The Voluntary Life

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Roderick Long's Comments on Circumcision' by Jake Desyllas. Libertarians hold every institution to a single test: does it violate objective property rights? Tradition, popularity and widespread acceptance are all beside the point — chattel slavery was ancient and universal, taxation is popular, and neither survives the test. So what happens when that t...

An AI narration of the article 'A Response To Michael Huemer on Abortion' by Jake Desyllas. Michael Huemer opens his article on abortion by describing the debate as a line-drawing exercise, in which pro-life people draw the line early and pro-choice people draw it later. This episode argues that the framing is wrong before the argument even begins: to treat abortion as a question of where to draw...

An AI narration of the article 'The Boomer Contradiction on Children's Rights' by Jake Desyllas. Since the 1960s the West has settled on a curious pair of beliefs about children: that they have no rights at all before birth, and strong, enforceable rights the moment after it. Most people hold both positions at once and feel no strain. Jake Desyllas argues that the strain is real, and that it canno...

An AI narration of the article 'The Theory of State Ownership of Children' by Jake Desyllas. Who owns a child? One long-running answer, older than the modern state and still very much alive, is: the State does. On this theory parents are not the child's natural guardians but an obstacle — a rival authority that cannot be trusted to raise loyal citizens, and whose influence must therefore be dilute...

An AI narration of the article 'Argumentation Ethics Entails Self Ownership From the Beginning of Life' by Jake Desyllas. A reply to Stephan Kinsella's comments on an earlier critique, this episode argues that the Hoppean rights theory already settles a question Kinsella leaves open: when does an individual come to own their own body? Jake's contention is that self ownership cannot be something ac...

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Stephan Kinsella's Approach To Rights Theory' by Jake Desyllas. Stephan Kinsella famously overturned the libertarian case for intellectual property by refusing to prejudge the conclusion: instead of assuming IP was valid and hunting for arguments to fit, he followed the arguments wherever they led. In this short piece, Jake Desyllas turns that same sta...

An AI narration of the article 'Three Views of the Relationship Between Parents and Political Authority' by Jake Desyllas. Philosophy of the family looks like one of the least political subjects there is. This episode argues the opposite: that it is one of the most political, and that the philosophers who write about parents and children usually have an agenda they are not advertising. The perenni...

An AI narration of the article 'What Is The Libertarian Theory of Parental Obligations?' by Jake Desyllas. This article examines four competing philosophical theories of the parental role within a libertarian framework: parental ownership, parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental responsibility. It critically analyzes each theory, evaluating its logical imp...

An AI narration of the article 'When do Parental Obligations Not Apply?' by Jake Desyllas. The causal theory of parental responsibility grounds positive obligations in the fact that, by creating a child, parents place that child in a state of peril. But if obligations follow from action, what about the cases where a child comes into existence without the parent having acted in the relevant sense?...

An AI narration of the article 'Objections Against The State-Of-Peril Argument For Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. Critics of the state-of-peril argument for parental obligations have raised many objections — that creating a child is not aggression and so cannot generate duties, that unborn children are themselves the aggressors, that giving life is so great a gift it nullifies all further...

An AI narration of the article 'Support for Abortion Has Corrupted Libertarian Theory' by Jake Desyllas. Libertarian philosophy ought to offer a coherent and beautiful account of family life: parents bear responsibility for the children they create, parental authority and its limits flow from that responsibility, and children are recognised as individuals with inherent rights. Modern libertarianis...

An AI narration of the article 'Opponents of Parental Responsibility Cannot Help Conceding The Argument' by Jake Desyllas. The principle that parents have causal responsibility for the children they create is so undeniable that even its most prominent opponents end up making the argument for it themselves. In this article Jake works through four examples: Judith Jarvis Thomson, Murray Rothbard, El...

An AI narration of the article 'Abortion is Incompatible With Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. If parents are causally responsible for the peril they place a child in by bringing them into existence, what does that imply for abortion? Jake traces a striking line of argument first sketched by Richard Werner in 1974 and made explicit by Doris Gordon a few years later: causal parental obligati...

An AI narration of the article 'The Only Ideal of Libertarianism is Peace' by Jake Desyllas. Libertarianism is usually defended on the grounds of individual freedom, economic prosperity, or the rejection of hierarchy and tradition. In this article, Jake argues that all of these are downstream of a single, more fundamental ideal: peace. Ethics, correctly conceived, exists to resolve conflict over s...

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of George H. Smith's Theory of Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. George H. Smith wrote more about children's rights than almost any other libertarian, yet when he came to set out his own theory of the parental role he advocated a version of parenting as a voluntary social contract between parents and society at large. In this episode, Jake examines...

An AI narration of the article 'The First Extreme Saver' by Jake Desyllas. Extreme saving — putting away fifty percent or more of your income to reach financial independence within a decade — feels like a recent invention, the work of FIRE bloggers and Joe Dominguez's *Your Money Or Your Life*. It isn't. In this episode Jake traces the idea back to the Victorian bestseller Samuel Smiles, whose 187...

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Roderick Long's Theory Of Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. Roderick Long sets out a clear version of the causal-peril principle: if your voluntary actions place another person in danger, you acquire an enforceable obligation to get them out of peril. But when Long applies this principle to parenthood, his arguments are inconsistent. Fathers, on...

An AI narration of the article 'What The Declaration of Independence Should Have Said' by Jake Desyllas. The preamble of the US Declaration of Independence is among the most influential passages in the history of libertarian thought — but does it actually hold up to the way libertarians now think about rights? In this short piece, Jake Desyllas proposes a rewrite. He argues that "all men are creat...

An AI narration of the article 'Children Do Not Have Obligations to Their Parents' by Jake Desyllas. In a libertarian legal order, parents owe positive obligations to their children — to feed, shelter, and protect them — because the parents' own actions brought the child into existence. But does the relationship run the other way? Do grown children owe their parents care in old age? In this short...

An AI narration of the article 'The Theory Of Acquired Rights Violates Hoppe's Specificity Principle' by Jake Desyllas. Do we have rights because of what we are, or because of some capacity we later acquire? Libertarians are split, and the stakes run straight through the hardest questions about children, abortion, and self-ownership. This episode tests the two rival theories against one of Hans-He...

An AI narration of the article 'Three Questions Philosophers Do Not Want To Answer About Parenting' by Jake Desyllas. Why are books on the ethics of parenting so consistently dull? In this episode, Jake Desyllas argues that the blandness is no accident — it is the product of strategic omission. Philosophers of the family routinely skirt around questioning the practices that most urgently deserve s...

An AI narration of the article 'The Cost of Bad Street Design' by Jake Desyllas. In this article, Jake Desyllas examines the hidden costs of a design ideology that came to dominate twentieth-century traffic planning: the idea that pedestrians and vehicles must be physically segregated, with streets re-engineered as conduits for through traffic. Drawing on his work in a pedestrian movement consulta...

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Nozick's Comments on Parental Obligations and Children's Rights' by Jake Desyllas. Robert Nozick's commentary on Locke's theory of homesteading contains two genuinely sharp insights into the problem of children's rights: that Locke's God-as-creator argument conceded the principle that children are ownable rather than refuting it, and that Locke's same...

Article only version An AI narration of the article 'What Is The Libertarian Theory of Parental Obligations?' by Jake Desyllas. This article examines four competing philosophical theories of the parental role within a libertarian framework: parental ownership, parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental responsibility. It critically analyzes each theory, evalu...

An AI narration of the article 'You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. Parental obligations exist because creating a child places that child in a state of peril, and the parents are the ones causally responsible for that peril. From this foundation, Jake draws an unsettling conclusion: those obligations cannot be legitimately given up. Through carefully constructed thought expe...