The Relationship Rights of Children [Hardcover]

This book is a philosophical analysis of children's rights with regard to the legal system.This is a philosophical analysis of a legal topic. It uses welfare-based and autonomy-based moral theories to develop a theory of what rights children should have when the legal system makes decisions about their family relationships.This is a philosophical analysis of a legal topic. It uses welfare-based and autonomy-based moral theories to develop a theory of what rights children should have when the legal system makes decisions about their family relationships.This book presents a sustained theoretical analysis of what rights children should possess in connection with state decision making about their personal relationships which the state does in numerous aspects of family law, including paternity, adoption, custody and visitation, termination of parental rights, and grandparent visitation. It examines the nature and normative foundation of adults' rights in connection with relationships among themselves and then assesses the extent to which the moral principles underlying adults' rights apply also to children. It concludes that the law should ascribe to children rights equivalent (though not identical) to those which adults enjoy, and this would require substantial changes in the way the legal system treats children, including a reformation of the rules for establishing legal parent-child relationships at birth and of the rules for deciding whether to end a parent-child relationship.Introduction; 1. Why rights for children?; 2. The existing relationship rights of children; 3. Paradigmatic relationship rights; 4. Why adults have the relationship rights they do; 5. Extending the theoretical underpinnings of relationship rights to children; 6. Rebutting defenses of the status quo; 7. Implementing children's moral rights in law; 8. Applications; Appendix; Notes.