On Becoming an Adult: Autonomy and the Moral Relevance of Life's Stages

Abstract

What is it about a person's becoming an adult that makes it generally inappropriate to treat that person paternalistically any longer? The Standard View holds that a mere difference in age or stage of life cannot in itself be morally relevant, but only matters insofar as it is correlated with the development of capacities for mature practical reasoning. This paper defends the contrary view: two people can have all the same general psychological attributes and yet the mere fact that one person is at the beginning of a life and another in the middle of one can justify treating the younger person more paternalistically than the older one. Recognising the moral relevance of age, moreover, is crucial if one is to accommodate both the liberal moral ideal of respect for autonomy and our demanding educational aims, given that these otherwise come into conflict with one another.

Theorising Children's Rights in Youth Justice: The Significance of Autonomy and Foundational Rights

“…An individual's agency in a local sense can legitimately be restricted by punishment, but punishment that permanently deprives a rights‐holder – including a child – of her capacity for global agency is illegitimate in the sense that it deprives her of her autonomy over the course of her life. In such circumstances, the offender – adult or child – cannot accept the punishment as consistent with her own autonomy. It is for this reason that Dubber argues against the death penalty as a politically justified punishment.…”

Ethics, Poverty and Children’s Vulnerability

“…Both develop during childhood, and there are valid reasons to treat children differently also in respect to those choices which they make and in those areas of their lives where they are competent to make these choices. Competence is not the single important benchmark here, but is a reason to let children safely experiment and to provide them with more room to make mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes that there are also other important aspects of the process of growing-up and becoming autonomous (Anderson and Claassen 2012; Franklin-Hall 2013). On the other hand, the structural background conditions, mentioned above, which cause and sustain (child) poverty are well out of the reach of children, whether or not they are competent in some areas of their lives.…”

A Philosophical Examination of Social Justice and Child Poverty

“…Children lack the competencies and autonomy to make many decisions for themselves and to know what is best for them, their actual wellbeing and their future well-being. Such a justification of partial paternalism toward children, which decreases as they grow up and become more mature, is widely acknowledged, although there is significant disagreement about the justificatory bases of paternalism and how far it should go; for example, in regard to teenagers and adolescents who show (nearly) the same competences as most adults (Archard 2004;Franklin-Hall 2013;Anderson and Claassen 2012).…”