Lockean tradition have been willing to defend the "rights" of children to be molested by adults, to buy drugs, to sell their legs, and so on. I think that there is a grotesque confusion here (as well as a lack of common sense), since it assumes that childrens' serious lack of intelligence and information in no way taints the voluntariness of their consent. While I am in agreement with Locke up to here, I think his theory needs to be reformulated. First of all, we should deny that parents have a non-consensual obligation to support their children. As explained earlier, even if we endorse Locke's right to charity, no involuntary duties to one's offspring follow. Second and more basically, we should integrate the theory of children's rights with Locke's theories of contract and consent. The main obstacle to such an approach is that a child can't consent in the normal sense; indeed, if he could, why would the child need a guardian in the first place? Tacit consent works no better than explicit consent, since lack of rational ability undermines tacit consent too. The difference between explicit and tacit is merely in the manner of expressing consent; and if a child is rationally unable to say "I consent" then he is no more rationally able to indirectly imply that he consents. So neither explicit nor tacit consent work. But despair not; for there is a third concept of consent, namely hypothetical consent. While this notion is ordinarily suspect, in the case of children it is uniquely useful. Adults must treat children only in ways to which they would consent, if their faculties were sufficiently developed. Everyone has the duty to treat children only in ways to which they would consent: there is a general obligation to refrain from using violence against children, molesting them, giving them poison or drugs, and so on. And a child's would-be guardians can only become his guardians on terms to which the child would consent if his mind were mat...
