The Voluntary Life

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Roderick Long's Comments on Circumcision' by Jake Desyllas.

Libertarians hold every institution to a single test: does it violate objective property rights? Tradition, popularity and widespread acceptance are all beside the point — chattel slavery was ancient and universal, taxation is popular, and neither survives the test. So what happens when that test is applied to circumcision? Very few libertarian philosophers have taken up the question at all. Roderick Long is one of the few who touched it, in a passage condemning the genital cutting of girls as abusive, insisting on the word "mutilation" for it, and refusing to treat a grown woman's later endorsement as consent. Every one of those arguments applies just as directly to boys. This episode asks why Long stops short of saying so — and what that reticence tells us about the responsibilities of a libertarian philosopher.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 2:09 Roderick Long's Comment 2:51 Unpacking Long's Argument 5:10 The Philosopher's Responsibility

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/9/10/a-critique-of-roderick-longs-comments-on-circumcision on 10 September 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'A Response To Michael Huemer on Abortion' by Jake Desyllas.

Michael Huemer opens his article on abortion by describing the debate as a line-drawing exercise, in which pro-life people draw the line early and pro-choice people draw it later. This episode argues that the framing is wrong before the argument even begins: to treat abortion as a question of where to draw the line is already to concede that there is a point before the line at which abortion is legitimate, which is precisely what pro-life advocates deny. From there the critique widens. Huemer engages closely with pro-choice philosophers such as Tooley and Thomson, but cites no pro-life philosopher at all, constructing his own weak version of their case instead. He gives the argument from parental obligations a few lines and leaves it hanging, unrebutted. And he never confronts the hardest problem his own side faces: that every argument used to justify abortion also justifies infanticide, a point the more consistent pro-choice philosophers openly concede. The abortion debate is difficult, but not because it is subtle and intellectually interesting.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 1:57 Misrepresenting the Pro-Life Argument 3:50 The Argument From Parental Obligations 6:18 Why the Debate Is Really Difficult

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/9/27/a-response-to-michael-huemer-on-abortion on 27 September 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'The Boomer Contradiction on Children's Rights' by Jake Desyllas.

Since the 1960s the West has settled on a curious pair of beliefs about children: that they have no rights at all before birth, and strong, enforceable rights the moment after it. Most people hold both positions at once and feel no strain. Jake Desyllas argues that the strain is real, and that it cannot be relieved by good intentions. Any principle robust enough to grant a newborn rights reaches back before birth; any principle that denies rights to the unborn reaches forward to the newborn, the infant, and sometimes the older child. He shows one prominent libertarian philosopher openly admitting he selects his premises to reach the answers he already wants — and sets out the four positions available to anyone willing to confront the contradiction rather than avoid it.

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/9/15/the-boomer-contradiction-on-childrens-rights on 15 September 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'The Theory of State Ownership of Children' by Jake Desyllas.

Who owns a child? One long-running answer, older than the modern state and still very much alive, is: the State does. On this theory parents are not the child's natural guardians but an obstacle — a rival authority that cannot be trusted to raise loyal citizens, and whose influence must therefore be diluted or removed. Jake Desyllas traces the idea from Plato and Aristotle, through Rousseau and the French Revolutionaries, to Hegel, the American Progressives, and the founders of sociology, and shows that it survives intact in contemporary political philosophy — where theorists openly write to advise the State on what parents should be permitted to do with their own children. The quotations are the argument: read in their own words, the advocates of State ownership are remarkably candid about what they want.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 0:58 Antiquity 1:39 Rousseau and the Revolution 2:56 The Modern State

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/4/7/the-theory-of-state-ownership-of-children on 7 April 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'Argumentation Ethics Entails Self Ownership From the Beginning of Life' by Jake Desyllas.

A reply to Stephan Kinsella's comments on an earlier critique, this episode argues that the Hoppean rights theory already settles a question Kinsella leaves open: when does an individual come to own their own body? Jake's contention is that self ownership cannot be something acquired, recognised, or granted at some unspecified later point. A body cannot be homesteaded by the being who needs it to do the homesteading, and any rule that lets others confer self ownership by fiat is, by the theory's own standard, non-objective and conflict-promoting. The only rule that does the job is self ownership from the very beginning of life. Along the way the piece presses a harder consequence: if you try to ground rights in rationality, you have to follow Singer and Tooley all the way to the legitimacy of infanticide.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 3:37 Rationality and Infanticide 6:28 Are Rights Inherent?

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/12/19/argumentation-ethics-entails-self-ownership-from-the-beginning-of-life on 19 December 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Stephan Kinsella's Approach To Rights Theory' by Jake Desyllas.

Stephan Kinsella famously overturned the libertarian case for intellectual property by refusing to prejudge the conclusion: instead of assuming IP was valid and hunting for arguments to fit, he followed the arguments wherever they led. In this short piece, Jake Desyllas turns that same standard back on Kinsella's own theory of rights. He argues that when Kinsella asks not *whether* but *when* we come to own ourselves, he is using exactly the motivated reasoning he so effectively diagnosed in others — quietly assuming that rights must be acquired rather than inherent. Drawing on Kinsella's own words, Desyllas shows the symmetry between the two cases and makes the case that the question of inherent versus acquired rights deserves to be reopened without a thumb on the scale.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 1:25 The Problem Of Motivated Reasoning

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/8/6/a-critique-of-stephan-kinsellas-approach-to-rights-theory on 6 August 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'Three Views of the Relationship Between Parents and Political Authority' by Jake Desyllas.

Philosophy of the family looks like one of the least political subjects there is. This episode argues the opposite: that it is one of the most political, and that the philosophers who write about parents and children usually have an agenda they are not advertising. The perennial problem for rulers is that obedience has no good justification, and forcing an outnumbered majority is expensive — so it is far cheaper to persuade, and cheapest of all to persuade people while they are children. That raises a question the philosophical tradition has answered in three incompatible ways: are parents the State's allies in producing obedient subjects, an obstacle to be dismantled, or the last line of defence against political authority? This opening episode sets out all three positions and the interests behind them.

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/4/3/three-views-of-the-relationship-between-parents-and-political-authority on 3 April 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'What Is The Libertarian Theory of Parental Obligations?' by Jake Desyllas.

This article examines four competing philosophical theories of the parental role within a libertarian framework: parental ownership, parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental responsibility. It critically analyzes each theory, evaluating its logical implications—particularly concerning the legitimacy of enforceable parental obligations—and its compatibility with libertarian principles. The article argues that the first three theories are unsound and incompatible with libertarianism. In contrast, it defends the theory of causal parental responsibility as the only sound framework consistent with libertarian philosophy, grounding enforceable parental obligations in the creation of peril. This analysis seeks to resolve long-standing debates and establish a coherent libertarian theory of parental obligation.

Chapters:

0:00 Abstract 1:00 Introduction 3:22 The Theory of Parental Ownership 9:46 The Theory of Parenting as Charity 22:07 The Theory of Parenting as Voluntary Social Contract 30:07 The Theory of Causal Parental Responsibility 53:13 Parental Obligations in Contemporary Libertarian Thought 59:51 Conclusion

First published at https://jls.mises.org/article/141458-what-is-the-libertarian-theory-of-parental-obligations on 1 July 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'When do Parental Obligations Not Apply?' by Jake Desyllas.

The causal theory of parental responsibility grounds positive obligations in the fact that, by creating a child, parents place that child in a state of peril. But if obligations follow from action, what about the cases where a child comes into existence without the parent having acted in the relevant sense? In this short piece, Jake works through the principled exceptions: rape, gamete theft, paternity fraud, gestational surrogacy, and a pregnancy that endangers the mother's life. Each case is a test of the theory's internal logic — and a clarifier of where parental obligations begin and end. The piece also draws an implication for the abortion debate, distinguishing the consensual-sex case from the rape case on grounds that follow directly from the causal theory.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 0:29 Rape 1:31 Gamete Theft 2:28 Paternity Fraud 3:01 Gestational Surrogacy 3:20 Endangered Life Of The Mother During Pregnancy

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2024/7/13/when-do-parental-obligations-apply on 13 July 2024.

An AI narration of the article 'Objections Against The State-Of-Peril Argument For Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas.

Critics of the state-of-peril argument for parental obligations have raised many objections — that creating a child is not aggression and so cannot generate duties, that unborn children are themselves the aggressors, that giving life is so great a gift it nullifies all further claims, that adoptive parents disprove any causal theory, that the chain of causation is impossibly tangled. In this post Jake works through ten such objections one by one, drawn from libertarian and analytic-philosophy critics including Brake, Block, Evers, Long, Dominiak, and Brighouse and Swift. A pattern emerges: when each objection is examined, the case for parental obligation only sharpens. Many of the standard counter-arguments turn out to be assertions rather than refutations, or to collapse into ad hominem.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 0:31 Objection 1: Creating A Child Is Not An Act of Aggression and Therefore Does Not Incur Obligations 1:48 Objection 2: Obligations Are Only Valid If Voluntarily Agreed To 3:27 Objection 3: Unborn Children Initiate Aggression Against Their Mothers 5:31 Objection 4: Giving Life Is A Net Benefit And Therefore Parents Are Not Obligated Further 9:51 Objection 5: Adoptive Parents Disprove The Causal Theory of Parental Obligation 12:16 Objection 6: It is Too Difficult to Determine Who Caused a Baby to Exist Therefore Parents Don't Have Obligations by Cause 14:45 Objection 7: Causal Action Leads To Insufficient Parental Obligations 16:49 Objection 8: Creation of Peril Only Occurs if Someone's Rights Have Already Been Violated but Creating a Child Does Not Violate Rights 18:30 Objection 9: The Non-Identity Problem Means There Is No Creation of Peril 19:48 Objection 10: The Concept of Parental Obligations Is Merely a Cover for Prejudice or Ulterior Motives

First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2024/6/27/objections-against-the-state-of-peril-argument-for-parental-obligations on 27 June 2024.