Our member, Dr. Nicolás Brando (University of Liverpool, UK), talks about his new book, Childhood in Liberal Theory: Equality, Difference and Children’s Rights (Oxford University Press, 2024).
This book explores childhood and children’s rights from within the framework of liberal theories of justice. Despite the growth of philosophical research on childhood and children’s rights during the last decades, a systematic study of the moral and political status of children in liberal political theory is absent. Childhood in Liberal Theory aims to question core assumptions about who children are, and how they should be treated as right-holders, through a thorough re-evaluation of the role that equality and difference play in our understandings of justice.
Children hold a unique position within society, often perceived as different from adults and subjected to differential treatment in various spheres of life. But is this differential treatment justified? Are children fundamentally different from adults in a way that justifies their distinct treatment under the law?
Childhood in Liberal Theory questions prevailing assumptions about childhood and children’s rights in the philosophical literature. It offers a novel look at these assumptions through an ambitious deconstruction of the concept of ‘childhood’, and an ‘Adaptive model’ of children’s rights as the most apt way of including children within liberal discourses on justice.
The book consists of three parts:
I initially intended to write my PhD dissertation on children’s rights theory and education policy. My aim at the time was to provide a philosophical analysis of children’s right to education and how it would apply to their schooling and educational interests. During the research, however, I noticed how problematic assumptions, biases and unquestioned conceptions and definitions of ‘who is a child?’ tainted most of the philosophical discussions on children’s rights and their right to an education. In particular, I encountered assumptions about children being necessarily vulnerable, incompetent, and lacking sufficient agency to make important choices about their life and education.
If our subject of analysis is wrongly defined and characterised, I thought, then any study that aims to determine their appropriate treatment and the policy directed towards them would be equally tainted by this primal mistake. Children (globally) are much more diverse than what the philosophical literature portrays them to be. If we want a rigorous philosophical analysis of children’s rights, then philosophical thought must be nourished with more varied interdisciplinary sources for it to assess the case appropriately.
Therefore, the thesis shifted towards studying ‘childhood’ as a concept, how it has been understood in liberal philosophical theories, how these definitions affect the way that we see children’s rights in practice, and what we can learn about childhood from disciplines beyond philosophy (sociology, social psychology, anthropology) in order to fill the gaps of abstract theoretical reflection. I wanted to write a book that reflected the diversity inherent in childhood, with a particular focus on questioning the assumptions of the minority world about childhood in the majority world.
Should there be a law ‘just for kids’? Is it a necessary and banal truth that children are so different from adults? Is it a necessary and banal truth that the rules and principles that ground justice for children should be different from those for adults? Is a unitary justice for all unachievable? The fact that different standards tend to be used to evaluate and judge what is owed as a matter of justice to children and to adults can turn out to be a problematic diversion from our basic commitments to social justice, especially if one endorses liberal egalitarian principles of justice.
The core intuition that guides the reflections in this book is that a theory of justice which distinguishes children and adults as categorically different types of humans, with categorically different needs and interests, must be getting something wrong. Especially within theories of justice that commit themselves to protecting the freedom of all, and to treating all as equals, establishing a system (as ours) which systematically restricts the freedoms of children, and which systematically provides a differential treatment to children would require a very strong justification. How can a theory of justice committed to equal freedom and equal treatment for all humans (which can be termed as liberal egalitarian justice) justify the systematic exclusion of one-quarter of the world’s population categorised as ‘children’ from equal freedom and treatment? This is the core question which this book aims to answer.
Throughout its history, liberalism has claimed to endorse equality and freedom for all while systematically excluding certain groups from this freedom and equality, based on their labelling as ‘different’ (think, for example, of liberalism’s historical treatment of women). This has been justified by claiming that, due to the characteristics, needs, and interests of some groups, it is ‘for their own good’ that they are treated differently. They are too pure, too innocent, too vulnerable, too savage, or too irrational to abide by the principles and rules that govern the rest of the population. I do not intend to claim that all differential treatment is necessarily unjust; however, due to its history of exclusion and oppression, it might be appropriate to explore whether liberalism’s treatment of ‘children’ perpetuates biased assumptions about their difference which can be used to legitimise unjust and discriminatory practices towards them. Just as we condemn political theories that single out the group of women or of the black-skinned as deserving a differential treatment just because they are ‘women’ or ‘black’, then we must evaluate whether this condemnation might apply to the treatment of children as well.
The fact that a large part of the human population is treated differently merely based on their categorisation as ‘children’ poses an arduous challenge for liberal theories of justice: namely, how can a theory of justice which is grounded on equality and freedom legitimise the treatment of part of its citizenry as unequal and unfree? This book aims to explore the concept of ‘childhood’, its interpretations in contemporary liberal theories, and its translation into the political and legal practice of differential treatment for children. By doing so, it seeks to establish a stronger conceptual and principled foundation for further studies on justice for children, addressing the current lack of alignment between the normative commitments of liberal egalitarianism and the differential treatment of children. It addresses this task by breaking the question into three:
1. Should the concept of ‘childhood’ be revised to ensure its compliance with liberal principles of justice? (Addressed in Part I of the book).
2. What does a theory of rights require in order to accommodate to the needs of a revised conception of ‘childhood’? (Addressed in Part II of the book).
3. How should the just treatment of children be effectively implemented in terms of their status as rights-holders and their unique claims? (Addressed in Part III of the book).
This book argues that children should not be categorised nor treated as systematically different from adults. The traits, characteristics, and behaviours which justify differential categorisation and treatment exist throughout the whole life course, and vary greatly from individual to individual. Based on the ideological commitment of liberal egalitarianism to equal treatment and freedom, individuals can only be categorised and treated differently if the personal circumstances of the individual require it. An assessment of justified differential categorisation and treatment requires evaluating the embodied, temporal, and spatial frameworks of the individual to understand what their fundamental interests are, and what is the appropriate treatment owed to them. This is what I label an ‘Adaptive model of childhood’: differential categorisation and treatment requires understanding an individual’s fundamental condition and interests based on their vulnerability (embodied framework), their developmental needs (temporal framework), and their embeddedness in their social environment (spatial framework), all this while accounting for the individual’s status as an agent, with a particular personality, voice, and claims. Strict categories that aim to determine separate regimes of treatment and rights for social groups are not fully able to abide by the principles of equal treatment and equal freedom of liberal egalitarianism; only a system that is sensitive to the diverse condition of individuals can live up to the standards of a liberal egalitarian political project.