There seems to have been little room for children in Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’. Reportedly, when, in a Q&A session at the Ford Hall Forum, she was asked if ‘children’ have any ‘rights, she replied that they don’t.
The Atlas Society has since attempted to qualify that rather blunt statement. On their website, Andrew Bissel wrote that
Various Objectivists have developed theories on this subject. Generally, these theories hold that while children do [NOT] have the full rights of adults, they deserve to have their right to live and not suffer violent attack respected, in virtue of their status as biologically independent human beings with the potential to develop into fully rational and socially independent adults.
The bracketed NOT is my own insertion, because the rest of the discussion, and the sentence itself, which is repeated, makes no sense without it. Bissel ended his article by stating that
So it is true that Objectivism denies that children possess “rights,” in the full sense of the word. Some may find this viewpoint disturbing, but it is the recognition of the truth about rights and children’s nature. Still, Objectivist scholars have amply demonstrated that, within such a framework, there are still ethical and legal guidelines one should follow in raising one’s children.
What Rand thought those guidelines might be is amply demonstrated in the description, in Atlas Shrugged, of the Winston Tunnel train disaster.
The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, “I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.”
Those fictional children, of course, died, along with their mother and everyone else on the train, in the fictional disaster, but it seems that Rand was more than happy with that. Perhaps she felt they would have been no great loss, since they were clearly not being raised in accord with Objectivism’s ethical guidelines, and they might also have failed to measure up to her high standards of physical, as well as mental, perfection. Almost the only other mention of a child in Atlas Shrugged is where
… a mean ugly little eight-year old was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth ….
The voters’ decision is not, as one might guess, being quoted with approval. In Rand’s world, being ugly was to be damned, and her heroes and heroines are god-like in all respects. The little girl subsequently had all her teeth knocked out, which, Rand presumably felt, served her right.
It is, however, also the case that among her fellow objectivists Rand might even be considered a moderate. Her sometime disciple and later apostate, Murray Rothbard, argued, on p.105 of The Ethics of Liberty, first that a child was the property of the parents and then that ……
….. if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway-freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children.
Even Rand might have hesitated to go that far, but we cannot be sure because she avoided the subject of children as much as possible. Rothbard is to be admired for taking her philosophy to its logical conclusion.