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.
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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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Section: Symposium on Longtermism; Guest Editor: Stefan Riedener
- Philosophy for the Long Run: Introduction to the Symposium on Longtermism
- Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as a Metaethical Route to Virtue-Ethical Longtermism
- Capitalism and the Very Long Term
- Future People as Future Victims: An Anti-Natalist Justification of Longtermism
- Regular Articles
- Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus
- Act and Rule Consequentialism: A Synthesis
- The Doctrine of Sufficiency as a Contractualist Principle
- Rawls, Humanity and the Concept of Expression
- A Marketplace for Honest Ideas
- Writing the Other: The Ethics of Out-Group Representation in Art
- Carbon Pricing and Intergenerational Fairness
- Cooperation, Democracy, and Coercion: On the Grounds and Scope of Freedom of Movement
- Attempts at a Marxist Critique of Cancellation
- Defensive Kidnapping
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Section: Symposium on Longtermism; Guest Editor: Stefan Riedener
- Philosophy for the Long Run: Introduction to the Symposium on Longtermism
- Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as a Metaethical Route to Virtue-Ethical Longtermism
- Capitalism and the Very Long Term
- Future People as Future Victims: An Anti-Natalist Justification of Longtermism
- Regular Articles
- Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus
- Act and Rule Consequentialism: A Synthesis
- The Doctrine of Sufficiency as a Contractualist Principle
- Rawls, Humanity and the Concept of Expression
- A Marketplace for Honest Ideas
- Writing the Other: The Ethics of Out-Group Representation in Art
- Carbon Pricing and Intergenerational Fairness
- Cooperation, Democracy, and Coercion: On the Grounds and Scope of Freedom of Movement
- Attempts at a Marxist Critique of Cancellation
- Defensive Kidnapping