Parental Obligations & Voluntary Slavery

Can you embrace one without also embracing the other?

Most people hold parents have an enforceable obligation to support their children, and, people are not permitted to sell themselves into voluntary slavery. Without taking a firm stance on which way to swing, I contend people have good reason to support both ideas, or, neither. The basic idea is if people can commit themselves to sixteen years of compulsory labouring and financing of their children, then, why, analogously, cannot people commit themselves to decades of compulsory labouring and financing of their masters in a voluntary slave contract too. Let’s explore a few answers.

Before proceeding, however, we should get a handle on what slavery is. I take slavery to be the state of being partially or fully possessed by another, or, realisably threatened with that, and, being forced to labour or give up the fruits of your labour to them. Along with Herbert Spencer in his excellent essay, ‘The Coming Slavery’, I take slavery to be on a continuum. At the maximal end is total actualised control of the person and forced labour, and, on the minimal end is no actualised control and limited taking of earnings. If the master of a chattel slave gave almost all of his possession back to the slave, but kept a right to forty per cent of his income should he choose to work, we’d still call this said man a slave. Certainly, his condition amounts to more than being perpetually stolen from where he is subject to the threat of jail for failure to hand over earnings.

Should this minimal slavery be accepted as such then enforceable parental obligations can constitute minimal slavery too, because, parents can be forced against their will to give up part of the fruit of their labour to their children in the form of food, heating and shelter. Should this minimal slavery be thought to be too thin a conception of slavery to count, you only need to consider parents being under an enforceable obligation to feed to their children, change their nappies and stop them from doing dangerous things to see forced labour is probably required by it, which, to my mind, definitely goes beyond minimal slavery to slavery of the definitive sort. Again, obviously, most people want to embrace enforceable parental obligations but reject voluntary slavery. Can both positions be consistently held?

An obvious answer is voluntary slavery should be banned because it is bad for its participants while having children is not. No liberal can embrace this answer because it commits them to paternalism: It would imply where having children is against the interests of the potential parent the state could permissibly restrict their reproduction. Concerns about autonomy, i.e., the actual ability to shape one’s life in accordance with a reflective plan for it, provide a better answer. This is because in many cases of voluntary slavery autonomy will be diminished while this is unlikely in having children. Yet, again, this relationship is contingent as we can imagine cases where poor people can have children and seriously diminish their autonomy on a net basis as a result, because, they simply cannot then choose life paths which may be in their reflective plans, but I doubt most people, let alone liberals, would want to prohibit these people from having kids.

I imagine a few conservatives will scoff at the idea that concerns for autonomy, i.e., concern for the ability to choose a life in accordance with deep reflection, could possibly stop people from having children, because, surely, one such life is that of being a parent, even with all the attendant enforceable obligations! True. Yet could the same not be said for a person who wanted a very low rate of interest with no deposit in order to get onto the housing ladder entering into a slave contract with a bank? Or a guarantee to always be provided with food, water and heat in exchange for minimal slavery? If autonomy isn’t diminished by children and your obligations to them it is not necessarily diminished by a minimal slavery contract with a bank either. Moreover: If the good of children is going to be warrant enough for greatly reducing the autonomy of the individual surely there will be many instances where the good of voluntary slavery will do the same thing too.

An obvious reply to this article is to point to the implausibility of a definition of slavery which says all parents are slaves to their children, reject the definition, then, avoid the dilemma altogether. I don’t actually think parents are slaves to their children in the modern world though, because, most of the time they can alienate their enforceable obligation to their children by giving them up for adoption. You are not fully or partially possessed by another person, or, forced to labour or give up the fruits of your labour, where you can choose not to do these things. Therefore, the plausibility of my definition stands. However, on a desert island and in some instances of the real world, where, I assume, people would still intuit parents can still be forced to look after their children, parents are indeed still slaves to their children.

Many people, including Amos Wollen, have suggested to me the need of the child makes the parental obligation enforceable while the desire of the slave master does not make the slave contract enforceable. Maybe you can only be forced to do something against your will if the interest is great enough in the other person. This reasoning does not rule out voluntary slavery per se. We only need to imagine a disabled man buying a slave who supports him without whom he would die, or, should we grant a great interest in the other person can permit voluntary slavery, why couldn’t a father, al la Walter Block’s example, sell himself into slavery in order to acquire the money to finance medical treatment to save his sickly son.

It seems very strange though that it might be permissible to enslave yourself to some disabled guy against your interest while it might not be permissible to enslave yourself to a rich man in your interest, perhaps for a higher price. What is the possible rationale for the difference? Why is the disabled guy’s need creating a transfer right within your self-ownership which wouldn’t otherwise be there? I suppose it is because we think this very important interest of his, or, a child’s concerning enforceable parental obligations, should not be brushed aside.

Individual rights over our physical body do not shape themselves according to need alone in liberal political philosophy generally however, so, why, parity of reasoning demands, should need change our set of individual rights here. For example, I have a right to labour as I please even if a disabled person or a random child might need that labour to survive, their need does not carve out a right into my labour from my overall self-ownership. It doesn’t seem need alone then can warrant parental obligation and a few instances of voluntary slavery arising from need, while excluding full blown voluntary slavery, because, need itself is not warrant for any enforceable obligation at all.

Obviously, the crucial element is voluntary creation of a child, but that occurs with the voluntary creation of slave contracts too! It might be claimed it is the joint fact of creating a child and them needing you which creates the enforceable parental obligation but since that conjunction doesn’t exist under most voluntary slavery contracts, they, contrastingly, are not enforceable. Yes and no. Yes, that makes parental obligations enforceable; no, if you can put yourself under a set of enforceable obligations for a central project of having a child, again, (another pairwise comparison!) why can’t you do so for other central projects at the same time. We’ve rule out autonomy, welfare and need concerns as sufficient reason.

I am not sure where I stand on the question of voluntary slavery; nevertheless, granting the existence of enforceable parental obligations, which, I think, I believe in, there are similar grounds for permitting the existence of voluntary slavery. Indeed, enforcing parental obligations in certain instances is simply to enforce voluntary slavery. I suspect most readers will not want to side with Robert Nozick in permitting voluntary slavery, but equally neither will they want to side with Murray Rothbard in rejecting enforceable parental obligations. I’d welcome anyone explaining why they may not have to side with either.

P. S.

To my mind, one of the best arguments against voluntary slavery contracts is the risk of the injustice of an unvoluntarily undertaken one is so large that all voluntary contracts can be prohibited on the basis of such risk simply being too high. This argument can be found in Joel Feinberg’s Harm’s to Self.