PROPOSED TITLE:
The Moral Status of Children:
A Philosophical Investigation
 
Robert Noggle
Department of Philosophy, Central Michigan University; and
and
Samantha Brennan
Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario
 
PROSPECTUS:
Fundamental issues about the moral status of children have been neglected by moral and political theorists. There is a great deal of literature at the level of application yet the theories and concepts underlying the applied work are insufficiently precise and detailed to do the required work. Yet, as legislators, the courts, social workers, health care practitioners, and medical ethicists are increasingly called upon to make important decisions regarding children and their care, the need for a detailed and sophisticated account of children's`moral status has never been more urgent.

Children's rights advocates have largely viewed the issue as one of the status of laws governing children, but our work goes further and talks about children not just in relation to the state but also in relation to questions of parental rights and issues of family justice. One thing that has been lacking in the current literature is an account of the relationship between the moral status of children and the moral grounding and moral limitations on parents. Because they lack such a philosophical account of children's moral status in the context of the family, current work on children in public policy, legal theory, and medical ethics has tended to consist of the mining of intuitions and legal precedent. One problem with this approach is that it leaves us stranded when people's intuitions differ.. Having a well-worked out philosophical theory about the moral status of children would help us to decide tough cases where intuitions differ from each other, or from legal precedent, or where both legal precedent and intuitions are inconclusive. For these reasons we expect that our book will make an important contribution to the literature.

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