Big Think

Pat R on December 2, 2009, 8:09 PM

Children only want to survive, to be cared for by society, and especially by parents – and don’t they have a right to all of that?

When organized society conflicts with the rights of children to survive, thrive, and flourish as all adults hope they might, don’t legislatures have an obligation to prevent such social intrusion in their lives that would rob, or deny them that right of survival – extended to include the full scope of development to adulthood?

Aaron Scott on December 23, 2009, 9:20 PM

If there is one basic human right that every child should be given it is to be free of the direct impact of war. One need only see the faces of parents who have lost children to sniper attacks, cluster bombs, or “acceptable” collateral damage, to see that, for all of our justifications, a great evil has been done when a child is killed.

Of course, this entails that war be outlawed itself. Or, barring that, perhaps we should drop of the fighting parties in the middle of the Sahara desert…and whoever is the last man standing wins. At least the children will have some degree of removal from the terror that surely crucifies their minds forever.

Yes, I believe in just war. But no matter how just the reason for going to war, if we wind up killing children over and over and over, it soon is not so clearly just as when we began.