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International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI 10.1163/157181808X312122
www.brill.nl/chil
Human Rights in Light of Childhood
John Wall
Departments of Philosophy and Religion and Childhood Studies, Rutgers University
Abstract
is essay argues that children’s rights will adequately transform societies only when the very
concept of “human rights” is reimagined in light of childhood. In this case, human rights would be
understood as grounded, not in modernist ideas of autonomy, liberty, entitlement, or even agency,
but in a postmodern circle of responsibility to one another. is “childist” interpretation of rights
is constructed by examining various forms of child-centered ethical theory in Western history; their
impacts on major human rights theories of the Enlightenment and today; alternative visions implied
in twentieth century international children’s rights agreements; new theoretical groundings arising
out of postmodern ethics; and the possibility of human rights as truly including all humanity.
Keywords
childhood; children’s rights; human rights; responsibility; humanity; otherness; postmodernity
e language of “human rights” has increasingly been applied to children over
the past century through national laws and international agreements such as the
United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. e notion of
children’s rights has wrought a historical sea change in how children are perceived
and treated as members and participants in societies. At the same time, despite
many gains, actual children around the world during this period have remained
frustratingly marginalized, whether through poverty, ill health, lack of education,
gender discrimination, child soldiering, or any number of other indicators of
social well-being.
is essay argues that the gap between children’s rights ideals and realities does
not result entirely from a lack of practical resources and implementation. Nor, as
some claim, is it that rights language is not appropriate for addressing children’s
social issues. e deeper problem lies in how to understand “human rights”
as such.
1 Despite the fact that children under 18 constitute a third of all human-
ity, human rights continue to be ethically grounded in the experiences and per-
spectives of adults. Children will remain second class citizens until the very idea
of human rights is creatively rethought in light of childhood. Such a fundamental
1)
I use the term “human rights” in the “moral” rather than “legal” sense, referring to rights that
should be held by human beings whether or not they are actually instituted in national or
international law.
524 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
shift in human rights theory would be similar to the movement in “third wave”
feminism from seeking the same rights as men to rewriting human rights discourse
itself in terms of gender, power, embodiment, and relationality. But for children
the transformation would have to be diff erent and even more radical. Under what
I have elsewhere called a new “childism” (Wall, 2006, 2007) – or thinking in light
of childhood – human rights should account for the full diversity of human age.
Specifi cally, as the following pages argue, human rights need to be regrounded,
not in autonomy, liberty, entitlement, or even agency, but in a postmodern circle
of responsibility to one another.
Child-Centered Ethics in History
Reshaping ethical ideas in light of childhood has a rich though largely forgotten
philosophical and religious history. In the West, to which I limit myself here, this
“childist” history has profoundly infl uenced both ethical understanding in general
and conceptions of human rights in particular. However, like in historical thought
about other marginalized groups like women, racial minorities, and the poor,
eff orts to humanize children in society have inevitably also dehumanized them in
some way. Allow me to distinguish three major forms of child-centered ethics
that have persisted alongside one another throughout time and continue to shape
our assumptions about children today, for both good and ill.
e fi rst such childist ethics may be called “top-down.” e lesson from
children here is that human life starts out in a state of animal-like disorder and
unruliness, so that the fundamental task of societies is to impose on raw human
nature some higher moral order. Unless humanity is bounded and civilized from
above, as it were – whether through God, reason, tradition, or some other greater
power – human relations will persist in a state of nasty and brutish war. Left in
a childlike state, social relations would resemble something like the chaotic
violence in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies .
e most infl uential proponent of such a view is the fi fth century B.C.E. Greek
philosopher Plato, who devotes major portions of his two treatises on social
ethics, the Republic and the Laws , to how much a good society depends on the
disciplining and education of its children. “Of all wild young things,” he says,
“a boy is the most diffi cult to handle. Just because he more than any other has a
fount of intelligence in him which has not yet ‘run clear,’ he is the craftiest, most
mischievous, and unruliest of brutes” (1961, p. 1379). e goal of politics is the
same as the goal of philosophy: to lead humanity toward higher rational principles.
Ideally, societies would be run by philosopher-kings and moral education would
be weaned off the use of poets like Homer who dabble in mere fantasy and wish-
fulfi llment. Childhood shows that the natural barbarism, tyranny, and fi ckleness
of human nature needs to be elevated toward civilization and justice.
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 525
Similar kinds of top-down thinking can also be found in some of the key
ethical statements of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. e
Genesis 2-3 story of Adam and Eve has often been read to suggest that human
beings enter historical life utterly fallen and corrupt, so that they require higher
divine commands and punishments if they are to recover a modicum of peace
and righteousness. e ten commandments of Moses at Mount Sinai place
children in a situation of obedience: “Honour your father and your mother”
(Exodus 20:12) just as humanity itself should honour God. In the fi rst century
C.E. Christian New Testament, Paul (clearly infl uenced by Plato) claims that to
be righteous one must “put an end to childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11) in
order to overcome slavery to the fl esh through the grace and freedom of the spirit.
And in the seventh century C.E. Muslim Qur’an, children are sometimes referred
to as “temptations” or “trials” (8:28, 18:46, 57:20, and 64:15) reminding parents
to submit themselves to Allah.
In the Middle Ages, the great North African Christian theologian Augustine
similarly draws on neoplatonism to argue that infancy is the fi rst proof of his
famous doctrine of humanity’s “original sin.” “In your [God’s] sight no man is
free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth” (1961, p. 27).
e historian David F. Wright (1987, p. 51) has argued that Augustine’s theology
of original sin was developed initially as a defence of infant baptism, and not
the other way around. e Latin in-nocens for Augustine does not mean good-
ness but rather “non-harming” or “inability to harm”: “If babies are innocent, it
is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength” (1961, p. 28).
Similarly, sixteenth century Protestant Reformers such as John Calvin argue that
at birth humanity’s “whole nature is a seed of sin” (1960, 4.15.10) so that social
justice can be brought about only by turning human nature toward God’s
higher will.
Such approaches, which we will fi nd persist today, have proven morally
ambiguous. On the one hand, they do have the merit of taking children very
seriously as fellow struggling moral beings. Children are not shunted off into an
ethereal sphere of pure moral goodness, but treated as complex and increasingly
responsible social persons. On the other hand, children are dehumanized by being
viewed as requiring humanization and civilization by wiser adults. Indeed,
humanity itself is viewed as needing to overcome its own natural state in the
world by aspiring to something greater than itself.
But throughout Western history one fi nds, at the same time, a second and
largely opposite “bottom-up” story of what is learned about moral life from chil-
dren. Here, children are thought to demonstrate humanity’s original ontological
goodness, purity, and moral wisdom, so that humanity’s naturally inborn talents
and gifts should be nurtured and encouraged instead of repressed. A child-like
innocence, freedom, and simplicity needs constantly to be reinfused into human
society to save it from its own greed, tyranny, and violence.
526 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
For example, the Bible’s sixth century B.C.E. creation story in Genesis 1( written
fi ve hundred years after Genesis 2-3 above) proclaims humankind to have been
created “in the image of God” and hence, however much fallen, primordially
innocent and good. Children, the object of the Bible’s fi rst command to “be
fruitful and multiply,” remind society of its original goodness and purpose.
Similarly, in the New Testament gospels, Jesus – himself said to have been God’s
incarnation as an infant – declares to his disciples: “Unless you change and
become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever
becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever
welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (Matthew 18:3-5; see also
Mark 9:33-37 and Luke 9:46-48; and Gundry-Volf, 2001). Children in such
passages point toward an initial righteousness in the depths of the human soul
that can liberate a broken world.
Such a view persists in early Christian theologians such as Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian, and John Chrysostom, who view children as the
greatest exemplars of divine righteousness and simplicity. Clement, for example,
claims in his Paedagogus that adults should “imitate” children, just as they should
imitate Christ, by being “unyoked to vice, not broken in by wickedness; but
simple, and bounding joyously to the Father alone,” “gentle, and therefore more
tender, delicate, and simple, guileless, and destitute of hypocrisy, straightforward
and upright in mind” (1994, pp. 213-16; see also Bakke, 2005). Four hundred
years later, the Muslim prophet Muhammed claims that, because they are models
of righteousness, dead infants go straight to heaven: “My son died while still
suckling. He has a wet nurse in Paradise” (1998, p. 136). e fi fteenth century
female mystic Julian of Norwich argues that adults and society should become
more childlike by accepting “our tender Mother, Jesus” (1966, pp. 147-153) as
infants naturally take to the nurturing breast. e early nineteenth century
founder of modern Protestantism, Friedrich Schleiermacher, declares children
“the pure revelation of the divine” in their unsullied inborn “gift” for wisdom, joy,
and love (1990, pp. 36, 39, and 45; 1991).
is second kind of childism is also, however, morally ambiguous. On the
one hand, it pays children a great deal of respect to see them as the origins of
all that is humanly good. Adults should strive to become more like children
rather than just the other way around. But on the other hand, such a view easily
subjects children to over-sentimentalization. As has been learned regarding
women and racial minorities, putting a subset of humanity up on a pure and
ethereal pedestal is another way to dehumanize and exclude them. If children
are the very origin and means of a good society, then society itself can owe
them very little.
Finally, there is still a third historical form of ethics in light of children that
could be called “developmental.” What children reveal, on this view, is neither
humanity’s unruliness nor its purity but rather its neutral or blank potential
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 527
to grow increasingly in moral reason over time. Childhood reminds us that
individuals and whole societies can move along a path of gradually unfolding
moral progress.
Plato’s student Aristotle, for example, sees children as not so much irrational
as pre -rational. Children are just as much “political animals” ( zoon politikon ) as
anyone else, since they too participate in and depend upon life in common with
others. But unlike adults, they do so in a less developed and rational way (1947b,
p. 598). is means, for Aristotle, that children cannot yet be said to possess what
he calls moral “virtues” or “excellences,” such as practical wisdom, a sense of jus-
tice, or even the capacity for genuine happiness. And like women, on Aristotle’s
view, who are similarly less than fully rational, children have correspondingly
lesser rights to social goods and participation. But children nevertheless prove by
their at least developing capabilities, starting at birth, that there can be an increase
in social justice and rationality over time (1947a, p. 361).
A similar notion is found in the twelfth century Sufi mystic abu Hamid
al-Ghazali, who combines Aristotelianism with Islam to argue that children are
not unruly brutes but, rather, “soft like the soft clay in which any seed can grow,”
or like “a precious uncut jewel devoid of any form of carving, which will accept
being cut into any shape” (1993, p. 64). Humanity turns out good or evil solely
by its moral education, which passes through three “stages”: from helping others
in want, to treating others as equals, and then to placing the needs of others above
one’s own (1993, pp. 101-2). e medieval Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides
likewise claims in his Guide for the Perplexed that moral wisdom grows gradually
over the lifecycle from birth as “man’s intellect increase[s] in strength and light;
his knowledge becomes purer, and he is happy with his knowledge” (1904,
pp. 552-53). e thirteenth century Christian theologian omas Aquinas, a
foundational fi gure for modern Catholicism, adapts Aristotle into an ethics of
“natural law” oriented toward the unfolding realization of the common good.
Under the right conditions, children and then adults grow in distinct moral stages:
from concern for oneself alone to increasingly broader forms of agapic love for
others (1948, II-II, Q. 10, a. 12, and III, Supplement, Q. 43, a. 2; Traina, 2001).
Likewise, the fi fteenth century theologian Christine de Pizan sees in childhood
the beginnings of humanity’s increasing potential for social virtue (2003, p. 42).
Developmentalism also has its specifi c strengths and weaknesses. On the one
hand, it places children on a shared moral continuum with adults instead of
either subordinating or sentimentalizing them. It adds a note of realism that
connects childhood to adulthood by observably defi nable phases. On the other
hand, childhood is thereby chiefl y viewed through the lens of what children are
not yet , namely developed adults. e focus on lifecycle progress toward moral
reason or virtue can obscure children’s own distinctive moral voices and agency.
e eff ort to humanize children in this third way can dehumanize them as not yet
full social citizens.
528 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
Children in Modern Human Rights eory
is complex history of ethics in light of childhood directly impacts modern
ethical theory and, in particular, modern human rights theory. We can see this by
examining the three most prominent Enlightenment architects of human rights
ethics: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Each of these
social thinkers writes extensively about children. And each’s conception of child-
hood profoundly infl uences how they think about human rights. e diff erences
among them – diff erences still being debated today – arise in part from their
respectively developmental, bottom-up, and top-down tendencies. And these dif-
ferences help to explain why, in the end, each denies that human rights properly
belong to children.
us Locke, the English seventeenth century social philosopher, often thought
to be the fi rst systematic human rights theorist, views human rights through a
chiefl y developmental lens. His argument in Two Treatises on Government is that
humanity’s “natural rights,” as he calls them, stem from the duty that each indi-
vidual owes to its Maker to further its own “self-preservation” (1823, pp. 107-8,
116-17, 146-47, and 159-61). Rights are socially agreed upon means for preserv-
ing each self’s “property” in society, that is, their life, liberty, and estate (the
model for the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness”). Individuals are owed the basic means for their own
self-improvement against the intrusions of others and society.
As Locke’s equally infl uential writings on children show, he ascribes rights to
humanity on the basis of its developing rational potential. In Some oughts con-
cerning Education , he claims that children are “white pages” or “wax” (not blank
slates, as often thought) ready to be written upon or molded with the skills and
discoveries of Enlightened reason. Children are born neither pure nor unruly but,
rather, “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their
education” (1989, p. 83). Society’s interest in children is not to civilize or to
imitate them but to cultivate each child’s ability to “submit to his own reason,
when he is of an age to make use of it” (1989, pp. 105 and 138-39). Furthermore,
in his Essay concerning Human Understanding , Locke formulates an empiricist
theory of moral and scientifi c reason as progressing in developmental stages: from
infant (even fetal) understanding by concrete experience alone, to the capability
for the “association” of experiences into higher order ideas, and fi nally to the
mature ability to submit these sensory ideas to abstract theoretical “refl ection”
(1975, I.I.27, II.I.6-8 and 20-22, and II.IX.5).
e result is that, for Locke, children demonstrate humanity’s universal
potential for holding social rights, but they are not yet rational enough to hold
social rights themselves. By natural law, children have the same interest in self-
preservation as anyone else; indeed, given their relative social weakness, even
more. But they lack suffi ciently developed reason to pursue their self-preservation
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 529
without doing themselves and others harm (1823, pp. 126-33, 138, and 179-80).
It is precisely because children too deserve preservation that they cannot yet be
handed over its liberties and rights. In fact, children should not be their own
“property” but be the “temporary property” of their parents, who are best able to
ensure their well-being for them (1823, pp. 127 and 132-33). e paradox here
can be explained by the fact that, for Locke, rights are grounded in a developed
capability for social reason available only to adults (indeed only landowning men),
so that children are excluded from them by necessity.
e French eighteenth century philosopher Rousseau agrees with Locke in
many respects, but interprets both human rights and childhood from a more
bottom-up perspective. Rights, for him, exist less to secure self-preservation than
to enable free persons to express collectively their true “general will” (1947,
I.6, and II.1). Against the tyranny of the will of the few, rights open up social
discourse and power to the equal inclusion of all. is view informs the more
egalitarian and fraternal ideals of the French Revolution, as in the fi rst article of
its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: “Men are born and
remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the
general good.” Human rights are not just protections against others but also
means for equal social participation.
Rousseau too is deeply interested in childhood. In his infl uential treatise Emile,
or On Education , he criticizes Locke’s developmentalism for “always seeking the
man in the child without thinking of what he is before being a man” (1979,
p. 34). In Rousseau’s view, a good society is one that resists the corruptions of
social ambition and power by encouraging the kind of natural freedoms and
instincts that each of us already possesses from birth. us the Emile begins:
“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything
degenerates in the hands of man” (1979, p. 37). Children are not pre-rational
creatures so much as the original models of unperverted human freedom and
goodness. ey exhibit what Rousseau calls a pure “self-love” or “self-esteem”
( amour de soi ), which is the basis of a truly general will, whereas adults degrade
self-love into mere “pride” ( amour-propre ) or desiring esteem from others (1979,
pp. 67, 92).
e consequence for human rights is again, however, paradoxical. For children
as models of natural human freedom must for that reason, on Rousseau’s view, be
carefully sheltered from the larger corruptions and avarice of the public sphere.
Children need to be nurtured for as long as possible in the private sanctity of the
home, where their God-given natural goodness may be strengthened by reason to
eventually stand up to the world (1947, I.2 and I.4). And so children are again
excluded from social rights, this time because, for the sake of a better society, they
need to be secluded until adulthood in the private sphere.
Finally, the late eighteenth century German philosopher Kant provides still a
third grounding for human rights, and, as his writings on childhood show, this
530 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
time in a more top-down fashion. On Kant’s view, rights are based on the human
capability for rational “autonomy” or self-legislation. Human beings are on one
level just like animals in being driven by heteronomous wants, instincts, and
desires. But on another level they are unlike animals in being able to regulate their
desires according to higher moral law. Each human being is owed rights because
each is ultimately not just a desiring creature but also a rationally autonomous
moral end in themselves. “He who violates the rights of men intends to make use
of the person of others merely as means, without considering that, as rational
beings, they must always be esteemed at the same time as ends” (1990, p. 47).
Rights confer on rational individuals their true human “dignity” (1974).
It is not often noted that Kant too writes signifi cantly on ethical questions of
childhood, most extensively in his very last published but little known work titled
Education . Here, he adopts the strikingly top-down perspective that the purpose
of children’s education is to overcome their natural irrational animality, their total
subjection to immediate desire and want. A sound education awakens within
each child his or her higher and opposed capability for intellectual and moral
auto-nomy. “ e greatest and most diffi cult problem to which man can devote
himself is the problem of education,” he says, or “changing animal nature into
human nature” (1960, pp. 11 and 6 respectively). Children are not bringers of
instinctual wisdom or even mere white pages, but rather, in the fi rst instance, the
playthings of impulse and need. ey therefore require “discipline” and
“ culturation” ( Bildung ) if they are to grow up to practise a higher order moral
reason and duty.
And so Kant, too, does not believe that children are owed social rights, but for
a still further reason. On the one hand, children do belong to the universal human
community in the sense that they deserve to be treated as objects of dignity and
respect for having a rational faculty within them. Kant insists that despite lacking
real autonomy, children are still ends in themselves. “Hence parents cannot regard
their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making; for a being endowed
with freedom cannot be so regarded” (1974, para. 28). On the other hand, only
adults can be subjects of human rights because only they are in principle capable
of using their free will and reason to legislate over their desires. us, Kant insists
on “the right of the parents to the management and training of the child, so long
as it is itself incapable of making proper use of its body as an organism, and of its
mind as an understanding” (1974, para. 29). Children are not property, as in
Locke, nor sequestered into the private sphere of the home, as in Rousseau. But
neither are they yet autonomous rights-bearing citizens.
e very architecture of modern human rights theory is therefore constructed
around adults. It is utterly adult-centric. e chairs and tables are too high, the
faucets out of reach, for children. In all three major justifi cations for why human
beings should have social rights, children end up lacking what Hannah Arendt
calls “the right to have rights.” What is shared in common in these ethics of
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 531
modernity is the presumption that human rights belong to rational individuals.
But because of deep Western historical assumptions about children, rational indi-
viduality is interpreted as something that children only either develop into, are
nurtured toward from the bottom up, or gain through top-down discipline.
While such assumptions have historically also excluded other groups from human
rights like women and minorities, unlike for these groups they arguably exclude
children by ironclad necessity.
e Situation Today
e result of this history for today can be seen in the great disjuncture suggested
at the start of this paper between human rights theory on the one hand and the
aspirations of children’s rights advocates and practitioners on the other. In fact,
human rights philosophers of the twentieth century, when if anything the con-
cept of rights has taken on new life, hardly mention children at all. One of the
most widely read texts on human rights theory in recent years, for example, Jack
Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in eory and Practice , using a largely Kantian
model of “individual autonomy,” devotes exactly half a page, out of close to
300 pages, to the rights specifi cally of children (2003, pp. 149-50). It is more or
less simply assumed that when we talk about rights we are talking about “men
and women.” But in national and international debates about human rights
practices – such as around poverty, health care, discrimination, and violence –
children are frequently at the centre of concern. Indeed, the 1924 Declaration of
the Rights of the Child is the very fi rst human rights declaration adopted by
an international body. And the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is
humanity’s most widely ratifi ed legal agreement ever.
is disjuncture between theory and practice refl ects in large part a failure in
human rights ethics to transcend its adult-centered historical and modernistic
roots. Consider, for example, the prominent discussion of human rights theory in
Anglo-American analytic philosophy, where the major dispute is between “will
theorists” and “interest theorists.”
Will theorists such as H.L.A. Hart, Alan Gewirth, John Rawls, and Donnelly
argue, chiefl y using Kant but also Locke, that human rights exist to preserve
social liberty or autonomy. Hart argues that all particular legal rights are based on
one fundamental moral right: “the equal right of all men to be free” (1955,
p. 175). is, however, he fully acknowledges, and without fi nding it controversial,
belongs only to “any adult human being capable of choice” (1955, p. 175). Or,
according to Rawls, the fi rst and most important principle of social justice is
that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of
equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others”
(1999, p. 53). A rights-holder, on this view, is anyone who has the capacity to
532 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
relativize their own personal interests (behind a “veil of ignorance”) to a larger
objective impartially. While Rawls does not exclude children explicitly, he bases
rights on the kinds of “equal basic liberties” that adults are more likely to be
able to hold.
Like for Kant, will theorists like these can certainly include children as human
rights objects . Children too can be granted, on this perspective, a basic set of rights
to be treated with dignity and respect. Whether or not they can be given liberties
themselves, they can be protected from abuse by the liberties by others. But
ultimately, so long as human rights are grounded in individual autonomy, they
will tend to obscure children as human rights subjects . For on the whole it will
remain implausible to grant children, and more so the younger the child, the
same level of public liberties as may be granted to fully mature adults.
Interest theorists, in contrast, argue that human rights are grounded, not in
autonomy, but in the furthering of basic human interests, goods, or needs. John
Finnis, for example, uses omas Aquinas’ ethics of natural law to argue that
human rights advance “basic forms of human good” (1980). e seven most fun-
damental such rights or interests are to life, the acquisition of knowledge, play,
aesthetic expression, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion. A similar
rights logic underlies Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian grounding of rights in the
“functional capabilities” needed for a truly “human” life (1999, pp. 40-41). She
identifi es ten such basic rights that are largely similar to those in Finnis.
Interest theory is arguably more open to children’s rights than is will theory
because it is easier to picture children as possessing basic human needs. Even a
newborn claims as a public good its own life, play, and sociability. But interest
theory retains the essential ambiguity of the Aristotelian and omistic history of
thought about children above, shared also in large part by Locke. at is, it views
rights as means to human development, in this case the development of goods
and interests. For children in particular, this tends to mean that rights are oriented
around what it takes to grow up to become healthy and useful adults. In Finnis,
for example, the rights to the acquisition of knowledge and practical reasonable-
ness are rights to what adults presumably have to a fuller degree. ( e possible
exception here is the right to play, though play has often historically been
interpreted in terms of its usefulness for children’s maturation, for example in
Locke). In Nussbaum, the “functional capabilities” to which humanity is to have
rights are generally going to be defi ned by adults, indeed by those adults who
hold greater social power. While women, for example, can at least in principle
aff ect how societies prioritize their interests, on the whole children cannot, or at
least less so the younger the child.
ere is, however, a third view of human rights, originating outside this ana-
lytic tradition, that addresses these problems in part. is is the “civil rights”
approach of fi gures such as Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone de Beauvoir,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gustavo Gutiérrez. Here, human rights are grounded
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 533
in the rather more Marxist desire to liberate social groups from economic, racial,
gender, and other systematic oppressions. e basic human right here is less to
individual freedom or the realization of interests as to collective inclusion in social
processes, to a public voice and agency. is tradition marks a fundamental
advance beyond the rational individualism of modernity (and analytic philoso-
phy). On the one hand, it shares with the bottom-up thinking of fi gures like
Rousseau a desire to overcome social corruptions through a fully inclusive general
will. But, more radically, it recognizes how even the general will is subject to
systematic societal distortion, so that human rights are advanced only through
grassroots movements in which the oppressed gain social and cultural power.
Such a view has proven more useful for children’s rights advocates than those
above because it recognizes children as constituting a distinctively marginalized
group. Some in the childhood studies movement rightly argue that children just
as much as other oppressed “minorities” have a right to their own voice and
agency. But this kind of bottom-up approach still suff ers from some of the ambi-
guities of its history. Although children are capable of signifi cantly greater social
participation than is generally assumed, they should not be expected to bring
about their own social liberation for themselves. e younger the child, the more,
on the whole, will she rely for gaining civil rights on others who are precisely not
children but adults. Unlike women and adult minorities, children will remain
forever without social power so long as they have to fi ght for social power for
themselves. Age genuinely aff ects one’s ability to take political action, express
public views, organize grassroots movements, hold positions of infl uence like
university chairs, and press for new political platforms. Often unacknowledged
in such bottom-up movements for children is how much they are initiated and
carried out by adults.
Listening to International Children’s Rights Agreements
Actual international children’s rights declarations and conventions of the past
century provide an opportunity to move beyond such entrenched historical
assumptions about human rights to fresh new ground. For upon close examina-
tion, they can be seen as blending together elements of all three kinds of top-
down, bottom-up, and developmental ethical bases. is ethical complexity has
grown only slowly as children’s rights documents have been refi ned and expanded
over the past several decades. But this evolution refl ects the fact that it is in practi-
cal international movements and declarations that humanity has struggled most
energetically and fully in recent times to imagine what a more child-centered
world might look like. e international stage of human rights agreements has
opened up what Paul Gordon Lauren has called “visions seen of a world of
possibilities” (2003, p. 1). While these children’s rights eff orts do not articulate
534 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
a theoretical ethical grounding, they do help us begin to see how it might be more
complexly constructed.
e fi rst international children’s rights agreement, the League of Nations 1924
Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, contains only fi ve rights, and
these are all centred on what have been called “provision” rights: rights to receive
national and international aid. ey are premised on what the Declaration calls
the “duty” that “mankind owes to the Child.” is duty includes children’s rights
to the means for normal development, nutrition and health, priority of aid in
distress, the means to an eventual livelihood, and to be brought up in the con-
sciousness of owing service to others. ere is also a sub-theme of what are known
as “protection” rights: rights against harm or violence. at is, two of the above
rights also call, secondarily, for children’s shelter and non-exploitation. But the
overall provision-based approach of the 1924 Declaration means, in historical
terms, that is rests on chiefl y developmental grounds. Society owes children the
necessary means for growing up to become healthy and productive members of
the world. In modern philosophical terms, children are owed what is in their own
best “interest.” ey are to be provided what are often called “positive rights” that
further their good and welfare (Woodhouse, 2004, pp. 229-43).
e United Nations subsequent 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child
contains similar provision rights, and even adds more wide-ranging ones such as
to “a name and a nationality,” “wherever possible, grow[ing] up in the care and
under the responsibility of parents,” and “the benefi ts of social security.” But its
now ten children’s rights shift to place signifi cantly greater (though not equal)
emphasis on explicit rights to protection. Protection rights are “negative” in
character in that they do not provide aid for children but guard children against
violence and harm. is shift refl ects the founding charter of the United Nations
itself, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an almost entirely
negative or protective rights document that was created in response to the
great horrors of World War II. e shift in children’s rights is likewise a shift
toward an increased sense of humanity’s vulnerability to disorder, violence, and
exploitation.
us, the fi rst right in the 1959 Declaration is to protection against racial,
sexual, religious, political, national, birth, and other kinds of discrimination.
Other such rights are against “all forms of neglect, cruelty, and exploitation,”
separation from parents, traffi cking, and employment. ese could be called
top-down rights in the sense that they impose Kantian-like principles of universal
order that guard against violations of individual dignity. ey are also close to
what will theorists call freedoms against harm from others. But the eff ect overall
is a more complex intersection of rights which, as in 1924, continue to provide
for children’s positive interests, but now in a way framed by children’s basic
negative protections.
irty years later, the United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the
Child (hereafter CRC) is even more complex still, and in two major respects.
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 535
First, it contains all the rights of the previous international agreements, but
adds to these at least as many rights again.
2 ere are now 40 distinct children’s
rights, and each is spelled out in much greater detail. Approximately 16 of these
40 rights (depending on how they are counted) could be said to reiterate rights
from the previous Declarations. Even here, though, in most cases, the rights are
further extended: the right to non-discrimination, for example, now also referring
to disability and birth status. A further 18 rights or so are new rights but of the
same provision and protection kinds. New provision rights include, for example,
to an offi cial government “identity” (article 8) and to an “adequate standard of
living” when parents cannot provide it (article 27). New protection rights include
those against sexual abuse (article 34), “torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degra-
ding treatment or punishment” (article 37), and drafting into armed confl ict
(article 38).
ese additions in the CRC continue the historical trend toward increasing
protections, so that provision and protection rights are now roughly equal in
number (about 18 and 16 respectively). is shift can be read as a still deeper
recognition of the extent of children’s social vulnerability. It also indicates a fuller
inclusion of children in the public domain as persons just as deserving as adults
of the protections off ered by states.
But second, and even more signifi cantly, the 1989 CRC adds an entirely new
category of children’s rights, namely “participation” rights. ese are rights to act
and be heard in society for oneself. e six such rights in the CRC are as follows:
to be heard (article 12), to freedom of expression (13), to freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion (14), to freedom of association and assembly (15), to
privacy (16), and to access to appropriate information and mass media (17).
Participation rights are a further species of negative rights – active negative rights,
if you will – much like in the predominantly late twentieth century civil rights
movement described above. ey do not provide aid or protect from harm but
enable public agency. ey grow historically out of the bottom-up ethical tradition
of viewing individuals as essentially just and good, thus requiring the means to
overcome society’s distortions and corruptions through a strengthened natural
will. Participation rights aim for Rousseau’s “general will” of a society created as
much as possible from the ground up. No previous international agreement had
ever contained rights of this kind for children.
It is largely these participation rights that are opposed by groups in the United
States who successfully fought to make it one of the two nations in the world not
to ratify the CRC. ( e other is Somalia, which has no functioning government).
2)
e following discussion is based on the classifi cation of CRC rights made by the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which can be found at http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html.
( e one right curiously left out in 1989, incidentally, is the child’s provision right, present in both
previous agreements, to be “brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the
service of fellow men”).
536 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
ese opponents take the traditional Lockean and Kantian view – also held by
will theorists and to a lesser extent some interest theorists – that children cannot
hold public liberties without doing themselves and others harm. Some also fear
that children’s freedoms will confl ict with the freedoms of parents to raise their
children as they see fi t, much as in Locke’s view that children are not their own
but rather their parents’ “property” broadly understood.
But such criticisms miss the larger historical context of children’s participation
rights that sees children in a bottom-up way as bringing valuable gifts and
experiences to society. In Rousseau, such rights are denied to children because of
their need fi rst to gain the rational strength for socially eff ective action. But such
a limitation is no longer appropriate in light of clear social scientifi c evidence
from the fi eld of childhood studies about the many ways children can and do in
fact contribute actively to public life (see, for example, James and Prout, 1990;
Mouritsen and Qvortrup, 2002; and Pufall and Unsworth, 2004). And it is no
longer necessary in a world where, unlike in Rousseau’s eighteenth century France,
the problem is not children’s too great immersion in adult commerce and culture
but rather their increasing isolation in the private sphere. Children are profoundly
aff ected by public forces like markets and mass media, but they largely lack a
public voice with which to respond to them on their own terms. Furthermore, as
we have seen, the Romantic vision of secluding children within the home is just
as ethically dehumanizing for children today as it once was for women.
e larger conclusion we can draw from these evolving children’s rights
agreements culminating in the CRC is more complex than asserting children’s
rights to social participation, important though these are. e larger conclusion
is that children’s rights cannot fi nally be reduced to any one kind of right alone,
nor justifi ed by any single tradition of human rights theory or childist ethics.
Rather, children show that human rights ethics can and should involve a robust
combination of all three traditional groundings. Children will suff er in one form
or another so long as their developmental, top-down, and bottom-up rights are
not intertwined with one another. It would be a mistake to leave out any one
dimension, a mistake made by both the CRC’s critics (as above) and those
defenders who interpret the CRC from a chiefl y participatory point of view.
Instead, children’s rights should be understood as pressing for a new conception
of human rights as such.
e Circle of Responsibility
is fuller complexity of human rights in light of children requires us to move
beyond premodernity and modernity into some of the helpful new theoretical
perspectives of what might loosely be termed “postmodernity.” Postmodern ethi-
cists generally do not speak in terms of “human rights” because rights language
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 537
has been so closely associated with modernity’s morally autonomous individual.
But, the deeper history of childism on which human rights theory is based opens
up wider possible visions of the human. And the twentieth century’s international
children’s rights agreements off er more multidimensional interpretations of
human rights beyond their bases in modernity per se. So the language of human
rights is at least open, especially in light of childhood, to creative new ethical
conceptualization.
e notion I wish to borrow from postmodern ethical theory – arguably its
most important ethical idea – is that of moral responsibility to “the other.” From
a modernistic point of view, “the other” can only mean the marginal and the
dispossessed, those who are “othered” by being robbed of freedom and agency.
But from the point of view of postmodernism (or at least post-structuralism), it
refers to persons in their irreducible diversity or diff erence. Societies are networks
of interdependent human relations responsible to each other in their endless
otherness. ough children may not be as autonomous or free as adults, they are
just as “other” in this sense as anyone else, just as singular, diverse, and plural.
Societies conceived of as webs of otherness will be able to include the full range
of bottom-up, top-down, and developmental forms of human rights at once. For
these can be organized, or so I will argue, around a full circle of responsibility to
each human other.
is ethics of otherness, like the United Nations, grew out of World War II, but
it draws somewhat more radical conclusions. Its greatest proponent is the Jewish
French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was a survivor of the Holocaust and
thereby arguably provides an even more “internal” view of the needed ethical
response. Levinas claims that the modernistic characterization of human beings
as autonomous rational agents proves unable to resist human violence. It is too
easily manipulated by those in power to justify imposing their own version of
social “rationality” on those who do not fi t within it. e “rational” can be
interpreted as the Arian, the male, the white, the European, the economically
successful, and so on – including, of course, the adult. Nazism and later Stalinism
and Maoism advance “totalizing” visions of a better world that label “the other”
as irrational, weak, and therefore less than fully human. is kind of silent mar-
ginalization can be addressed only by what Levinas calls the “face to face” of
responding to each other precisely in their disruptive and irreducible otherness.
Ethical “responsibility” is a call for “response”: not to freedom and power but to
“the strangeness of the other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my
possessions” (1969, p. 43). Only by encountering the shock of otherness can
selves and societies open themselves up in hospitality to the genuine complexity
and fullness of humanity.
On the whole, ethicists of otherness like Levinas and his followers do not
deeply consider childhood. Levinas himself did in fact run a Jewish school in
Paris after the war and wrote at least one essay on children’s education in what he
538 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
calls “Hebraic humanism” (1963, pp. 267-320). But a too strong conception of
otherness can end up subjecting children to a kind of marginalization of its own.
It can obscure the important sense in which children need not only to shock and
disrupt us, to not be done violence as others, but also to receive active care and
support. Postmodernists who follow Levinas tend to emphasize the negative side
of moral life (just as does the 1959 Declaration above), speaking, for example, of
responsibility as “a passivity more passive than all passivity” or a “being taken
hostage” (Levinas, 1981, p. 15), or something “that disrupts me, that is visited
upon me, that knocks me out of orbit” (Caputo, 1993, p. 8). But children show
that responsibility is both negative and positive at once, both a passive listening
and opening oneself up and an active giving and engagement. In terms of the
above language of rights, children need not just protection and participation
but also deliberate provision.
It is for this kind of reason that my own and others’ work in postmodern ethics
has pressed the ethics of otherness in what I call a “circular” direction. e other
initiates the ethical relation through its irreducible and diverse otherness, but
selves and societies are also called upon to make others their own active responses.
“Responsibility” includes a never-ending cycle of both passive responsiveness and
active responding. Paul Ricoeur has called this to-and-fro of self and other a
“hermeneutical circle.” For him, the ethical aim is not no self but a new self ever
more accountable to “the exception on behalf of others” (1992, p. 269). Richard
Kearney similarly describes the ethical aim as “a narrative identity woven from its
own histories and those of others” (2003, p. 188). My own way of putting it is to
say that selves and societies are required to respond to otherness with their own
decentring “moral creativity” (2005, pp. 103-36). Each self is born into an
already constructed circle of human relations which, however, he or she should
also continually reconstruct in response to the diverse centers of meaning of
each other.
Children, from this point of view, are fully members of the human moral
circle. In fact, they turn out to be its sharpest representatives. For on the one
hand, children start out life constructed by vast networks of interpersonal, social,
and historical relations which they are at once passively shaped by and actively
begin to shape for themselves. ey should be welcomed into these larger worlds
in their greatest possible otherness. On the other hand, children are also increas-
ingly responsible to the otherness of others around them, and from the day they
are born. Starting in the narrower circles of relations to family, friends, and other
close others, children are called upon to reconstruct their own already constructed
lives in increasingly other-responsive ways. is aim of self-transforming respon-
sibility to others is the same from birth to death. e diff erence in childhood is a
matter of degree rather than kind: how far toward others it can be expected to
extend based on experience with others in the world.
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 539
Such an approach replaces the implicitly adult-centred ethics of rational
individuality in modernity with a child-inclusive ethics of other-responsive inter-
dependency. And it does so without reverting to equally adult-centred premodern
ethics of hierarchical community. ere is no more profound and complex circle
of social responsibility than that which extends itself to each and every child. And
there is no greater model than in children themselves of the possibility for expand-
ing and decentring in responsibility to others over time. But all selves, child and
adult both, are simultaneously owed responsibility by others and obliged to others
to provide them their own singular response. is dynamic and increasingly
inclusive ethical circle lies at the heart of what it means for us to treat each other
with full humanity.
e Circle of Human Rights
On such a basis, human rights may be imagined as more than mere expressions
of individual liberties or entitlements. ey are markers of responsibility to each
other. Each human right is a social construction aimed at reconstructing the cir-
cle of society in a more fully expansive way. ere are an infi nite possible number
of “other” centres of society to be included, because otherness is irreducible to
common life as such. But human rights function to stretch out or distend social
relations in ways that make them more rather than less responsive to the genuine
diversity of humanity. ey function to expand the circle or horizons of society.
e 1989 CRC helps us imagine what such a circle of human rights might
look like in concrete and practical terms. For although it is confi ned to children’s
rights specifi cally, its shows how the three kinds of rights explored above depend
on a fundamentally dynamic relation of human beings to one another. From
this angle, the CRC can be read as not just an application of human rights to
children but a model for beginning to imagine human rights in a more humanly
inclusive way.
is circle of human rights can be pictured as shown below. From this perspec-
tive, diff erent kinds of human rights are integrally bound up with one another.
Take, for example, participation rights: bottom-up rights to be heard and have an
eff ect on one’s surroundings and society. From a childist point of view, these are
not just expressions of individual freedoms. On the one hand, they are profoundly
dependent on top-down social protections. Freedom of expression, for example,
cannot realize itself in a meaningful sense if it is undermined by discrimination,
abuses of power, or actual or threatened violence. Freedom is vulnerable and
depends on larger protections against exclusion. On the other hand, participation
rights also inherently rely on positive developmental provisions. Freedom of
assembly, for example, increases insofar as citizens are educated, healthy, have
540 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
a basic standard of living, and can rely on a level of social security. Such connec-
tions are especially evident for children but no less necessary for adults. To par-
ticipate with one’s own “other” voice in society is to join a larger active-passive
circle of social relations. Adults may be less dependent on social protections and
provisions than children, but they are still dependent on them fundamentally.
Otherness actively shapes social relations only insofar as it is protected and pro-
vided support.
Or take protection rights: top-down rights against violence and harm. From
one side, protection rights depend on provisions of aid and support.
Non-discrimination, non-abuse, and non-exploitation all require that threatened
groups can access provisions or goods such as health care, social services, knowledge
of rights, and family and community support. From the other side, protection
rights also rest on fundamental rights to participation. Women’s rights against
domestic violence, for example, only came about after women won rights to vote,
work, and be heard. Societal protections need to be constantly defi ned and
reshaped by “others” having their own public voices and agency. Such is only
more so the case for children. As those with the very least experience and power,
their voices against exploitation and harm need to be welcomed and supported
the most energetically.
Finally, provision rights too are more complex than often thought. ey are
not merely hand-outs of positive aid. From a modern individualistic point of
view, such provisions can be interpreted only as generous gifts from the rest of
society, or at most long-term investments of society’s own self-interest. But from
a childist point of view, they are part of what is required for expanding the circle
Human Rights in Light of Children
bottom-up
participation
rights
top-down
protection
rights
developmental
provision
rights
J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543 541
of interdependent human relations – in this case, by developing its members’
social capabilities. On the one hand, provision rights rely on a robust regime of
top-down social protections. Health care, education, and social security, for
example, are eff ective social investments only if they are provided without dis-
crimination, abuse, or exploitation. On the other hand, provision rights also
depend on social participation. How societies increase the good of its members
should be shaped and interpreted, not just by the few, but by the free expression,
association, and cultural agency of the widest possible diversity of others. Only by
responding to genuine human otherness does social investment expand rather
than contract the well-being of society as a whole.
Human rights ultimately derive their meaning and purpose from their capacity
to expand the diversity and inclusiveness of human relations. Human beings are
irreducibly other to one another and form just and strong societies when this
diversity is given expression in common. Top-down, developmental, and
bottom-up rights are really diff erent sides of a holistic and dynamic human rights
circle. At the centre of this circle lies the fundamental ethical duty or responsibil-
ity of selves and societies to respond as fully as possible to human otherness.
Rights are realizations of social responsibilities. ey proclaim each and every
human other as deserving society’s inclusive response. Because others are ulti-
mately irreducible to the social whole as such, human rights have the dynamic
rather than static function of expanding rather than merely maintaining social
relations. ey strive for society’s centripetal inclusion of the widest possible
humanity. Over history, this has been human rights’ greatest achievement, as it
has gradually expanded the construction of society from kings to landowners,
majorities to minorities, men to women, and now adults to children. e purpose
of human rights is to help us live interdependently as plural others in common.
Such a conception of human rights can at last fully include children. So long
as rights are grounded in free, equal, or autonomous individuality, children will
be pressed to the outer edges of the social circle. Protections will be granted
according to what is convenient for those in power, provisions allotted as reluctant
hand-outs, and participation defi ned by adult capabilities. But if rights are
grounded in the responsibility to construct ever more other-inclusive societies,
then children should be their most important subjects. For it is children who, on
the one hand, are most likely to be marginalized and unheard, and it is children
again who, on the other hand, need the greatest social response. A human rights
regime based on responsibility to otherness would fi nd in children its clearest
reason for being, its greatest opportunity for humanity.
Conclusion
If the promise of the children’s rights movement of the past century has yet to be
realized, it is in large part because our very understanding of “human rights”
542 J. Wall / International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008) 523–543
remains distinctly adult-centred. Children are a third of all humanity, yet their
experiences and perspectives have not profoundly shaped how human rights are
understood. What children and humanity need is something like a shift from
“second-wave” to “third-wave” childism, from modernism to postmodernism,
from seeing children as requiring the same rights as adults to seeing children as
transforming what is meant by human rights as such. Only in this way will chil-
dren fi nally be able to take their place as fully social citizens.
is vision of human rights should emphasize responsibility to the other.
It should ground and justify the construction of human rights on the obligation
to expand the circle of human relations. Societies humanize themselves not just
by freedom, equality, or rationality, but most importantly by welcoming others
in their fullest possible diversity, diff erence, and otherness. As children teach us,
human rights serve their greatest purpose when they extend us toward our own
ever more complex and expansive humanity.
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