Post by Radrook Admin on May 14, 2019 12:50:47 GMT -5
Should Parenting require a license?
Should parents be required to have a license before being permitted to be parents? If we care enough about the damage that an unqualified driver can do to others and we appreciate that the government requires licensing to drive in order to reduce accidents, then why should we object when a government strives to do the same in order to protect the innocent from winding up ruined due to idiotic parenting? I personally escaped the effects perhaps due to luck or divine intervention. But millions of others aren't so lucky or perhaps blessed and wind up in prisons and maybe on dearth row,.
In short, I see a glaring contradiction here by those who feel very offended by the government participation in trying to reduce bad parenting and their simultaneous, enthusiastic approval of the governments' involvement trying to reduce bad drivers.
Moral Responsibility
All governments have a moral responsibility to protect their citizens from harm, be it educational, by neglecting certain essential subjects which all humans should be familiar with, or physical, by failing to take measures to make sure that the weak are not at the mercy of the merciless. That was pointed out in Plato's Republic where the government is compared to a parent of its citizens.
True, such involvement can be taken to the extreme, and things taken to extreme are always bad as Aristotle pointed out in his golden mean explanation of virtues versus vices. But if kept within golden-mean parameters, there is no justifiable reason why the government cannot improve how its citizens are raised. If it can and it doesn't, then it is being negligent of its duties toward its citizens and is itself guilty of bad parenting from the Socratic/Platonic philosophical viewpoint.
www.searchquotes.com/quotes/author/Albert_Einstein/
My response to an objection
Procreation is part of human nature-I agree. But does that make it a human right within a society that might be harmed by it? Since societies exist to enhance human survival via mutual cooperation toward goals then behavior within a society which can prove detrimental if left non-legislated tends to be legislated to one degree or another.
For example, children are required to be educated so that they can fit in with a particular society's infrastructure. If indeed they ultimately don't, then they are classified as juvenile delinquents and frowned upon by most other members. Legislation which includes negative sanctions, such as fines incarceration and executions to control their behavior and protect other citizens from their antics have been set in place. Would you argue that their human nature is being legislated? If indeed we tagged the it behavior as inviolable because it is human nature then social pandemonium would quickly ensue where the strong would savage the weak who would be at the mercy of the strong due to lack of legislation.
No, I'm not proposing that the government tell us who and when to marry. My only suggestion is that kids be educated from a very early age in the principles of good parenting by taking a child psychology course and then passing the knowledge part of that course as a requirement to being allowed to be parents. That is all.
Such courses are available right now. In fact, I took one as an elective in my Social Science curriculum and emerged a better parent as a consequence. At no moment did I feel that the knowledge was depriving me of any human nature because it suggested that certain parenting choices were detrimental to a child's welfare. Actually, had I suggested that to the professor in charge of the course, a psychologist-he would have considered me quaint.