Private Property Society and Kids Suing Parents

Eric Parks emails:

Robert,

Was wondering your position on this...

French parents who upload images of their children could be sued by them

I believe the child image case is a subset of a much bigger question for the advocate of a Private Property Society..

As Murray Rothbard has pointed out in The Ethics of Liberty, albeit from a natural rights perspective,  it is impossible to see a newborn babe as an existing self-owner. My view is slightly nuanced, I simply hold, from a PPS perspective, that a newborn babe can not survive, make decisions, protect itself, without help. Someone must make decisions etc. for a child. The presumptive decision makers for a child are the parents that bring a given child into the world.

The parents, as decision makers, remain until the child begins to make decisions for himself, Or as Rothbard puts it from his natural rights perspective:

For the child has full rights of self-ownership when he demonstrates that he has them in nature--in short, when he leaves or "runs away" from home.

Recognizing that a parent's role is limited, that it ends when the child begins to make his own decisions, it follows that parents can not make decisions for a child that last in perpetuity.
A parent can not sign a contract for a young child that will require, say,the child to work at a certain job, 80 hours a week at low pay, for 30 years. When a child becomes of age, that is, when he is making his own decisions, he can reject any contract that was made on his behalf by his parents. In other words, parental decisions are non-binding on an adult.

Thus, when a child becomes of age and learns that his parents took pictures of him as a child, perhaps in the belief that he would cherish memories for later years, the child as an adult can demand the pictures be destroyed, limit the way the pictures can be used etc., since the photo taking "contract" between the parents and a child end when the child becomes of age.

I note that this does not mean that a child can sue a parent for decisions made on his behalf that do not violate the non-aggression principle, just that parental decisions lack force in a PPS when the child begins to make his own decisions.

Of course in cases where a child has been abused by a parent, and later becomes a decision maker, he can sue a parent for a violation of the non-aggression principle. Indeed, while a child remians under the decision making control of a parent and an outsider recognizes abuse, that is a violation of NAP, the outsider can make a friend of child filing with a PPS court to ask for remedies that will stop the NAP abuse.

 -RW