My Mother Is A Fish

THE DAILY APOLOGY: belated book review -- Narveson's _Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice_

Gil Guillory writes in support of Jan Narveson's contactarianism. His work does not presuppose a mythical contract between individuals at some past time, just that in the prisoners' dilemmas we face daily, we will rationally choose cooperation given the length of the game and so on. His work demonstrates a new respect for the word respect, inasmuch as he reforms it to mean respecting people's values. His work strikes a blow against intuitionism, an intellectual disease which myself am often subject to, the idea that we can intuit universal moral values, by explaining how in various ways utility cannot be interposed as a measurable proxy for good.

The section on children's rights is interesting to the extent that it raises the question of a being's rights are protected by an individual especially lacking in the private means of securing those rights; after all, it is only a child against the might and authority of the parents, abusive or not. They are protected for rational reasons.(?) Anyway, whether parents have no claim to ownership over their children as a residual of the claim to ownership over the fetus, or whether they relinquish such ownership to teh child on birth or whatnot, as opposed to the idea that no body own's his self--the contractarian case--still, similar results result.