleological bar in terms of the three necessary conditions of autonomy:11 If children must now be prepared to enjoy a moderate rather than only minimal level of autonomy, then they will need to acquire: first, a set of more acute cognitive skills; second, a greater measure of self-discipline or of volitional skills; and third, they will need to be able to actualize preferred, nonadaptive options from a wider range of life-goods. The modification in regard to the first two (sets of) conditions is more straightforward; here, we can take a description of the relevant attributes (cf. 1.2.1 & 1.2.2) and merely increase them in magnitude, so as to determine what heightened level of autonomous maturation is now appropriate to aim for as the adult goal. The case is not nearly as straightforward, however, in relation to this third necessary condition (a wider range of realizable life-goods). For here, when we ask What would a wider range of realizable life-goods look like or entail?, we must of necessity introduce a host of other, more complex factors related to the life-goods themselves (including career options, types of enjoyments, and various kinds of personal and communal values). In terms of children’s educational development, a more extensive regimen would become required if we were to prepare them to effect options from a wider range of life-goods. For instance, we might not have to prepare children who were on a trajectory toward mere minimal autonomy (* AL3) to be able to actualize options from among the lifegoods of, say, wealth (LG #12) and achievement (LG #19) and power (LG #20); but if we were supposed to place children on a trajectory toward a more robust level of autonomy (* AL4)—where this heightened adult end goal would, by definition, offer a wider range of lifegoods to actualize options from—then we might indeed have to prepare children to be able to actualize options from a range of life-goods that included wealth and achievement and power. (This doesn’t imply that all children would have to end up wealthy and accomplished and powerful here, but that they would have to be given a decent shot at these things.) At some point, as we continue to raise the bar on what level of autonomy we prepare children to achieve, it will cease to suffice to say that they may merely actualize options from among, say, only the first several basic life-goods (namely, LGs 1–4: pleasure, physical intimacy, love, and friendship, which, arguably, even inmates and advanced primates are sometimes able to enjoy and choose from). Having only such basic life-goods to choose from, we might say, would represent too

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narrow a range of options to allow that person to qualify as being very autonomous. In other words, if having some “decent range of realizable life-good options” is a necessary condition of being minimally autonomous, then having an expanded range of these options would be a necessary condition of being markedly more autonomous. Consider the implications of these claims more specifically in relation to children’s educations. If our normative goal was no longer that children had to achieve only minimal autonomy, but a more robust level of autonomy, then we could conclude that, in addition to the six previous conditions of our Educational Justice Standard (understood as a bare sufficiency standard), a sixth condition needed to be added: namely, that children be prepared to compete for greater socioeconomic success (where “success” here is still understood in a broad and personally fulfilling and not just financial sense). In accordance with this more morally ambitious way of thinking—including what has been said about autonomy entailing the ability to actualize preferred, nonadaptive options from some decent, and now wide, range of lifegoods—it would not be inconsistent to insist that the newly expanded educational standard contain something like the following requirement: All students should be exposed to a wide variety of higher pursuits, life values, and career opportunities. They should all be taken, by textbook and by imagination if not by bus, to the Oval Offices, the Wall Street board rooms, the Ivy League groves, the great art museums and concert halls, the space centers and cockpits, the surgery rooms, the Supreme Courts, and other sites that represent attainment of the various lifegoods. In this form, the expanded educational standard would aim to prevent disadvantaged children from seeing these things as “reserved only for advantaged wealthy children,” and so from adapting themselves to an inordinately narrow range of life- and career options. Correspondingly, students would be taught that the careers of their parents and neighbors need not mark the boundaries of their own possibilities. In sociological language, this means that poor children would be given roughly equal chances of achieving high Duncan scores (a scale of occupational status ranging from 0 to 96), and eventual personal and socioeconomic success, as wealthy children!12 Would this amendment to the original Standard be for the better or worse? Should this aggressively egalitarian emphasis also be seen as a necessary component of the Educational Justice Standard? For the sake or argument and for the moment, let us assume so. For consider again disadvantaged children like Christopher (without a dream) or Smokey (without a sister) or Serena. If such children were not provided with the additional kind of socioeconomic (and in some sense, com-

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pensatory and hope-inspiring) preparation I speak of here, the following might likely result. They might likely continue to think, in so many words, “What difference will my schooling make? Why should I spend so much time and effort learning my A, B, C’s and 1, 2, 3’s when all that is waiting for me beyond these school walls are the same old depression, deprivation, and degradation I’ve always known?” If they were inspired with visions of hope that went beyond what they experienced in their poorer homes and neighborhoods, however, these visions and insights might make all the difference in their ability to persevere, to utilize their education to escape from their deadening environments. But as it stands now, without something like this sixth condition being required, how many underprivileged children do not cultivate their own plans or effort(s) or ambitions (these being nascent components of autonomy) simply because they can’t conceive of other or better or inspiring ways of life? In this way, this sixth, socioeconomic condition might usher in an additional needed component to the perhaps previously incomplete Standard, insofar as it would start to prepare children (especially the otherwise disadvantaged ones) to be able to actualize options from a significantly wider range of life-goods. Another way to conceive of the possible incompleteness of the original six-pronged Educational Standard—that was built on the concept of “sufficiency” and that lacked much hint of these positional or egalitarian values—is through the following thought experiment. Imagine in a society called “Pleasantville” at time t1, that there is educational justice. By definition, this means that all (educable) children here enjoy each of the six original conditions, and so are able to achieve at least minimal autonomy when they reach adulthood. Notwithstanding, at some future period t1+n, a change occurs in Pleasantville. The wealthiest parents gain access to a new, innovative and expensive technology (we might call these “computers” or “neural synapse enhancers” or anything else, since it isn’t the exact nature of the technology that is important here), which they use to supplement their children’s educations. This technology allows their children to learn at relatively accelerated and previously unprecedented rates. As a result, these children of the very wealthy (c2s) begin to learn more and faster, do better on curricular and placement tests, and win an increasingly disparate number of positions in the top graduate schools, law and medical and business schools, and so forth. And then, predictably, in comparison to children of the less wealthy (c1s), they go on to win a highly disproportionate number of positions in all “high attainment careers” or “high Duncan score careers.” And they practically never end up in stultifying or “unprestigious careers” such as those of janitors and garbage collectors.

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In the long run, then, Pleasantville becomes not so pleasant, being characterized by gross class divisions and social inequities; and it becomes not so fair, failing James Fishkin’s “delivery ward social fairness test,” whereby the eventual attainments of newborn infants should not be accurately predictable based on morally arbitrary features such as their race or parents’ economic class (Fishkin, 1988, 4). Using Robert Nozick’s terminology, we could say that Pleasantville loses its earlier pattern of educational fairness, so that the children not born into privileged homes either lose their previous assurance of becoming fully autonomous adults, or at least end up with prospects of becoming much less autonomous (commensurate with a relatively diminished range of competitiveness and life options) than they did at the earlier—and more egalitarian—period in Pleasantville. What should we say about this change in Pleasantville? In particular, what does this familiar thought experiment demonstrate about disadvantaged children’s opportunity to become autonomous, in more than a minimal or tentative sense? For starters, it raises the possibility that sufficiency alone, contra Frankfurt, might not serve as an adequate basis from which to support all children’s developing (moderate) autonomy—but that some egalitarian variable might also need to be factored in. True educational sufficiency, in other words, might contain or need to entail some element of equal opportunity, that was tethered to the allotments and attainments of the better off. In Harry Frankfurt’s terminology, this means that having “too little” might, after all, be properly assessable only by considering “how much less” some have than others have. Or again, this suggests that there might not be any valid “absolute assessments,” as Frankfurt says, of sufficiency and insufficiency without concomitant “relative assessments” of sufficiency and insufficiency. Sometimes—at least in educational contexts that demand fair preparation for later competition—we might not be able to say that “Huck has enough” unless we can also say that “Huck is close enough to Fauntleroy.” This thought experiment suggests that the original Educational Standard might need to be modified or augmented so as to become a floating Standard—that requires the schooling of the worst-off children to remain within some fair range of that of the best-off children—at least if we insist upon moderate, rather than minimal, autonomy as the ultimate end goal. For as long as the best off children enjoy a substantial advantage in their grade school educations (which will be carried into the competition for higher education and careers) over the worst off, we can guess that this range between the best off (c2s) and worst off (c1s) is unfair and that the schooling of the worst off is insufficient. And this would follow precisely because the best off will be prepared

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for a level of autonomy that consistently and significantly outpaces that of the worst off—as revealed by the markedly wider range of life-goods that the c2s will be able to effectively actualize options from, versus the relatively narrow and diminished range of life-goods that the c1s will have to continue adapting to. In terms of a more aggressive or comprehensive model of educational justice, then, we might conclude that my six-pronged Educational Justice Standard might need to be based not only on Frankfurt’s notion of “sufficiency” or Gutmann’s notion of “adequacy,” but also on the more egalitarian notion of “equal opportunity.”13 There is a similar perspective or thought-experiment from which one might arrive at this conclusion (viz., the conclusion that any educational standard built solely on a consideration of sufficiency—that would thereby allow highly disparate attainments of autonomy among different groups of children—is incomplete and allows for too much unfairness, so that some conception of equal opportunity needs to be introduced to prevent this unfairness). This perspective follows Bernard Williams’ account of a hypothetical fair competition14: No just society, he argues, will allow a highly inequitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of society, such that some disadvantaged children (c1s, characterized by certain morally arbitrary features such as being a minority or being born into poverty) will have to overcome enormous obstacles as they grow up while other children (c2s) enjoy enormous advantages as they grow up. (Recall my description of SOD, or the Snowballing of Disadvantages, 2.4.3.) Williams argues that no just society will allow these comparative (dis)advantages to accrue in such a way that the c1s—who must later compete against the c2s for a limited number of social positions, prizes, and benefits—end up consistently losing out to the advantaged c2s. Although a just society might allow an unequal distribution of benefits and burdens among the adult population (assuming that the inequality here could result from differential effort, merit, or desert), it would not tolerate an inequitable distribution of benefits and burdens among the child population. Members of this society would admit that, although fairness doesn’t demand that all competitors in a race receive equal prizes, fairness does demand that all competitors compete on a equal footing and level playing field, where earlier none were unfairly disqualified from training or crippled from training with balls and chains around their ankles. Any reasonable conception of fairness would demand this especially if these crippled competitors did not have to train this way earlier, as a matter of necessity, that is, if society (including its leaders and the organizers of “the race”) had it in its power to remove these balls and chains early on.

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Let me reiterate the way that this egalitarian condition seems to relate to an autonomy-based standard of educational justice: if the education of the worst off and disadvantaged children (the c1s) is not within some fair range of the education of the best off, their (the c1s) autonomy development will be relatively impaired in the process. For again, being autonomous, among other things, means that a person will have a decent range of life-goods and -options to choose from. Consider the following chains of events: If comparatively many of the c1s regularly cannot quite, say, make it into law or medical or graduate school, and cannot get hired for higher-paying jobs, and cannot come to hold positions of real power, and cannot achieve as much in the arts and sciences, and cannot enjoy as high a level of personal health, and on and on—specifically and only because the c2s enjoyed a superior early education, and then became better qualified, and then regularly beat out the c1s in competition for advanced school slots and jobs, and then made more of the universal means (i.e, more money via higher salaries) and then, as a final consequence, ended up able to enjoy a much wider range of life-goods—then, we could conclude that the c1s range of options had been unfairly constricted, and that their (the c1s) autonomy was thereby unfairly impaired. (COD, SOD, and AID—or the clustering and snowballing of disadvantages along with their commensurate impairment of autonomy—come into play once again here.) The ultimate conclusion one might draw from all these considerations is that: the original Educational Justice Standard was both insufficient (in that it didn’t support children’s attainment of a robust enough level of autonomy, * AL4) and incomplete (in that it unfairly allowed underprivileged children (c1s), through morally arbitrary reasons and no fault of their own, to continually attain only a lower level of autonomy than privileged children (c2s), with this disparity in autonomy attainment being evidenced by the adult c2s consistently enjoying a much wider range of life-goods than the adult c1s). If this is so, it seems that the insufficiency and incompleteness might be avoided, again, only if some kind of “equal opportunity condition” is added to our original standard of educational justice. So far in this section, I’ve spoken in hypothetical, tentative terms, suggesting that the original Educational Justice Standard might be incomplete or might need to include an egalitarian component of “equal educational opportunity.” There is a reason why I’ve spoken in these terms. Although it seems laudable to advocate the state’s provision of equality or equal educational opportunities for all or state support of all children’s attainment of more robust levels of autonomy (* AL4), this advocacy would come at a price. It would come at the price of significantly

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heightened involvement—and even excessive intrusion—into families. For example, in regard to the aforementioned Amish parents, such advocacy might require the Yoder’s children to go through 12 years of public education rather than the previously mandated eight years; it might also require their children to be exposed to the values and curricula of a decidedly more multicultural more liberal education. And if they refused to submit to this “coercive, autonomy-expanding education,” it might also (wrongly) require their children to be taken from them! So at this point of course, many more potential problems and controversies would arise. In addition, such advocacy might usher in elements that were outside the scope of, or inconsistent with, the theory of justice for children proposed so far. This theory—based as it is on the goal of protecting children’s attainment of at least minimal autonomy—is, I think, quite defensible and coherent as it stands. Insisting on this additional condition of equal opportunity or of children’s attainment of higher levels of autonomy, therefore, would potentially make such a theory less defensible and coherent and, perhaps more importantly, open up the door for much greater dangers of state intrusiveness. These are some of the reasons why, on the one hand, I’ve spoken only in hypothetical terms about equal opportunity and not insisted on it as a necessary condition of justice for children. (Any “justice for children” that seemed to necessitate overly intrusive states or injustice to parents might not end up qualifying as truly legitimate justice in the first place.) On the other hand, the notion of equal educational opportunity (EEO) does seem important and generally relevant enough to issues of child justice that it would not make sense to be too dismissive of it or give it too short a shrift. For these reasons, I will devote the remainder of this addendum to trying to be generous: by bracketing these concerns about inordinate state intrusiveness, trying to work out the most plausible conception of EEO possible, and trying to further consider how EEO might or might not be made compatible with fair moral injunctions to publicly support children’s development of autonomy. In trying to offer a broader or more thorough perspective on what educational justice might involve, it would not do to simply say that “some general notion of EEO might be added to the mix.” For as many theorists have pointed out, this notion is notoriously vague.15 What do we, or should we, mean by “equal educational opportunity” (EEO)? In order to elaborate a more precise and defensible version of this notion, we might start by using three gradients that must characterize all children. One gradient (E), we could say, would mark the child’s effort level, another gradient (F) would mark the privilege-level of his or her family

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background, and a third gradient (G) would mark the level of his or her innate giftedness. We could also stipulate that there would be three possible levels of each gradient. (That is, a high-effort child would be an E1, a moderate-effort child an E2, and a child expending low effort an E3; a naturally very gifted child would be a G1, a child of average giftedness a G2, and a mildly learning disabled child a G3; and a child from a very privileged family would be an F1, a middle class child or one of moderate means an F2, while a child from a more disadvantaged background would be an F3). Within this model, then, there would be 27 (33) possible types of children.16 Below is a chart including and grouping each of these types (C1, the first type of child, is E1-G1-F1; and so on). C1: C2: C3: C4: C5: C6: C7: C8: C9:

E1-G1-F1 E1-G1-F2 E1-G1-F3 E1-G2-F1 E1-G2-F2 E1-G2-F3 E1-G3-F1 E1-G3-F2 E1-G3-F3

C10: C11: C12: C13: C14: C15: C16: C17: C18:

E2-G1-F1 E2-G1-F2 E2-G1-F3 E2-G2-F1 E2-G2-F2 E2-G2-F3 E2-G3-F1 E2-G3-F2 E2-G3-F3

C19: C20: C21: C22: C23: C24: C25: C26: C27:

E3-G1-F1 E3-G1-F2 E3-G1-F3 E3-G2-F1 E3-G2-F2 E3-G2-F3 E3-G3-F1 E3-G3-F2 E3-G3-F3

Given this matrix, the central problem we must then try to solve is: How should educational resources be distributed so as to achieve a fair and “equal educational opportunity” for these 27 types of children, that would place each on a trajectory to achieve some robust measure of autonomy? In his Equality of Opportunity, John Roemer articulates an essentially compensatory solution to this problem—in terms of compensating for poor family backgrounds, or F3s, but not necessarily compensating for low levels of effort (E3s) or low levels of giftedness (G3s). That is, he rightly reasons that children who come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds will require significantly more educational resources spent on them, to give them equal chances of adult success or autonomy (as measured by earning capacity), as will children who come from relatively advantaged backgrounds. As Roemer notes, In the mid-1960s, when the young men in the NLSY [National Longitudinal Study of Youth] sample attended secondary school, per capita expenditures nationally in the U.S. were approximately $600. To have achieved equality of opportunity for future earning capacity (as measured by the logarithm of earnings at age 30), approximately ten times as

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much should have been invested in the education of blacks as of whites.17 Consequently, the bottom line is that Roemer advocates disproportionately high educational spending on disadvantaged children (all the F3s, including C3, C6, C9, . . . , C27), compensating them in this way so as to achieve an “equal educational opportunity” for all. What should we say about his model? Roemer is right, I believe, to assume that we should not let morally arbitrary factors (a child’s race or class or gender) determine what life chances the child ends up with. Conversely, he is right to assume that we should structure our educational resources and institutions in such a way as to allow only morally relevant factors (perhaps such as merit-based levels of effort, where lower effort is not merely resultant from living in stultifying environments wherein industry and higher levels of effort are not rewarded, or are even punished) to determine what careers and life chances a child ends up with. The problem with Roemer’s model lies elsewhere, it seems, in that he does not adequately separate his “systemic disease etiologies or diagnoses from their proper remedies.” In other words, if children suffer from bad homes, isn’t it a crude solution to try to treat them with good (or, really, way-above-par) schools? Alan Ryan makes this same point through a piece of wise insight that John Dewey gained: “Dewey never supposed that a school could take children out of a battle zone in which family life had virtually ceased and turn them into rational, farsighted, and public-spirited citizens. Neither he nor anyone else ought to be asked to repair in the classroom the emotional and physical damage done outside it” (Ryan, 131). So yes, autonomy and equal opportunity are laudable goals; and if the only way to achieve these is to provide otherwise disadvantaged children with way-above-par educations, then maybe we should do this, as Roemer suggests, and spend up to ten times as much on these children than on other children. But is this the only or best way to achieve these goals? Why can’t we strive to provide equally good educations to all children and then address their other environmental inequities and disparities directly (as advocated in ch. 4)? Certainly, if a child from a highly dysfunctional home goes to a really subpar school, then justice requires at the very least that society bring his school up to par. This much should be obvious. But if this same child has a difficult time learning at a decent-quality school, due to home or environmental problems that are not his fault, wouldn’t it be better to try to remedy these problems directly, rather than to try to compensate by providing him with super-high-quality schooling? In a medical context, treating one dysfunctional organ system by bolstering

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another usually only complicates the disease process; and the case may be no different with a child’s overall development. Does Roemer assume that such direct remedies are implausible and, therefore, that his compensatory educational strategy is optimal by default? If so, he doesn’t explicitly show this. In a separate attempt to flesh out this notion of equal educational opportunity (EEO), Christopher Jencks (1988) has pointed out that there are three possible strategies we might employ. EEO, he says, “can imply either a meritocratic distribution of resources [first strategy], a compensatory distribution of resources [second strategy], or an equal distribution of resources [third strategy].”18 I will now point out some serious flaws in various versions of the first and second strategies, so that this third strategy—which aims at an equal distribution of educational resources—emerges as the most plausible. (Of course, educational justice might not be achieved only if children receive an equal share of educational resources—since they might receive an equally insufficient share; so it will be assumed that children must receive equally sufficient shares.) In view of qualifications about the first and second strategy, I will then assume that resort to this third equalizing strategy is warranted, because of the plausibility of the following bedrock equity principle (which the third strategy rests on, and which is traceable to theorists of justice going back to Aristotle): “equals should be treated equally (provided with equal resources) unless good reasons exist that justify treating them unequally (perhaps by using equal resources upon them in different ways).”19 I have already addressed one version of the second strategy—that attempts to compensate for past environmental disadvantages—in my response to Roemer. But there is an even more radical version of this strategy—which aims at compensating genetic disadvantages—that should also be addressed, if only to reject it. Jencks calls this version “strong humane justice”: “This variant of [educational] justice requires [us] to compensate those who have been shortchanged in any way in the past, including genetically” (Jencks, p. 520). This version is unacceptable because trying to give all children—including practically uneducable and genetically handicapped ones such as the severely mentally retarded—an equal educational opportunity might require expending an infinite, or at least wildly impractical, level of resources on the severely handicapped ones. (For example, should we devote billions of dollars on research to try to figure out how to make, say, encephalic children— who are born without functional portions of their brain—capable of normal rational thought?)

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In lieu of these implausible consequences, the only compensatory reasons that would seem to make sense, as an attempted elaboration of the EEO ideal, would be reasons geared around the compensation of persons who suffer from specifically educational types of past disadvantage. (So this would not include children who had serious genetic or learning disabilities or children from terribly harmful homes, but rather children who went to terribly subpar “East St. Louis–type” schools such as Kozol described.) Consider persons who have had to suffer through terribly subpar primary schools, so that, later on, they have substantial gaps in their learning. It isn’t clear why Roemer and Jencks think that children who suffer from other types of disadvantage qualify for receiving compensatory educational opportunities, and not simply or only this East–St. Louis type of student. Again, if a child has a problem at home, try to improve his home; if a child has a problem with his school, try to improve his school; but why confuse the two? Why exactly should we try to compensate children who’ve suffered from subpar home environments with way-above-par schools? And for children who’ve suffered from bad schools in the past, why not simply try to give them better schooling in the present and future? There seems to be no good reason why the state should not support these types of students, when they are older teens or even adults, in attending “fill-in-the-gap” learning programs, publicly funded and free of charge (just as free as free grade schools). Better late than never. After having wronged these people earlier by sending them to such abysmal grade schools, should society wrong them again later, by either ignoring them, condemning them as ignoramuses or moral reprobates, or refusing to teach them later with compensatory adult education programs? (How many such persons end up as “ignorant” adults, with the intellectual development of ten year olds, not because of degeneracy or some purely moral flaw, but simply because they were denied a decent early education, and then were never given a chance later to make up their past educational deficiencies?) Should such “grown-ups” be resigned as lost causes or closed cases? Or is it assumed that such people, who go through twelve or less years of deplorable public education, should nevertheless emerge unscathed, be self-taught, and be expected to participate in society just as effectively and autonomously as other citizens, who were not so educationally deprived? So if we were going to adopt a compensatory educational strategy, then it would seem to make more sense to adopt this track—to treat people who had bad educations earlier to good educations later. Equalizing resources over a student’s whole academic life in this way would thus justify allocating more resources later to students who had received less earlier. (And in turn, this would achieve

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some of the benefits of the compensatory strategy within a fundamentally egalitarian framework.) Having said this about the second strategy, then what about Jenck’s first strategy? That is, what about attempts to articulate the ideal of EEO in terms of meritocratic (rather than compensatory) criteria? As Jencks explains, such meritocratic, that is, “moralistic [educational] justice is easy to reconcile with equal opportunity. One simply says that all students have an equal opportunity to make an effort and that all who make equal effort get equal treatment” (521). But is it really fair for those children who exert more effort (the E1s) to be allotted more educational resources, simply in virtue of their assumed greater merit? I say “assumed” here because its not certain or clear that students who exert more effort always do so because of greater outright moral merit or character; or conversely, in other words, its not certain or clear that students who exert less effort always do so because of purely moral or character failings, like simply being lazier. This isn’t ultimately the best explanation, if, for example, some students end up exerting less effort because all their previous hard effort was left unrewarded or even punished. (Imagine here the tragic, not-uncommon, originally diligent students who are made fun of and ostracized in their school early on, and called names like “egghead” and “teacher’s pet,” just for applying themselves in class and getting A’s on tests.) If all students did have an equal opportunity to expend effort, and if educators could control for background motivating features, it might be fair and safe to assume that the E1s simply deserve more educational resources spent on them. (By “background motivating features,” I refer to things, as mentioned, like the approbation or censure that peers give to students in response to their show of interest and diligence; but also the praise or apathy parents give to children for good grades and effort expenditure; the conduciveness of home environments to working on homework; the abundance or dearth of models of high-effort students who are rewarded, etc.) But neither of these “if” is the case, or can be the case. Since the things that influence children’s level of expended effort come largely from their extracurricular social milieus (rather than being purely the product of internal moral mechanisms that operate within some “black box of their souls”), children do not have, and cannot have, a truly equal opportunity to expend effort. Educators have, and can have, far too little control over the background features that influence effort. To control for these features, in order to be able to reliably assess that one child really was expending more effort than another (and also to guarantee truly equal opportunity to expend ef-

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fort), all things considered, educators would have to be in control of, or at least be able to monitor, the around-the-clock environments of the children, rather than only their eight-to-three-o’clock school environment (cf. Sher, 1987, ch. 2). As Roemer notes, two children who exert the same absolute amounts of effort may, in an all-things-considered or morally comparable way, be exerting different relative amounts of effort, in response to differing background environments that offer them far different motivation and supports for expending the same absolute amount of effort. (For instance, a poor black child who exerts x units of effort might be exerting more relative effort, all things considered, than a wealthy white child who exerts the same x units; see Roemer, 1999, 6–24.) Because all children cannot have truly equal opportunities to expend effort, then, and because educators cannot always reliably assess whether one child is really expending more relative effort than another, all things considered, it would thus not be fair to devote more resources to the E1s (the children expending more effort) than the E3s. (I will go on to show, however, that, while E1s might not deserve more resources than E3s, they might deserve different treatment than E3s.) Some may feel that such considerations obscure the fact that E1s just do deserve greater resources; that is, they may reason that, even if the E1s haven’t merited the favorable background conditions that support their higher effort expenditures, nevertheless they still deserve more resources simply by virtue of their greater effort. Although I accept the first part of this claim (about the E1s’ non-deservingness of their background circumstances), I reject its conclusion (that the E1s should then automatically be granted more resources). Why? For one, automatically granting more resources to the E1s would likely exacerbate, rather than mollify, existing inequities and disparities in effort exertion. The purported merit of those who exert more effort should not necessarily take moral precedence (in terms of justifying greater resource allocation) over the needs of, and the moral mandate to compensate, children (E3s) whose background circumstances make it markedly more difficult for them to expend the same absolute amount of effort (as the E1s). But there is another more salient consideration here, which may make this question (of whether or not the E1s deserve more educational resources) moot: The educational resources here need not be distributed in a uniform or homogeneous way. Even if we think of this resource, as Jencks suggests, as “Ms. Higgins’s time and attention,” this may still be expressed in nonuniform, specialized ways. In other words, we might still distribute equal amounts of resources to children, while simultaneously responding to their individual and widely differing merits,

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needs, and levels of effort. Ms. Higgins (our hypothetical grade school teacher, who must decide how to best or most fairly allocate the educational resources) may still give equal time to an E1 (high effort student) and an E3 (low effort student), but use this time in very different ways. She may devote half an hour to praising and rewarding E1’s effort, while devoting the same amount in trying to figure out why E3’s effort is so low, and encouraging E3 to do better. This standard of “equal allocation expressed in different ways” may hold for students with high and low levels of native giftedness (the G1s and G3s, respectively), too. A certain amount of attention or money could be devoted to high-achieving G1s, geared toward keeping them stimulated with advanced materials, while the same amount of attention or money could be devoted to slower-learning G3s, but geared toward remedially strengthening their weaknesses. The basic resource (whether hours, amounts of attention, dollars, etc.) could remain equal in each case, but be expressed quite differently—depending on, and tailored to, the differing individual merits and needs of each student. (I assume here that training geared for gifted or high-effort students will not necessarily be more expensive, or require more resources, all things considered, than training for apparently lessgifted or poorly motivated students.) This way of thinking recalls Peter Singer’s insight that “The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration” (Singer, 1975, 2). For various reasons—including all children’s’ equal worth as human beings, their equal rights to a good education and an autonomous “open future,” and so on—we might thus want to conclude that children who expend more effort or who are more gifted do not necessarily merit more educational resources, simpliciter, but rather they merely merit different types of educational treatment. If I’m right about this, it constitutes a corrective cure for the skepticism of Jencks, who suggests that EEO (equal educational opportunity) cannot be coherently elaborated or applied—since, according to the “trilemma” he suggests, (a) we must either deny extra resources to those who really merit them; or (b) we must admit that there is no principled way to show why any one type of child really deserves more resources than another; or else (c) (if we do allocate extra resources to types of students who seem to merit them) we must essentially abandon the ideal of equal opportunity. Having said this about Jencks’s first strategy, and having seen flaws in his second, we are forced back to his third strategy—that of articulating EEO in terms of an equal distribution of educational resources. For all these reasons, that is, we seem forced to accept the following conclusion: It seems best to conceive of EEO so that basic educational resources

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(R) will be divided fairly equally among the total number of children (n), so that each and every child receives R/n—but where R/n is spent on each child in a way that optimally teaches all children, depending on their own unique sets of tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, talents and handicaps. As such, I conclude that this third conception is most plausible—unless someone can show why the greater merits of one child (say, an E1-G2-F1) carry greater overall moral weight (implying that we should spend more overall resources on this former child) than do the greater needs of another child (say, an E3-G2-F3). Having arrived at this conception of EEO, where does this leave us? Under this conception, and also with its adjoining assumption that we should aim for children’s attainment of a robust, rather than merely minimal, level of autonomy (* AL4), we might conclude that there are two important and interdependent components of educational justice. One component would be this last conception of EEO, understood in terms of an equal distribution of educational resources (R/n); and the other component—or rather other six components—would be the six sufficiency conditions of the original Educational Justice Standard (5.2). From this equality- and autonomy-optimizing perspective, both of these component ideals might need to be included, to provide a truly fair and complete conception of educational justice. And just to be clear, this would ostensibly be so for the following reasons. On the one hand, an equal opportunity parameter would arguably need to be present— in order to prevent the otherwise underprivileged children from unfairly continuing to attain only a consistently much lower level of autonomy than the privileged children, or, in other words, to prevent the disadvantaged from continuing to be able to actualize options from only a narrow and inequitable range of life-goods. (Recall the Pleasantville and Williams thought-experiments, that suggested moral mandates for equal opportunities and fair competition, respectively.) On the other hand, a sufficiency parameter would arguably need to be present—in order to preclude the possibility of allowing all children to end up equally inadequately educated, by providing all children with equally insufficient resources to become very autonomous (* AL4). If this amplified standard of educational justice were applied, then presumably we could not have sufficiency without equal opportunity— since this might allow unfair inequitable results; and we could not have equal opportunity without sufficiency—since this might allow equally inadequate and equally nonautonomous results. With all these considerations in mind, this egalitarian, autonomyoptimizing standard will undoubtedly appeal to some; for these reasons

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some will undoubtedly assume that it more faithfully reflects a truly just educational system for children. Although these arguments have their appeal and aren’t without merit, again, they come at a cost. Implementing this more radical standard of educational justice would come at the cost of allowing much more intense state involvement, and perhaps even intrusion, into all families. For that reason, I conclude that my original Educational Justice Standard would be best or best implemented, all things considered. In some future day, when we’ve learned how to protect children’s attainment of minimal autonomy and learned how to prevent states from abusing their power and not interfering too much in people’s lives, then perhaps we’ll find that this more ambitious and radically egalitarian standard is ultimately preferable and more representative of true justice. But justice may not be realizable all at once. So until that day comes, it seems best to take one step at a time and strive to implement this more modest Standard—by trying to provide all children with at least a decent, adequate education and to protect children’s attainment of at least minimal autonomy. Once we scale these heights, we should be in a much better position to see if and how we should climb any higher, more challenging mountains.

6

Conclusion

This completes my account of justice for children. In this account, I’ve examined what autonomy is and why its so important (ch. 1), what early environmental conditions are required for its development (ch. 2), what reasons support the state’s intervention on behalf of children whose autonomy development is threatened (ch. 3), and what sociopolitical conditions are required for the development of at least minimal autonomy, in regard to homes and schools (chs. 4 & 5). A central claim I’ve tried to establish is that it is unjust for adults to exercise their freedom in ways that arrest or subvert the developing autonomy of children. This claim covers more obvious active instances of injustice, as occur when parents seriously abuse their children or when governments advance policies that serve to stymie rather than support the developmental capacities of young people (as when states spend billions on military adventures requiring young conscripts to be put in the line of fire but spend relatively paltry amounts on schools). But this claim also covers less obvious passive instances of injustices, as occur when parents seriously neglect their children or when society— including both public officials and ordinary citizens who become inordinately preoccupied with their own interests—allows many youths to grow up without adequate training and preparation for adulthood. I’ve also tried to show that these latter injustices are no less immoral than the former active ones, merely because of their “passive” nature. Governments do not stand idly by when contractors break the conditions of their contract, on the grounds that this is “private business.” Rather, they intervene to prevent the harm and economic disorder that would surely otherwise come through allowing such breaches. Considering that the harm that comes to children through governmental passivity (when child neglect and abuse aren’t adequately addressed) 191

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can be even more virulent than the harm that would come to contractors through governmental passivity (if breaches of contract were not addressed), then governments would not seem to be justified in intervening in the latter “private” financial cases but not also in the former child cases. For as I’ve argued throughout, setbacks to a child’s vital interest in becoming autonomous are typically more harmful than setbacks to any one of an adult’s already-established interests. By extending these arguments, I’ve also contended that, to the degree any society ignores children’s interests, it will not only prove itself unjust but will also inevitably have to wrestle with more problems of crime, poverty, unemployment, and greater relative economic inefficiency (with higher ultimate costs for welfare programs, prisons, treatment and retraining programs, etc.) when these children emerge as nonautonomous adults. Conversely, to the degree that any society supports children’s interests, it will thereby prove itself just. And such societies will inevitably reap the benefits of less general social disorder and a more autonomous citizenry later, as children grow up to be more productive, innovative, self-standing and self-respecting citizens. Through these kinds of contrasts and this emphasis on the fair treatment of children, I have in turn tried to establish that truly just (and efficient) societies will thus foster as high a percentage of autonomous members in their midst as possible. Some skeptics might object to the picture of the supposedly ideal society that I’ve painted here: Even granting that so many children could be given such good early support and training, so that they did become autonomous adults in pursuit of “their own” aspirations and careers, then who would “dig the ditches and clean the bathroom stalls,” who would do all the manual labor that will invariably need to be done in any society? All I can say to this question here is that solutions to such social coordination problems would much more likely be solved by a more autonomous and relatively better educated population and workforce. Part of these solutions would undoubtedly involve distributing benefits (like a livable wage, decent health insurance, truly “secure” retirement benefits, etc.) more fairly to those who shoulder the burden of more arduous and exhausting labor. But also, in the “high-autonomy society” I’ve proposed, when young people did enter careers involving much manual labor, they would be much more likely to freely do so. Given a fairer distribution of the benefits and burdens of society— including universal nurture of everyone’s rational and decision-making faculties—surely not everyone would want to become doctors (when they realize, e.g., how much physiology and pharmacology they’d have to memorize) or lawyers (when they realize how much prep time is

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required to do well on the LSATs, bar exams, court cases, etc.) or astronauts (when they realize how good their eyesight and overall health has to be), etc. This is in sharp contrast to most societies in today’s world, where many if not most of those who end up doing hard labor weren’t really informed about or prepared for other options when they were younger. The way things stand now, we can indeed assume that many of these laborers would have had the native ability and ambition to become doctors, lawyers, astronauts, and so on, if only these opportunities had been shown to them. So the more my proposals were realized, the more things would improve in relation to these skeptical concerns. There should be no doubt that a truly and highly autonomous society would figure out fair ways to clean its latrines and dig its ditches, while simultaneously allowing more of its members to pursue fulfilling careers of their own choosing. Regardless of what practical advantages my high-autonomy society would offer, though, it would certainly offer profound moral advantages. It would be morally indefensible for any society or group of its privileged elites—if they had it any their power to provide a greater range of opportunities for youth and thus to better support their developing autonomy—to deny these things to youth, merely to ensure that the “dirty work” gets done and the status quo is “safely maintained.” This denial would amount to cravenly violating the supreme deontological moral imperative, to “using these youths merely as means to their own ends and not treating them as they deserve to be treated, as ends in themselves.” My high-autonomy society would at least bring progress past this current immoral impasse, where robust autonomy continues to be reserved for only a privileged subportion of society. In parting, I want to leave, if not a promissory note, at least a suggestion that raises some promising theoretical possibilities. This suggestion pertains to what would be a strong theoretical virtue of my approach to social justice, if it were expanded to cover injustice to adults and not children only. This virtue would be the wide scope that my theory could cover with a good measure of economy and simplicity. In terms of the evaluation of theories, any that have parsimony along with a wide explanatory breadth are “virtuous theories” indeed. The following basic principle of justice, extrapolated from my arguments about children in this work, would serve as the underlying foundation of this expanded but economical theory: “a state is unjust to the extent that it wrongly causes or wrongly allows its members to be(come) nonautonomous.” If properly fleshed out, this theory would cover a wide range of types of injustice, all under the same unifying principle. It would cover what have been conventionally recognized as instances

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of state injustice, including basic rights violations like denial of due process, denial of freedom of speech, of conscience, of the right to vote, and so forth. These would be cases where the state actively “wrongly causes” nonautonomy. (For example, people would be prevented from being autonomous in this way if they were wrongfully imprisoned, say, for worshiping within an unauthorized nonstate religion, or if they were brutally suppressed from having any say in the decisions of their government.) This principle would also cover instances of injustice that involved the state shirking its obligations and responsibilities toward its citizens (and future citizens). This would include more obvious and conventionally acknowledged instances, such as failure to protect citizens from internal violence and from external threats and enemies. But it would also include more recently chronicled injustices, such as failure of the state to adequately prepare many of its youth to become decent citizens (as Amy Gutmann has argued), failure of the state to adequately consider or proportionately represent the interests of less privileged minorities (i.e., by showing unjustified bias toward the interests of some races or elite minorities), failure to provide at least some minimally effective social safety net, and also the failings I’ve been criticizing here, concerning the allowance of deadening school and early home conditions. These would be cases where the state passively “wrongly allows” nonautonomy. In all these varied cases of injustice, then, injustice could be viewed, by my economical approach, as a violation of person’s autonomy—either by squelching the autonomy that adults already have and want to exercise, or by aborting the autonomy that children and the underprivileged would like to develop and exercise, if only they had the chance. This perspective would thus set up a fourfold division of types of injustice, wherein the unjust state could wrongfully: (a) actively cause or (b) passively allow the subversion of people’s already-developed autonomy, and also (c) actively cause or (d) passively allow the subversion of people’s (mostly children’s’) developing autonomy. (And as I’ve argued, a central contention here would be that these passive injustices were not necessarily less wrongful or pernicious than the active ones; cf. 3.1.) Seen from this perspective, my basic principle of justice could cover this broad range of types of injustice (with my work in this current volume being a sustained analysis of this fourth type of injustice, in particular, rather than the more commonly addressed other types). I hope these brief comments serve to show what potential theoretical power my autonomy-based approach to social justice might have, if properly expanded, by providing a compact principle around which many of the previously disparate components of theories of justice could be consolidated.

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Finally, despite the danger of presumptuousness, I will also suggest that such an approach shows potential for being expandable into a “unified field theory,” whereby the best elements and insights of both consequentialist and deontological theories of justice could be combined together consistently. Perhaps in an approach based ultimately on the optimization of autonomy, as I have proposed, such a synthesis need not involve any contradictions. In effect, this approach would join Utilitarianism’s insistence that “utility is to be maximized” with Kant and Rawls’s insistence that “each person is to have the most extensive freedom that is compatible with the like freedom of others.” Synthesizing these claims, and taking personal autonomy as the utile to be maximized, the central thesis of my unified theory would be that “the autonomy of all is to be maximized, within the constraints of procedures and institutions that respect the autonomy of each.” In these ways, this new theory might serve as an extension and application of Joseph Raz’s economical, autonomy-based approach to moral, legal, and political theory, which he forged in Morality of Freedom. But that, quite obviously, is a project to be developed another day.

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Appendix The Societal Assessment of Injustice to Children

This work might not be complete without offering an explanation of how child injustice, defined in terms of the wrongful crippling of childrens’ development of autonomy, could be reliably assessed within any society.1 Such an assessment would facilitate the measurement not only of what general overall portion of society was crippled in this way, but also what particular subpopulations of society suffered so. In this way, understanding both the extent and distribution of this injustice would allow concerned parties (be they of advanced industrialized democracies or developing countries)—who were concerned to take the first steps of advancing the cause of justice for children in their society—to get a more fine-grained picture of the challenges they were up against. Consider the hypothetical claim that, ceteris paribus, “a society is unjust to the degree that it fails to prepare its children to lead autonomous lives,” where “to the degree” is understood as the percentage of the population that ends up being wrongly left below an Autonomy Level of Three (< AL3; 1.3). Let’s unpack this claim. Assume that, within any population, about 98% of those born are genetically capable of becoming autonomous, at least to AL3. This means that about 2% of the population will be born with genetic diseases or handicaps (e.g., severe Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, etc.) that will limit them to a non-autonomous life, so that at best they may achieve AL2. (Two percent is an admittedly rough but conservative estimate; as will be seen, though, it’s the methodology rather than these precise percentages that is of prime importance here.) From these considerations alone, it might be tempting to conclude that, in a just society whose laws and 197

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institutions faithfully represented children’s interests, 98% of those born should and would end up as autonomous adults. But this conclusion would be premature, for a couple of reasons. First, some children will be rendered incapable of autonomy (< AL3) by sheer unpreventable bad luck. For example, some will suffer serious brain damage, as from accidental head injury; others through no fault of their own will contract severely debilitating diseases like Mad Cow Disease, AIDS; and so on. We might thus roughly estimate that another 2% of the child population will suffer so, so that only 96% of the population will now be capable of becoming autonomous. Second, some will end up nonautonomous through no physiological or unlucky cause and through no fault of society, but purely through their own moral or personal failure. There will always be persons, even under the most ideal social conditions, who eventually but freely embrace a nonautonomous life, such as might be characterized by serious addiction (whether to alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, etc.) or dependent institutionalization. There will always be some, that is, who “freely give up their freedom.” To assume otherwise is to claim that all nonautonomous persons, like serious addicts and long-term inmates, become only so for physiological, wrongful, and/or environmentally caused reasons. While many, if not most, addicts and inmates may become so through these unfortunate reasons, it doesn’t seem plausible to insist that every one of them does. To insist on this would be to claim, equivalently, that no addict or inmate ends up living nonautonomously—trapped within the narrow confines of his compulsion or cell-block—out of purely moral failings such as likings for drugs or crime. This stance would thus imply a radical determinism of human behavior that denied free will and personal responsibility any place. As I cannot take time to address such radical behavioral determinism here,2 I’ll simply assume, until evidence proves otherwise, that moral responsibility for one’s personal failings and addictions—even if these lead to a virtually nonautonomous life—is still a sound concept. So let’s estimate that another 2% of the population will freely choose to embrace a life (eventually) characterized by some such form of nonautonomy,3 so that, again even under the most just or ideal social conditions, 94% of the population at best could be(come) autonomous. If this were really the case—that is, if estimates of 2% in each of these three groupings were empirically reliable—then, according to this criteria for justice (qua optimal autonomy development), no more than 6% of the adult population (excluding all those immigrants and elderly who’ve become nonautonomous for health reasons) of a thoroughly just society would be nonautonomous, that is, at least 94% of children would end up autonomous. And to the extent that an adult

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population is not autonomous—say, if 10 or 20 or 30% were nonautonomous (< AL3), as might occur if a proportionate number of people were simply in prison for substantial periods—it would seem plausible to conclude that, to that extent, this society was unjust or at least less than optimally just. (This confirms our intuition that, e.g., among two different societies, if one has a markedly higher incarceration rate than the other— e.g., as the United States has a markedly higher rate [702 per 100,000 inhabitants] than Finland’s [52 per 100,000] or any other Western democracy—then, ceteris paribus, something must be seriously awry in the former society.4) Admittedly, these 2% guidelines are mere estimates, chosen with some approximation of where the truth might lie but chosen also for convenience’ sake, to clearly illustrate this approach. The argument here doesn’t way hinge on the precision of these estimates, and I freely invite social scientists to make them more accurate.5 To be made more theoretically secure, this principle could be abstractly symbolized: Suppose p1% represents the percentage of the population who are genetically indisposed for autonomy at some time, p2% represents the percentage who unavoidably suffer from bad luck, and p3% represents the percentage who freely embrace a nonautonomous life. Then we could say that a society supports the development of children’s autonomy, and so is just in its treatment of them, to the extent that [100 – (p1+p2+p3)] % of the population ends up autonomous (again, factoring out all immigrants and emigrants, unhealthy/elderly nonautonomous citizens, untimely deaths, etc.). Conversely, we could say that a society is unjust in its treatment of children to the extent that the actual percentage of autonomous adults (let us call this actual percentage TAP) falls below the optimal percent of autonomous adults. (Let us call this optimal percent TOP, where TOP represents the percentage of adults that would become autonomous if the society and its institutions were thoroughly just.) Or again, we could say that childhood injustice, as its been defined, may be measured by this divergence between TAP and TOP, where this divergence represents the extent to which children are wrongly denied the opportunity to develop, and thereby later exercise, autonomy in their lives.6 In other words, childhood injustice would be the difference between the actual percentage of autonomous persons in society (TAP) and the optimal percentage of autonomous persons in society (TOP). The greater this difference, the greater the injustice; and the less this difference, the less the injustice. Fairly accurate calculation of these TAP values among adult populations are by no means unattainable now.7 In their groundbreaking work, The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, for instance, social theorists

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Robert Goodin, Bruce Headey, Ruud Muffels, and Henk-Jan Dirven have already provided detailed suggestions for analyses of persons’ “personal autonomy,” “labor market autonomy,” “economic autonomy,” and “temporal autonomy,” with specific comparisons between the populations of the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States (cf. esp. ch. 12). They’ve also outlined how we might measure (what they call) persons’ “combined resource autonomy.” This combined measure might prove to be an especially illuminating marker of the ways and degrees to which people have developed and can exercise their combined, overall autonomy. To illustrate the difference between some of these “autonomies” and the ways they might be measured, they rightly point out that unemployed people usually have very high “temporal autonomy” (having a lot of free time to do what they want, within their financial constraints) and yet very low “economic autonomy” and “labor market autonomy” (having very scant “command over material resources” and very little ability to work as they would prefer, respectively). Conversely, wealthy people oftentimes have very high “economic autonomy” and yet low “temporal autonomy” (needing to work so hard and at such long hours that they have relatively little free time, apart from infrequent vacations). Accordingly, many people within both these types of groups—the unemployed especially, but also the wealthy—might be shown to have a relatively low amount of “combined resource autonomy.” With this combined index of persons’ autonomy, then, we can gain empirically robust insights into the types and levels of autonomy that different populations have (not) been able to develop, and are (not) able to enjoy. Instead of speaking in such vague terms as some state being “a free society,” or some system “maximizing people’s happiness (as Utilitarians would say),” or some basic structure “affording people the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others (as Rawls would say),” my approach thus offers a more quantifiable way of specifying to precisely what degrees, and in precisely what ways, any population is or is not able to develop and exercise autonomy and, in turn, any state is just or unjust. I should point out one theoretical challenge, however, that might remain for any approach that framed a state’s (in)justice in terms of the (non)autonomy of its citizens. This challenge regards the factoring in of elements of public inefficiency and resource scarcity (including scarcities of expertise and knowledge). It would seem to indicate a weakness of a theory if it could confuse unjust states, simpliciter, with largely inefficient states—whose administrators sincerely wished to lead more well-run and useful governments, but who compromised the autonomy of people’s lives because of sheer inexperience, incompetence, and/or lack of adequate resources. (Recently founded states like

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those of post-Communist Eastern Europe, and states that are emerging from simpler or isolated types of existence and just learning how to operate within the global economic and political arenas, like Nigeria, come to mind here.) Strictly speaking, whereas social injustice implies some kind of moral failing on the part of official agents (or agencies), social inefficiency does not necessarily imply this. Some state agency could be screwing up royally even as its individual agents and public “servants” were striving to do the very best they could, in the absence of adequate training, resources, or other more qualified agents. Accordingly, our theory should be able to distinguish states that simply lack the experience and/or resources to do a good job (in supporting or not subverting the autonomy of its citizens) from states that do have the experience and resources but nonetheless subvert the autonomy of citizens through corruption and self-serving state officials. Whereas the latter kind of state is clearly unjust, the former kind might appropriately be deemed as merely inefficient—even though both states might have equivalent divergences between TAP and TOP (between the portion of citizens that are actually autonomous and the portion that would be autonomous if thoroughly just institutions were in place). To avoid this blurring of distinctions, measurements of the state’s capacity for its support of autonomy would also have to be factored in. But this should not be an insuperable problem for measuring the levels of autonomydevelopment support of any society. Assuming that this could be measured, the limits of a state’s capacity to support its citizen’s autonomy development could be factored into TOP as one more not unjust variable—a p4 so that TOP would now be [100 – (p1+p2+p3+p4)] %. There is one supremely important principle, however, that shouldn’t be lost in the details of the above considerations. This principle is that: societies will prove themselves unjust, in part, to whatever extent children are wrongfully denied the opportunity to develop their autonomy, where the extent of this injustice is reflected in the difference between TAP and TOP. Equivalently, we could say that any society is unjust, in part, to the extent it wrongfully allows children to end up as nonautonomous adults. So if a nation allows very few children to end up nonautonomous, in only a few random communities, then we can say that this nation is fairly just and responsible toward its own. In contrast, if another nation allows many children to end up nonautonomous and, on top of this, these neglected children come mostly from certain minorities and poor communities, then we can conclude that this nation is significantly unjust and irresponsible—and apparently racist and classist—toward “its own.” Whereas the “injustice” in the former case seems to comprise at most a slight, local, unrepresentative—and unprejudiced—problem,

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the injustice in the latter case seems to comprise a pervasive systemically biased problem. As indications of a society’s injustice toward children, we thus need to consider not only the bare percentage of children (from among the total number of children, broken down perhaps by different age-groups) whose autonomy development is not supported and protected, but also the distribution of children (from among the various types of subcommunities within the nationwide society) whose development is thwarted so. To be clear about this difference between the extent and distribution of injustice, imagine that exactly one quarter of all children, in both populations of two separate nations A and B, suffer through terribly inadequate schools. In A, these 25% are children from all races and socioeconomic backgrounds; in B, however, the 25% are overwhelmingly children from poor black families. In such a case, we could say that B is a more unjust society than A—even though the extent of neglect is equivalent in both cases—because the distribution of neglect reveals some kind of systematic immoral prejudice. In addition, consideration of the extent and distribution of childhood injustice here is even more complex than this, since both the extent and distribution contain two further and somewhat distinct variables within themselves—namely, bad schools and bad homes. Accordingly, to more precisely gauge the overall injustice to children, one would have to separately measure the portion and subpopulations of children that suffer through bad schools, the portion and subpopulations that suffer through bad homes, and the portions and subpopulations that overlap, suffering through both of these injustices together. It is through this mixed profile, and apparently only through this profile, that the real types, levels, and distributions of “child injustice” could accurately be assessed within any society. Hopefully in some not too distant future, social scientists, social workers, and ethicists will take such theoretical tools and apply them together, to achieve societies with markedly less injustice to children.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Gerald Dworkin elucidates the way that autonomy appears in the wider moral and political context of these issues in “Autonomy” (1998). 2. Gilbert (2000); Sandman (2004), Meyers (2005), Feinberg (1989), Forst (2005), and Arpaly (2004), 117–130. 3. Berlin, p. 131. Although, to be sure, there are differences between Berlin’s “positive liberty” and the notion of autonomy, this passage, taken in isolation at least, may serve as an apt description of the latter. 4. For an account of autonomy in contrast to such internal limiting conditions as akrasia, neuroses, self-deception, compulsiveness, and anomie, see Robert Young, pp. 81–87. 5. Ekstrom (pp. 601–603) provides an especially pointed criticism of this problem; see also Kristinsson, pp. 101–109. 6. Frankfurt (1971), p. 71. Interestingly, Stefaan Cuypers argues that these apparent problems are not ultimately damning to Frankfurt’s account, and that there are theoretical resources within this account to adequately resolve them (Cuypers, 2000). 7. For example, George Sher defines autonomy in terms of “responsiveness to reasons” (1997, pp. 46–56). 8. It is possible to imagine someone who comes to exercise adaptive preferences without any environmental inadequacies, but who comes to prefer an inferior, and ultimately less fulfilling, option, through only these cognitive and volitional lapses. For example, we might think of someone who, due to laziness and a fearful calculation of the effort and diligence that would be required, comes to prefer an option that, in all 203

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ways except the lower level of effort required, will prove roundly inferior. Notwithstanding, it is reasonable to assume that adaptive preference formation usually occurs against the backdrop of some type of environmental deprivation, when some reasonable option has been denied the agent (rather than when the agent denies himself this option). For what the nonautonomous preference, properly speaking, seems to adapt to is some external lack, not merely or originally to some internal cognitive miscalculation. In the case of a mere cognitive error, it is more appropriate to say that the agent’s resultant preference is misguided, rather than adaptive. 9. Andrew Schwartz defends just these points, especially about autonomy coming in degrees, in his “Minimal Rationality and SelfTransformation: Christman on Autonomy,” Social Theory and Practice 30(2), April 2004, 215–228. 10. In mentioning these questions, I do not mean to suggest that certain bureaucrats or statisticians in any just state must be able to learn all this information, in order for the state to be able to justly support person’s autonomy. Perhaps many of these items can be ascertained only through unacceptably intrusive or costly measures. My intention here is only to show, on a theoretical rather than practical level, what kinds of considerations must come into play with an ideally thorough assessment of a person’s level of autonomy. 11. In opposition to this conclusion, one might reason that a nonhandicapped person might not achieve level Five, not due to others’ or society’s injustices, but because of their own moral flaws. Profligates and prodigals stand as the paradigmatic counterexamples here: these are persons who suffer no real crippling injustice or deprivation when younger, but nevertheless, because of personal moral degeneracy and lack of self-control, end up living quite nonautonomous lives, “groveling for the husks that the swine have left.” In such cases, however, it seems that we are still very much in the dark as to why someone would abjure a self-standing autonomous life, in ‘preference’ for a life of such dependence and indignity. That is, it still seems like a dogmatic and simplistic leap to assume that such dramatic cases involve merely moral flaws, and that significant influence secondary to genetic flaws and/or early familial dysfunction are not equally contributing factors. We must note the general trend that, as psychology is learning more and more about people and what makes them tick, resort to simplistic moral explanations (e.g., “He is an alcoholic or a homosexual solely because of immoral choices he has made”) are proving less and less tenable. I mention all this, not to establish my own claim (that social injustices are

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behind nonhandicapped persons’ failure to achieve autonomy), but to expose the inadequacy of such moralizing objections to my claim. 12. In this way, I recognize “paternalism” as a morally neutral relation, which may, depending on the specifics involved, manifest itself in either a legitimate or illegitimate form. For a defense of this neutral conception of paternalism, see David Archard’s “Paternalism Defined.” 13. From Hurka’s Perfectionism, pp. 150–151. See also his “Why Value Autonomy?” (Fall 1987). 14. For example, Boylan (2001); Christman (2004, section I); Norman (1994); Stojanov (2002). 15. For challenging arguments that the former perfectionist strategy is the stronger, see Sher (1995, section I; and 1997, section V). 16. For example, Carolyn Ellis (2001); Carolyn Stone (1990). 17. Stone (1990). Of course, such views cannot be taken to represent all feminists, since many deny that these sets of cognitive and emotive qualities primarily represent, or faithfully track, masculine and feminine poles, respectively, in the first place. 18. In what follows, when I say “all children” or “every child,” I will be referring to the set of all nonhandicapped children, who are not afflicted at birth with obvious genetic defects or abnormalities. 19. Riesman, along with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. I will thus be referring to all three of these when I mention “Riesman’s” work. 20. To be sure, respecting someone’s autonomy and respecting someone’s autonomous choices may be somewhat distinct matters. For it is certainly possible that, although a person might be nonautonomous overall, that he or she is nevertheless capable of making autonomous choices. So, the reasoning might go here, we might still have a duty to respect a person’s choice, although the person is nonautonomous. But this would still effectively undermine our original notion of “respect for persons,” since the criteria for respect would shift away from being a property of the person to being a (supposedly) objective, or personindependent property, namely, a choice whose consequences would issue in what was really in their best interest (as viewed from the specious viewpoint, of course, of an “objective” outsider, rather than of the person him- or herself). 21. There is a strong consensus among contemporary moral philosophers of many stripes that paternalistic intervention into the lives of adults is justified only when evidence of the person’s gross incompetence, or of likely harm to others beside that person, is at hand. Cf. Kleinig (1984); Sartorius (1983); Buchanan, & Brock (1994); and Beauchamp & Childress (1994).

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22. Such ongoing “basic welfare interest standards” could be systematically fleshed out in terms of what Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum refer to as “basic human capabilities.” (When construed as the specific practical skills and abilities essential to adequate human functioning, these capabilities may be taken as loosely equivalent to Feinberg’s “basic welfare interests.”) In their attempts to lay the foundations for a more sophisticated theory of distributive justice, Sen and Nussbaum have noted the way that a capabilities approach has significant advantages over a Rawlsian “primary goods-type approach.” (Sen, esp. 1987 & 1992, and Nussbaum, esp. 2000; and for a more detached commentary and critical response to this capabilities approach, see Crocker, and Daniels.) In essence, the chief advantage of this former approach lies in (what Sen calls) its greater “informational richness.” That is, according to Sen, focusing on persons’ capabilities (in addition to keeping needed resources in mind) will provide us with more details about their specific needs and welfare, and so will allow for more sophisticated public welfare support, than focusing merely on what primary goods (e.g., money and, in Rawls’s rather vague terms, “liberties, opportunities, and self-respect”) persons at their disposal. To illustrate, as is often heralded, a welfare system that merely gives needy people money may still be grossly ineffective—by allowing the recipients to use this money unwisely, or by making them even more dependent on aid. But a welfare system that bolsters, say, these persons’ economic capability to support themselves will be much more effective, in enabling them to become independent. As sages have noted since ancient times, if you merely “give a boy a fish,” he may nevertheless starve to death because of not being able to scale or cook it, or because of having greater than normal caloric needs. But if you teach him the ability to fish and scale and cook, he will do just fine even if you have not provided him with the fish itself (cf. Sen, 1980). This latter support, that instills capabilities rather than merely providing resources, will have bolstered the boy’s autonomy to a wholly greater extent. Rather than being a list of things or resources that persons are supposed to have, then, the capabilities represent a list of competencies and abilities that persons are supposed to learn how to do. As Nussbaum says, if someone lacks any of the basic capabilities, some fundamental competencies seem to be missing from that person’s life (qua a “decent and distinctively human life”): “The intuitive idea behind the approach is twofold: first, that certain functions are particularly central in human life, in the sense that their presence or absence is typically understood to be a mark of the presence or absence of [minimally decent] human life; and second—this is what Marx found in Aristotle—that there is

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something that it is to do these functions in a truly human way, not a merely animal way” (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 72). Because of its emphasis on being able to do, rather than merely having, a capabilities approach thus seems much better suited for a theory of (children’s development of) autonomy than do more traditional approaches to autonomy and social justice. Along these lines, a capabilities approach, if properly extended empirically, could provide a quantifiable basis for assessing and supporting (albeit indirectly) children’s development of autonomy—that is, by supporting them not just with “fish,” but with the “abilities necessary for fishing.” Although the state will be incapable of measuring or promoting autonomy directly, since this is obviously not a fungible resource or property that citizens wear on their sleeves, it may do so indirectly, in terms of the following types of measures. Does some population have, for example, a high illiteracy or innumeracy rate? If so, then the children among this population will more likely come to lack autonomy in certain cognitive respects; and the state will be able to indirectly bolster their autonomy by promoting better literacy and educational programs. Does a certain region’s population evidence poor health, in terms of, say, widespread obesity, premature heart attacks, and shorter lifespans? If so, then the children in this region will more likely come to lack autonomy in these physical respects (it will be difficult to autonomously plan one’s life if one has to worry about premature death); and the state will be able to indirectly bolster their autonomy by mandating certain nutritional standards, health education programs, and exercise training when they are in grade school. And so on. The main point here is that these basic welfare interests, or capabilities—when used as indirect indices of autonomy and autonomy-development—may provide the theoretical tools to enable states to assess, at any given stage of a child’s development, whether or not that child is falling above or below the Threshold of adequate development. And if the child is falling below it, we will not be clueless about how to correct his or her development, how to get the child back on a proper trajectory toward the eventual achievement of autonomy. 23. We might think of the counterfactual development and superior later lives that a children would have enjoyed (if they had been able to become autonomous, or if their parents had not failed them) in terms of what George Sher (1979) calls “transworld personal identities.” Imagine that, in my current identity at time t1, someone harms me by stealing a manuscript for a book I have written, and then publishes it in her name. This would certainly harm me, in the sense of setting back my interest in publishing it. But now imagine that, after

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being sent back in time to t1–n, someone makes my childhood so miserable that I can never even develop the capacities to be able to write a book, so that I end up with a “transworld identity” at t1 as a bum on skid row. This latter harm would be a far greater and more comprehensive harm to me than the former harm. Although this is not exactly the tack that Sher takes, his article is nonetheless instructive in allowing us to conceptualize the differences between people’s counterfactual identities when we talk about, for example, their frustrated-versus-fulfilled autonomy.

Chapter 2 1. With some minor adjustments, this argument can be schematized as follows: Let p = the attainment of autonomy; q = the ability to pursue one’s preferred life-goods and career work; r = the acquisition of a broad set of self-efficacy skills; and s = the enjoyment of development that is unimpeded by serious forms of deprivation. Then, [1] [2] [3] \[4]

~ ~ ~ ~

q r s s

… … … …

~ ~ ~ ~

p q r p.

2. There is, to be sure, a fourth logical possibility, namely, that someone might nonautonomously come to embrace a certain set of life-goods, but make many major decisions and actions in life that are themselves autonomous, and thereby inconsistent with their overarching preferences—with the final consequence that the person’s life, overall, is autonomous. But if this is logically possible, it seems practically impossible, or at least so odd or unlikely a state of affairs as to be not worth considering. 3. For an account of the features that are common among these “underdog” children who successfully escape severe early deprivation, see Marmot, 54–55 and SE 193. 4. I am not assuming that adolescence is the only time that persons can or should decide which life-goods they prefer and will pursue. Obviously, this is a process that is continued and iterated throughout life. But this doesn’t negate the truism that young adults should have embraced at least some provisional values and goals by which to guide their lives and plans. For having some overarching values and goals,

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even if these are not necessarily permanent or absolute, will surely be more crucially helpful than having none at all. 5. Although diligent entrance into career work is usually a sign of autonomy, it need not always be. Some might choose to forego the normal life progression into career work by design, because of an autonomous decision to take life easy. We might think here of an early Beat or Jack Kerouac type, or a cynic Diogenes type, who after careful consideration embraces a bohemian lifestyle of “carefree” living, low industry, and spontaneous travel, deliberately spurning such a career-oriented life path. (Of course, they will often be unable to remain carefree for long without steady work, unless they have inherited resources to draw from.) But relatively few of those who do not work hard or apply themselves very much when becoming adults, I suspect, do so in a truly autonomous way, for such principled and carefully considered reasons. 6. These cognitive skills are fairly distinct from chapter 1’s cognitive conditions of autonomy. Whereas the latter were necessary and constitutive elements of the expression of autonomy, these skills are essential building blocks for the development (in addition to the expression) of autonomy. And while no one of these cognitive, or the other self-efficacy, skills may be absolutely necessary for the development of autonomy, we can be sure that there is some preponderance of them which, if left undeveloped, will issue in eventual nonautonomy for any person whose development is so lacking and stunted. 7. From Thomas (1999), p. 36. 8. Admittedly, some of the skills that will be acquired during this phase, as I’m describing them here, won’t be purely cognitive skills, being as much kinds of somatic or coordinational skills. But even in these cases, it seems that enough learning and cognitively coordinated growth occurs during such periods that including (the acquisition of) such “impure” skills in this section isn’t inappropriate. 9. In his “Population Health and Human Development,” Clyde Hertzman offers six of the most prevalent causal explanations of these developmental gradients (1999, 25–29). The first two are explanations of “health selection” and “differential susceptibility.” These two positions seek to explain away the gradients as artifact effects. That is, these positions basically state that most of those who end up with worse outcomes in life do so because they are genetically predisposed to. Supposedly, since they are born with more heritable (not acquired) weaknesses, their later lesser achievements serve as mere reflections of these weaknesses. Hertzman explains how these types of explanations miss the mark. In essence, they are refuted by those children born to

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poor and even cognitively challenged parents who, when undergoing certain preschool developmental programs, end up achieving quite normal or even superior academic and cognitive outcomes, compared to other control-group children with the same family backgrounds, who did not undergo these programs, who did achieve the expected lower outcomes. (Cf. Power & Hertzman, 1999, 52–54; Case et al., 1999, 132– 143; Wadsworth, 1999, 54–56. These studies highlight the effectiveness of such programs as the Carolina Abecedarian project, various Head Start Projects, and the High/Scope Perry Preschool Programme.) Such findings thus imply that these two explanations give too much weight to heredity, and too little weight to the effects of the early nurturing environment. The third causal explanation focuses on “individual lifestyles,” and states that the personal habits and behaviors of different subgroups lead them into different risks and outcomes. In particular, healthpromoting behaviors tend to be practiced more by those who are from, and end up in, higher SES groupings. The fourth explanation emphasizes persons’ “physical environment,” and states that differential exposures to various pollutants, hazards, and detrimental agents lead to differential health and well-being outcomes. The fifth explanation centers on the “SES conditions” that children have access to; here, greater or lesser access to various material resources and psychosocial outlets and functions lead to better or worse personal and psychological outcomes, respectively. The last explanation, similar to the fifth, focuses on “differential access to health care services and resources.” As some children enjoy more access to higher-quality early health support systems, their eventual health and personal well-being tends to increase, and to enable them to function and perform more effectively. After reviewing these causal explanations, Hertzman then discusses each of their relative weights and explanatory power. As it turns out, they (and especially, according to Hertzman, the third and fifth explanations) do explain a lot but are still incomplete, even taken together; to more fully explain the pathways of SES gradients, they need to be supplemented by explanations of “biological embedding” processes that occur largely during infancy. 10. This last proviso explains why some studies, such as Jencks et al. (1978), and Herrnstein & Murray’s controversial Bell Curve reports, must be interpreted very carefully. Even if, for example, many young members of certain races achieve lower intelligence scores at a very young age, this does not mean that they’re necessarily less innately gifted intellectually. It might simply mean, rather, that these members experienced environmental conditions that stunted their cognitive development from very early on, even in the first months of life.

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11. To be precise, language acquisition may be viewed more accurately as a sensitive, rather than a critical, period—since persons are able to learn and assimilate languages at later times in their lives (albeit with more difficulty). Technically speaking, critical periods are defined by being the only times when certain neural pathways and functionalities can be laid down. As Keating and Miller explain, “Some of the effects of early development may occur as critical periods, when the presence or absence of particular experiences makes a biological system functional or nonfunctional. Others are better described as sensitive periods, during which the quality of particular experiences shapes developmental outcomes, but in less absolute ways than in critical periods” (1999, 220). 12. These “clusters of disadvantage” should be understood not just generally but statistically, and in the specific terms of the 14 micropathways mentioned in 2.4.1. The following represents one provisional method whereby fairly accurate levels of these AID effects could be measured. First, one would target a specific nonautonomous population cohort for analysis (e.g., some number of Autonomy Level Two [AL2] types who are American, born between 1970 and 1975, and sentenced to prison terms of five or more years). Then, one would backtrack and obtain profiles of certain micropathway characteristics that this population had experienced at earlier ages. For example, one profile might focus on micropathways 2, 3, 4, 7, and 12, and determine retrospectively that, of this population, 80% of them had as children suffered through: (a) home environments run by caregivers having at best an eighth-grade literacy level (one indicia of mp 2); (b–c) 10 or more years of absentee fathers, conjoined with caregivers who were emotionally unstable (indices of mps 3 & 4); (d) mothers earning poverty level wages (an indicia of mp 7); and (e) grade schools that produced performances falling in the lowest 30th percentile of their corresponding state– or nationwide–school group (one indicia of mp 12). In other words (after controlling for population size and other variables), if given these hypothetical results, we could come to the AID conclusion that children who experience this particular set [2, 3, 4, 7, & 12] of disadvantages run a high 80% risk of ending up as nonautonomous adults. Although this backtracking method of ascertaining these types of AID patterns and correlations seems feasible, it is admittedly provisional in its finer details; so I invite social scientists to build on these methodological suggestions and develop them further. Notwithstanding the details of these measurements and methodologies, we shouldn’t lose track of the forest for the trees here. AID points out that certain clusters of early but ongoing disadvantages will undermine childrens’ later development of autonomy, in proportion to the severity and duration of these disadvantages—unless high-risk children

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are helped onto different autonomy trajectories early on, through appropriate types of remedial intervention. A couple additional points should be highlighted here: First, such AID correlations could be and are being established, being thoroughly conducive to empirical verification. (Much of the burgeoning scientific literature on birth cohorts, along with longitudinal studies on child development, provide the material for derivation of such long term AID correlations. For salient examples, see the many groundbreaking studies in Tarlov & St. Peter [2000], Kawachi, Kennedy, & Wilkinson [1999], Keating & Hertzman [1999], and Marmot & Wilkinson [1999].) Also, if equipped with statistical accounts of these types of correlations, we would then have a fairly reliable scale of the autonomy risks involved with being born into an early environment with this or that specific pattern of disadvantages and micropathway characteristics. In other words, we could assign any child, depending on the profiled set of characteristics that he or she was born and raised in, one of our aforementioned autonomy trajectories. For instance, we could assign privileged little Johnny an Autonomy Level Five (AL5) Trajectory if, given his background data set at a certain age, he had the highest probability of ending up as an Autonomy Level Five adult; whereas we might have to assign poor little Janey an AL2 Trajectory given her data set.

Chapter 3 1. I define “legal principles” here in the spirit of Ronald Dworkin’s “Model of Rules I,” not as actual laws but as “standards that are to be observed, not because they will advance or secure an economic, political, or social situation deemed desirable, but because they are a requirement of justice or fairness or some other dimension of morality,” and because they are helpful in revealing whether particular laws and policies are or would be justified in terms of such dimensions of morality. See Dworkin (1977), p. 22. 2. For Mill’s original formulation and defense of this principle, see On Liberty, esp. pp. 15 and 69. Feinberg formulates this principle as follows: “It is always a good reason in support of penal legislation that it would probably be effective in preventing (eliminating, reducing) harm to persons other than the actor (the one prohibited from acting) and there is probably no other means that is equally effective at no greater cost to other values” (1984, p. 26). Along with Mill and Feinberg, most liberals have tended to see this principle, sometimes conjoined with the Offense Principle (cf. Feinberg’s Offense to Others), as exhausting

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the set of principles governing state interference and, in particular, the proper extent of the criminal law. 3. This response might not be warranted if it were merely harmless or trivially harmful moral issues that were at stake. (For analysis of such harmless wrongdoing, see Feinberg, 1988.) But since such significant, nontrivial interests are at stake, the extent to which a state’s laws and policies have historically reflected these actual priorities dwindles in relative importance. 4. For example, Hayek (1960, 1973), Friedman (1962), and Nozick (1974). 5. Isn’t any such imbalance in our society and legal system due to the mere fact that property-holders, especially those who own substantial property, have long enjoyed substantial legal and political representation, whereas the “unpropertied class,” especially including children and the poor, have long lacked correspondingly substantial representation? 6. See Mayerfeld (1999), especially chapter 5. Also, it should be emphasized, “damage” and “injury” are meant here and in what follows in comprehensive and not only physical ways, as including injuries to one’s mind, character, interests, psychological integrity, etc. 7. See p. 207, n. 23. 8. Cf. Shue (1980), p. 58. And of course, what dies here is not the youngster’s physical life, but his or her developing autonomy and character. Although I have said and can say little about this latter topic—the social genesis of character—here, it deserves much more philosophical attention than it has hitherto received. For example, if children are abused and suffer physical harm at the hands of others, we have no hesitation in holding these others accountable, or at least in trying to insure that the abuse stops. But if children’s characters are hurt, or malformed or corrupted due to serious abuse or neglect, or corrupting influence or lack of wholesome influence, our response is significantly narrower: in these latter cases, we as a society seem not to have developed the conceptual, moral, or institutional sophistication to address these abusive or corrupting influences. This narrowness can be recognized in relation to juvenile delinquency, and the growth of deviant or criminal character in youth in lieu of the development of healthy or law-abiding character. In such cases, when adolescents manifest delinquent behavior and character, our “justice systems” are commonly poised to hold the youth accountable and to take actions towards them. In contrast, such systems, and our society as a whole, are much less prone to look beyond their delinquency, to examine (much less demand accountability from) those adult agents and systemic conditions which influenced their malleable and malformed characters in the first place.

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In addition, the fact that CAD is often an emergent harm explains why, in this work, I envision the state as seldom if ever accusing or prosecuting parents with the charge of “CAD” directly, but rather with more traditional charges such as parental abuse or neglect, where these crimes indirectly lead to CAD. I see the state as being justified in taking more significant action to prevent these more “traditional, straightforward” harms, then, because they so integrally lead to this less-noted, but more virulent and emergent, harm of CAD. 9. In “The Community as Child Abuser,” Harold Lewis (1986), a dean of the School of Social Work at Hunter College, makes a compelling case that, when children are harmed under their parents’ care, it is often the outlying community (including these “fellow neighbors, citizens, and legislators”) that is also culpable and responsible for this harm, insofar as they often provide little or no help to such needy families. 10. There is a more aggressive autonomy-protecting perspective one might take here. To see this perspective, consider these two additional factors: Whether or not the state should intervene might also depend on the level of cognitive preparation we specify as determining when a child can be autonomous, when the child will have his or her faculties developed enough to be able to function as an autonomous adult. Concomitantly, it might depend on which society we use as a reference point to determine if these children will be able to function as autonomous adults. For instance, if we use only Amish society as our reference point, these children, if not coerced to attain more than the public eighth grade standards, would still be able to function adequately as adults “in society.” And this implies, in turn, that the state would not be justified in intervening. But if we use the wider national society as our reference point, these children, if not coerced to attain more than the public eighth grade standards, would likely have a hard time being able to function adequately as adults “in society.” And this implies that the state would be justified in intervening. What might this more aggressive perspective conclude that Yoder implies overall, then, about where this line (that demarcates legitimate from illegitimate state intervention) should be drawn? It might easily conclude that children should be given a mandatory twelfth grade education rather than only an eighth grade one, and that they should be prepared to live in their nation’s broader society rather than only in some narrow cultural microcosm of it. For supposedly, the one danger (of children being simply unprepared, and thus later unable, to function within a broader cultural context) is more noxious and virulent than the other danger (of children being exposed to and prepared for alternatives earlier on, with the chance that they might later choose these over “their” more native traditions). Mill’s “competent judge test”

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would apply here: Wouldn’t it be better for someone to be able to make an informed decision about which of two (or more) alternatives they prefer and will choose, rather than to be practically forced to “embrace” one alternative, only because they lack (or, really, have been denied) familiarity with any others? More specifically, which would be better: young adults “choosing” to follow their parent’s traditions simply because they were incapable of (or incapacitated from) doing otherwise; or these same young adults, although they had become (and thus were allowed to become) familiar with alternatives and had become capable of pursuing these, choosing to follow their parent’s traditions because they truly thought they were superior to these alternatives? From this more aggressive perspective, one might thus assume that any honest, conscientious parent would admit the latter as being the better outcome. Although this may be the case, however, I decline to adopt this perspective here, or as part of my overall main argument in the text, since this could be taken to support a more robust level of children’s autonomy, rather than support of the minimal level that I advocate throughout. But in 5.3, I consider these two different approaches (to state educational support of minimal versus higher levels of autonomy) in somewhat greater length. 11. Henry Shue (1980), 97; Waldron (1993), especially chapter 1. 12. In addition, the standard I advocate (of intervening only when we have good reason to believe it will effectively support an otherwise deprived child’s autonomy-development needs) may be seen as is superior to two other competing and traditionally accepted standards (which are supposed to provide criteria for determining when the state should intervene). The first of these is known as “The Best Interest Standard” and the second as “The Clear and Present Danger Standard.” It might be argued, in essence, that the former allows too much state intervention, that the latter allows for too little or too late state intervention, but that my standard (which we might call the “Adequate Development Standard”) provides a more informationally sensitive and balanced standard for state intervention (cf. Brennan & Noggle [1997]; Kopelman [1997b]).

Chapter 4 1. This highlights the need for the state to have enough information about (potential) parents to be able to fairly reliably anticipate, and then predict, such harms. The downside of this is the danger that this would require an excessive amount of state prying into the lives of even those potential parents (in order to garner enough information to be able to tell who is and is not a “high-risk” parent) who do not and

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would not pose any real risks of harm to children born to them. Perhaps, even more than this, there is the danger that the state would misuse this (plethora of?) information somehow, against the interests of citizens. What these dangers highlight is this: as governments gain greater technological capacity to learn more and more about the private lives of citizens, these citizens need, step for step, to make sure that there are laws to protect them from “information abuse” by, and “excessive surveillance” and intrusion from, their governments. Such laws would codify and protect, for instance, rights to know who knows what about you, rights to be protected from secret and nondisclosed (to the citizen) surveillance and information acquisition, rights to have information kept confidential (unless absolutely needed for, say, criminal proceedings), and so on. 2. Anonymous Op-ed. writer, “Watching as the Children Starved,” New York Times, June 24, 2004. 3. Wrongful life suits have had little success in the recent past. And it is hard to imagine any greater success for suits that would be bought against parents accused of perpetrating “CAD.” It is because CAD is a more abstract and emergent harm (arising out of the setting back of the prior welfare interests of children), and so a harm that would not likely be targetable in a court of law, that I have in this work advocated holding parents responsible for more tangible and prior harms, specifically, for the abuse and neglect of childrens’ basic developmental needs and interests. Notwithstanding, for helpful philosophical discussion of these wrongful life cases, see Jeff McMahon’s “Wrongful Life: Paradoxes in the Morality of Causing People to Exist” (1998), and Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm,” Legal Theory 5 (June 1999). 4. For some idea of the varying costs involved in these different types of public support, see Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. (1997), sections 4, 5, and 12. 5. For an explicit statement of these statutes, see the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (42 U.S.C.A. §§ 5105–5106), 1974. 6. For information and statistics on these pitiable children who are “slipping through the cracks,” see Garbarino et al. (1992), and Trickett & Schellenbach (1998), especially chapters 5 and 6. 7. O’Neill (1979), pp. 25–26, and Steinbock (1994). For similar rebuttals, but from population, global, and environmental perspectives, see Bayles (1979). 8. See Blustein (1980), Archard (1990), and Brennan & Noggle, (1997), for accounts of others’ duties toward children, in correlation with children’s rights to adequate care.

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9. Morris Lipson and Peter Vallentyne (1991, 1992) make just this point—that parental autonomy is not absolute, but must give way at least in some form or degree to accommodate the developing autonomy and interests of children. See also Bigelow et al. (1988), for an attempt to balance the autonomy of parents with the (developing) interests of children. 10. An advocate of sterilization might object that we may have certain knowledge that certain persons, such as the severely mentally retarded, will never have the qualities necessary to provide a child with a decent upbringing—so that sterilization is in these cases justified. I admit that sterilization might be justified in such cases, but will not discuss them here since they are somewhat tangential to my main concerns, that is, since this work primarily concerns persons who are, and might become, nonautonomous through social, rather than through such congenital or physical, processes. For discussion of ethical questions regarding sterilization of the retarded, see Annas; Blank; Petchesky; Walters; and the (other) Hastings Center Report on Sterilization (1978). 11. I should point out that most of the arguments that follow apply to an American context or, that is, the context of more laissez-faire states that do not show decent prospects of implementing strongly supportive welfare programs for at-risk or needy parents, such as stateprovided day care, monetary child support, paid parental leave, etc. For states that do or soon could provide such programs (such as France and other EU countries), CC would be a no-starter, or more highly contraindicated and counterproductive compared to such more supportive programs. And for a more in depth discussion of these issues than I can provide here, see Moskowitz & Jennings’ (1996) helpful volume. 12. For an historical and philosophic overview of these illegitimate programs, see Pence (1990), pp. 286–302. 13. Moskowitz et al., in The Hastings Center Report on Long-Acting Contraceptives (Jan., 1995), p. S7. 14. For a more thorough discussion of various aspects of this paradox, see Kavka (1981); Parfit (1984), especially pp. 351–379; Hanser (1990); and Covey (1993). Melinda Roberts’s “Present Duties and Future Persons: When are Existence-Inducing Acts Wrong?” (1995) is especially helpful in sorting through some of these complications.

Chapter 5 1. The ambition referred to here is assumed to have arisen fairly independently of very dysfunctional family backgrounds and other

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stultifying and preference-deforming influences. It should be apparent by now that, if children are long exposed to such backgrounds and influences, to limited options, and to inadequate training and inspiration, their ambitions often eventually wither in the process. 2. Kozol, 1992, p. 13; although this incident does not necessarily illustrate conditions prevalent in the school, it does reveal what kind of environment “schooling” takes place within. 3. “America’s Most Wanting,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2002, A27. 4. These inspectors could become the amicus curiae backbone of an Education Act, serving as “friends of the court” to represent the interests of children who could, understandably, not always be expected to stand up for their own interests. This Act would lay out all the standards, principles, and procedures that would be needed and relevant for proper regulation of schools. Also, for comparisons with Hugh LaFollette’s proposed system of “Parental Licensing,” see his Philosophy & Public Affairs paper (9:2, 1980) by that same title. 5. Perhaps such myopia is merely the result of (what Peter Singer might call) a biased “generationalism” (cf. footnote 24). Just as Singer equates “speciesism,” “racism,” and “sexism” with the morally specious and arbitrary bias shown in favoring the interests of members of one’s own species, race, and gender, respectively, so we might call those acts “generationalist” which, due to merely selfish bias for the interests of one’s own generation, discriminate against the interests of younger (or later) generations. As one example of such generationalism, we might think of the tendency to permit national debt, ballooned by fiscal irresponsibility, to be passed on to children. The ancient Hebrew prophets chronicled this perennial bias when they noted how “the fathers eat sour grapes, while the children’s’ teeth are set on edge.” 6. See Goodin (1982), especially chapter 7 (“Impossibility as an Excuse for Inaction”), 8 (“Risk as an Excuse for Maldistribution”), and 9 (“Uncertainty as an Excuse for Myopia”). Simply deciding to fund local school districts from equitably distributed statewide revenue, or national funds if necessary, rather than merely from local real estate tax revenue, would often be the only practical measure needed to help bring all schools up to par. Granted, it has become all too common in our society for exasperated educators and legislators to scratch their heads, admitting that they just cannot figure out how to make failing schools work. But 9 times out of 10, the schools they admit this about are simply grossly underfunded. (Obviously, it is would be challenging to figure out how to make an effective rocketship on a hundred dollar budget.) If we as a society took the first baby step of at least funding our schools adequately, we would find, I think, that the challenges of prop-

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erly educating children, even from disadvantaged backgrounds, was no longer as daunting or perplexing (especially if my chapter 3 proposals were implemented). 7. Gutmann (1980, p. 349). See also Gutmann (1999), especially chapter 5; Macedo’s “Multiculturalism for the Religious Right? Defending Liberal Civic Education” (1995); and Bartkowiak’s “Religious Education and the Social Good,” in Narayan & Bartkowiak (1999). 8. A starting gate is that point in time after which free competition for some prize, job, title, and so on, begins between competitors. Before the starting gate, according to the “ability-acquiring moment’’ of educational opportunity theories, any two competitors were supposed to have been provided equal opportunities for attaining the qualities or abilities in question, where these qualities comprise the criteria for later judging who “wins.” After the starting gate, according to the “ability-judging moment” of such theories, the winner is indeed supposed to be chosen on the basis only of clearly specified abilities, rather than on the basis of other traits (such as skin color) that should be held as irrelevant to the competition. This latter “equal judging of ability” is the Non-Discrimination aspect of such theories, whereas the former “equal acquiring of ability” is the more strictly Equal Opportunity aspect. In what follows, I will be concerned only with this former “equal acquiring” aspect (which is more naturally relevant to issues of grade-school education), and in the following way. I will take as my starting gate approximately the 18th year of a teenager’s life, that general period when most teenagers can be expected to have finished high school. I will assume that, when any such teenager then competes for positions in college or on the job market, she should be judged in a nondiscriminatory way, according to only those traits that are legitimately relevant to whatever position is up for grabs. I will have nothing more to say about what happens after this starting gate. My focus from here on will be on what happens before this starting gate—specifically, on whether all competitors have been provided a fair education for competition up to this gate. 9. Gutmann (1980) argues that a certain kind of political preparation is also necessary, if not to make them autonomous, at least to make them functional members of their civic communities. 10. For accounts of the neglected, nonautonomous masses trapped in prisons, poverty, and addiction in America, see Tonry (1995) and Parenti (1999), Wilson (1997), and Reinarman (1997), respectively. 11. See section 1.2. It should be remembered, in what follows, that, although these three sets of conditions may be neatly separated out conceptually, they will overlap and inform each other in actuality.

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12. For an understanding of this Duncan scale, see Christopher Jencks et al. Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America (NY: Basic Books, 1979), and Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (NY: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 221–225. 13. It should be more evident, according to reasons that Frankfurt has presented, why a model of “equal educational opportunity,” by itself, will likewise be inadequate. We might imagine all children receiving an exactly equal level of educational opportunity—where this level is uniformly abysmal or scant—so that equality, in itself, is no moral achievement. Also, the state might have to allow some limited deviations above the line of “equal educational opportunity,” such as might flow from more involved and supportive parents, or from high-quality private schooling. To deny this would allow, as James Fishkin has pointed out, for inordinate meddling and interference in the family or private sphere (Fishkin, 1983). As such, we should note that the quality of education (and educational opportunity) that a child enjoys at school will always be partially dependent on family conditions that she enjoys in her home and community. But to the extent that these private deviations substantially hurt (rather than inequitably bolster) a child’s ability to utilize an education at school, the principles I offered in chapter 3, rather than in this chapter, apply. With this proviso in mind, I am concerned in this chapter to establish what fair conditions should obtain in the schools when home and community conditions are held as a theoretical constant. 14. Williams, “The Idea of Equality,” The Concept of Equality, W. T. Blackstone (Ed.). (Minneapolis, MN: Burgess, 1969). Incidentally, and in relation to the previous footnote, we should note that competitors who are born with natural advantages (such as innately faster-twitch muscles, stronger limbs, or quicker minds) necessarily bring an unfair advantage to the race. Although this may be the case, it is significantly different from the case of socially rooted advantages (which are all that I am addressing here), for the simple fact that “nature,” rather than society, is the cause of such natural advantages. While justice does require us to eradicate all undeserved socially rooted advantages, it does not necessarily require us, it seems, to eradicate all undeserved naturally rooted advantages. (On a consequentialist level, such genetic egalitarianism might be practically impossible to achieve; and on a deontological level, this might entail obliterating all the unique identity traits and idiosyncrasies, included in our “genetic handicaps,” that make us distinct individuals.) Although Rawls assumes the more inclusive claim of justice, he seems to do so without adequate justification. 15. See Jencks (1988), Fishkin (1983), and Roemer (1998).

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16. Roemer uses such a system of types of children, although he makes a subtle distinction between “levels” and “degrees” of effort. If we wanted, we could make this model more fine-grained by including 81 types (3 to the 4th power, using four levels of each gradient), 243 types, 729 types, and so on, depending on how many levels of each gradient we wanted or, in other words, how much information we wanted to be included within each level. (Currently, Julian Betts and Roemer are pursuing just such a line of research.) 17. Roemer (1998), p. 80. It should be noted that earning capacity will be only one measure of adult autonomy. Obviously, many young adults, if autonomous, will choose to enter careers that, though offering relatively lower earnings, will offer, to them, high net amounts of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Accordingly, we would want future “longitudinal autonomy studies” to track not only later earning capacities of different populations of youth, but also the distribution and entrance of these youths into a broad variety of careers (including artists, scientists, educators, public servants, charity work, etc.). If disadvantaged youths continued to enter certain careers in very disproportionately low levels, we should want to figure out precisely why this was so. 18. Jencks (1988), p. 520. Jencks himself does not seem to prefer any one of these versions strongly above the others. In a skeptical manner, he suggests that, to some degree at least, every version of “equal educational opportunity” suffers from some sort of fundamental incoherence. As such, his article offers more in the way of conceptual clarification than moral resolution. 19. See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book 5, chapter 3; and Bernard Williams’s “The Idea of Equality,” and S. I. Benn & R. S. Peters’s “Justice and Equality,” both in The Concept of Equality, W. T. Blackstone, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Burgess, 1969), pp. 35–53 and 54–81, respectively.

Appendix 1. Incidentally, this ability to measure the levels of this autonomyinhibiting injustice could prove quite fecund for historical analysis. If modified to allow measurement of the autonomy levels of different populations, even ones that existed in the past, we could approximate what percentage of these populations were autonomous (and, as my analysis will allow for, according to what ways and distributions these populations were and were not autonomous). For example, we could derive “autonomy-profiles” of, say, Periclean Athens and Octavian Rome (with profiles of both the patrician and plebian subpopulations),

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Renaissance Florence, Calvin’s Geneva, Victorian England, America in 1930, 1965, 2000, and so forth. The possibilities are endless. With such analyses, some quite fascinating results and insights should emerge. 2. Some of the best representative philosophical essays on free will versus determinism, specifically in relation to this question of moral responsibility, are contained in John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza, eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 3. For statistics on the levels of such nonautonomous persons, in particular those incarcerated and in drug and alcohol treatment programs in the United States, see Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 117th ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Oct., 1997), especially tables 331, 332, 354–359, 219, and 220. 4. For a provocative account of the ways that Finland is not a “penal society,” compared to the United States, see Warren Hogge, “In Finnish Prisons, No Gates or Armed Guards,” New York Times, Jan., 2, 2003, A1, A6. 5. And, for consistency’s sake, we are assumed to be talking here about inmates that have properly been charged as criminal offenders, not innocent and autonomous citizens who have been imprisoned for wrongful political reasons, such as filled the jails of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In the case of the United States, most of those in jail might end up there for having been wrongly denied the chance to become autonomous, to make it on their own apart from a life of petty crime. In the case of Iraq, by contrast, most of those in jail might have ended up there for nothing more than posing some kind of perceived threat to the despot. While both of these kinds of imprisonment stem from social injustice, the former may be seen as stemming from a denial of the right to develop one’s autonomy, whereas the latter should be seen as stemming from a denial of the right to freely exercise one’s autonomy. Accordingly, one could calculate the extent of a nation’s total or overall autonomy-harming injustice by factoring in all inmates (and this would reflect that state’s denial of both these rights). But to calculate the extent only of a nation’s autonomy-development-harming injustice (which would stem from the state’s denial only of the former right), one would have to factor out all those inmates who were imprisoned for purely wrongful political reasons. 6. To reiterate, one can assess the degree to which any society unjustly frustrates the development of autonomy, first, by calculating how many relevant adults in the society are nonautonomous. This would be all those who meet the specific criteria laid in section 1.3, and would include all known addicts, inmates, and so on (but would not include all

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those who would lead autonomous lives if they were not merely wrongfully, say, locked up in prison. This exceptional grouping would include political refugees and detainees, slaves, etc., if they existed in the state in question. Also, keep in mind that the number of nonautonomous persons that sociologists will be able to document will usually fall somewhere below the actual level [e.g., do sociologists know how many women would prefer not to sell their bodies in some form or another?], so that our documentable estimates might well be conservative, falling below the real truth of the matter). Second, one would then calculate the percentage of the overall adult population all these nonautonomous persons comprise, and then subtract this actual percentage from 100%, so as to arrive at TAP. The society in question will then emerge as unjust to whatever extent TAP (the actual percentage of autonomous persons) falls below TOP (94%, or whatever percentage proves to be the optimal, or highest attainable, percentage of autonomous adults in the population if the society’s institutions were thoroughly just). 7. Many of the sources and statistics in chapter 2, in addition to what is included here, amply demonstrate this claim.

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Index

abortion, 139, 155 acts of omission, 91 adaptive preferences. See preferences addiction, 20, 66–68, 133, 198 adolescence, 12, 19, 40, 57–58, 61–67, 70, 83 Adoption & Safe Families Act, 141 agency, 5, 19, 24, 26, 88 AID (Autonomy Impairing Disadvantages), 82–83, 124, 149, 180, 211– 12n akrasia, 7, 23, 45 AL3. See threshold anomie, 7, 203n Archard, David, 97 Aristotle, 184 arrested development, 1–3, 41, 57, 80, 83, 86, 88, 92, 105, 113, 121, 123, 132, 139, 161, 171–72 authenticity, 6, 23 autonomy, passim Bandura, Albert, 12–13, 42–43, 48–49, 55, 61–63, 65, 68, 70, 169 Barry, Brian, 1, 147n Berlin, Isaiah, 6, 16 beliefs, self-efficacy. See self-efficacy Best Interest Standard, 215n Big Brother, 8 biological embedding, 71, 75–79, 121, 170

brain, 77–79 Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, 66, 74 CAD (Crippling of Autonomy Development), 87–94, 120–22, 125, 133, 213–14n capabilities, 2, 20, 27–28, 40, 42, 56, 58, 76, 81, 150, 171, 206–7n capacities, 6, 9, 11, 21, 25 care, 30 careers (and career options), 7, 40, 50–56, 60, 63, 68 class (social), 55, 73, 82, 149–50, 153 COD (Clustering of Disadvantages), 81–83, 128, 149, 170, 180, 211n coercion, 7, 15, 35 cognitive skills, 10, 22, 58–62, 160– 61 communitarianism, 27–28, 99, 101 Concentric Spheres View, 106–9, 135 conceptions of the good, 9, 28–29, 99, 166 contraception, compulsory (CC), 137–56 contracts, 108–11 cost effectiveness, 101 CPS (Child Protective Services), 118, 130–31 critical periods, 78–79, 121, 128, 211n culpability, 161–62

251

252

INDEX

Depo-Provera, 137 delayed gratification, 12–13, 70 delinquency, 62, 111 desires, 7, 12–13, 23, 26 determinism, 33, 198 development. See arrested development Dewey, John, 183 dignity, 25–27 disadvantages, 20, 71–75, 81–83, 139, 143, 145–46, 149–50, 176, 182–83. See also AID, COD, SOD distribution, 1, 29, 81, 112, 148, 158, 167, 179, 184, 188, 192, 197, 201–2 drugs, 13, 17, 19, 34, 53–54, 66–67, 74, 133, 198 duties, 8, 25, 35, 91, 95, 105–13, 134–36, 163 Dworkin, Gerald, 6, 203n Dworkin, Ronald, 212n Educational Justice Standard, 157, 166–73, 176–80, 189–90 efficacy. See self-efficacy efficiency, 83, 101–3, 123, 192, 200 effort, 45, 47, 58, 177, 181–83, 186–88 Elder, Glen, 72 Elster, John, 14, 66 equal opportunity, 1–2, 178–89 fairness, 179 families, 20, 60, 62, 72–73, 95–98, 127–31, 143, 181, 202 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, 130–31 Feinberg, Joel, 5, 8–9, 19, 25, 34, 42, 86, 89, 98, 212–13n feminism, 30 Fishkin, James, 98, 117, 157, 178, 220n Fourth Amendment, 130 Frankfurt, Harry, 7, 13, 166–68, 179 freedom, 5, 10, 20, 26, 30, 98, 140, 191, 195

Friedman, Marilyn, 31 frustration, 17, 58, 64, 169 Gardner, Howard, 58 generations, 4, 72, 146, 153 Goodin, Robert, 200, 218n gradients (socioeconomic status/ SES), 65, 73–77, 81, 210n Gutmann, Amy, 166, 168, 179, 194, 219n Hackett, Gail, 55, 60, 68 harm, 88–94, 125–26, 135 Harm Principle, 35, 86–88, 94, 117, 144, 154, 163 Head Start, 127, 172, 210n Hertzmann, Clyde, 77–79, 170, 172, 209–10n High/Scope Perry Pre-School Programme, 172 Hobbes, Thomas, 112 Hurka, Thomas, 26, 205n ignorance, 7, 48 illiteracy. See literacy independence, 5–6, 9, 17, 22, 27, 100, 104 individualism, 22, 27, 100 information gathering, 92, 114, 127, 129–31 injury, 34, 37 intelligence(s), 33, 58–59 interests, 1, 8, 34, 86–87, 89–94, 131, 192 intervention, 3, 86–87, 94–103, 113– 15, 120–32, 136–37, 163 intrusiveness, 95–97, 114, 127, 129– 31, 144, 150–53, 181, 190 Jencks, Christopher, 184, 210n, 220– 21n Jim Crow, 153, 160–61 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 12, 23, 64, 98 Keating, Daniel, 73, 76, 171

Index Kozol, Jonathon, 94, 158–59, 168, 185 language acquisition, 79, 82 LaFollette, Hugh, 123–24, 127, 133, 218n liberalism, 3, 5, 9, 22, 27, 87 libertarianism, 9, 86–87 life-goods, 40, 44–52, 56, 61, 67, 157–62, 169, 175–79 life-paths, 57, 70 literacy, 58, 75, 126, 138, 160 MacIntyre, Alastair, 48, 162 manipulation, 7, 15, 45 Marvalit, Avishai, 135 Marx, Karl, 23, 26 mastery experiences, 64, 67 micropathways. See pathways Mill, John Stuart, 3, 23, 86, 107, 117, 212n, 214n Miller, Arthur, 136 minorities, 145–47, 179, 194, 201 neural sculpting, 71, 75–78, 121, 170 neutrality, 28–29, 99 Norplant, 137 Nozick, Robert, 1–2, 178 Nussbaum, Martha, 1–2, 42, 206–7n obligations, 8, 105, 112. See also duties occupations. See careers O’Neill, Onora, 91, 105, 134 opportunities, 7, 15–16, 18, 20, 26, 54–55, 62, 69, 98, 160, 175–76, 180 options. See opportunities parental licensing, 123–34, 164 Parfit, Derek, 156 paternalism, 8, 19, 33, 97–99, 205n pathways (developmental), 74–76, 124–26, 170–71, 210–12n perfectionism, 26, 28, 44–45, 47

253

Pierce, C.S., 69 poverty, 47, 74, 81, 149–50, 174 preferences, 6, 13–16, 20–23, 26, 37, 45, 47, 51, 160, 175 privacy, 129, 134–35, 151 privilege, 20, 170, 177, 180, 182, 189, 193 proactive responses, 120–23 Quine, W.V.O., 33 range of options, 7, 26, 48, 160, 175, 180 Rawls, John, 1, 28, 98, 132, 195, 200, 206n rational choice theory, 53–54 rationalization, 14–16 Raz, Joseph, 35, 195 respect, 2–3, 9, 25, 29, 33, 98, 135– 36, 195 responsibility, 5, 107 responsiveness to reasons, 13, 30 Riesman, David, 32–33 rights, 8, 103–4, 131, 134, 140–42, 144 risks, 123–28, 132–33, 164 Roemer, John, 182–84, 187, 221n role models, 61–62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134 Scale (Autonomy), 17–21, 36, 64 schools, 60–62, 100–1, 157 passim Second Principle of Justice (Rawls’), 2 self-assessment, 58 self-control, 6, 12, 17, 19, 24–25, 66–68 self-efficacy, 6, 42–43, 55–57, 59, 67–68 self-government, 8–10, 17, 25, 37, 41, 88 Sen, Amartya, 1, 42, 150, 206n SES gradients. See gradients sexuality, 65–66 Sher, George, 14, 187, 205n, 207–8n

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Shue, Henry, 94, 104, 213n, 215n Simmons, John, 112 Singer, Peter, 188, 218n skills, 57 cognitive skills, 10–12, 58–62, 160–61 interpersonal skills, 68–70 self-efficacy/self-management skills, 56–59, 63–68, 157, 160–61 Smith, Susan, 118, 127, 129, 140 SOD (Snowballing of Disadvantages), 81–83, 128, 149, 170, 179–80 sour grapes, 14, 48 starting gate, 219n state of nature, 112 sterilization, 137–38, 145, 147 sufficiency, 166–68, 177–79, 189 theoretical virtues, 193–94 threshold (autonomy, AL3), 3, 17, 19–21, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 40–43,

49, 100–1, 125, 136, 158, 166, 169, 172–73, 175, 190, 197–99 Tonry, Michael, 145, 219n tort law, 163 trajectory, 20, 54, 80, 88, 90, 150, 158, 175, 212n underprivileged. See privilege utility, 53, 167, 195 value, 21–30, 34, 156 Van den Haag, Ernest, 148, 150 veil of ignorance, 29 volition, 12, 16, 23 waste, 102–3, 123 Weber, Max, 52 Williams, Bernard, 179, 189, 220n Wisconsin v. Yoder, 100–1, 181, 214n wrongful life suits, 122 Yates, Andrea, 118, 127, 129, 140