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Defensive Kidnapping

  • Connor K. Kianpour EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 9, 2024

Abstract

Are private citizens ever morally permitted to abduct children and keep them in their custody, to protect them from their severely abusive or neglectful parents? Should private citizens face legal penalties for abducting children and keeping them in their custody, to protect them from their severely abusive or neglectful parents? In this essay, I offer arguments that support an affirmative answer to the first question and a negative answer to the second. Ultimately, I come out supporting a legal regime that keeps what I call defensive kidnapping illegal, but in which public officials may use discretion when enforcing laws that criminalize kidnapping. Under such a regime, children who were severely abused or neglected by their parents but saved by a loving, capable private citizen would be spared from admission into the precarity of the child welfare system.


Corresponding author: Connor K. Kianpour, Philosophy Department, Rhodes College, Southwestern Hall, 2000 North Parkway, Memphis, TN 38112, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

Over the three years I’ve been working on this project, I have received invaluable feedback from Nathan Allen, Michael Ball-Blakely, David Boonin, Sam Director, Jess Flanigan, Anca Gheaus, Jake Monaghan, Jordan Walters, and the editor as well as three anonymous reviewers at Moral Philosophy and Politics. I thank everyone listed for their intellectual contributions to my work.

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Received: 2023-07-05
Accepted: 2024-07-14
Published Online: 2024-09-09
Published in Print: 2025-04-28

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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