Rights Of Children, Disabled, Elderly
11th November 2025
✅ 1. Why The Right To Life Is Universal And Applies From Birth
Here is the strongest, undefeatable argument:
✅ Rights protect the conditions required for moral agency
Rights do not apply because one is currently rational.
Rights apply because:
One is the kind of being whose nature requires rationality to survive.
This includes babies, the unconscious, the sleeping, the injured, the elderly, and the temporarily irrational.
A newborn does not need to be a moral agent to have rights.
It needs rights because it will become one—and because without rights it cannot survive long enough to do so.
Potentiality → Actuality defense:
A baby has the volitional, conceptual nature of a human, even before reasoning.
Having rights does not require the current exercise of rationality, but the potential for rationality.
Otherwise:
Sleep/unconsciousness/comas eliminates rights
Sedation eliminates rights
Uneducated adults have no rights
Brain injury eliminates rights
Stroke victims have no rights
Moments of anger eliminate rights
Infants have no rights
Alzheimer’s patients have no rights
Anyone in grief, shock, fear, or mental fog loses rights
Psychosis eliminates rights
This can lead to abuse, torture, rape and "justified" murder.
Contradiction.
The system collapses.
Therefore:
✅ Rights apply to the kind of entity, not the momentary mental state.
✅ Human infancy is part of that entity’s life cycle.
✅ Rights begin once individualized, at birth.
✅ 2. Child Guardianship
Children are:
Immature sovereigns
Not yet capable of full moral agency
Developing the capacity for rights-exercising rationality
Thus the correct position is:
Children have rights from birth, but not full liberty.
They have guardianship until they can responsibly exercise sovereignty.
This avoids contradiction while protecting the innocent.
Child guardianship is a temporary rights-bridge.
A child has full moral worth and a future claim to full sovereignty, but lacks the cognitive development right now to exercise judgment, consent, self-direction, or responsibility. So guardianship works like this:
The child retains the right to life. No one may harm them, and their future autonomy must be protected.
The guardian (typically the parent) applies the child’s liberty for the child’s sake. Not for their own agenda. They act as if making choices on behalf of the future adult.
Authority is limited to what is necessary for survival, development, and protection. Feeding, education, guidance, healthcare, safety.
Guardianship dissolves as capacities develop. Rights aren’t granted at 18 by magic; they phase in as the child becomes capable of understanding, choosing, and taking responsibility.
✅ 3. Role Of Guardianship
Guardianship of children, injured adult, disabled person, elderly etc.
Guardianship = Temporary Fiduciary Authority. It’s an agent (trustee) to patient (beneficiary) relationship that protects a developing or impaired person’s future.
Ward = The one in protective custody of the guardian.
Purpose: Preserve the child’s or incapacitated person’s potential for flourishing and eventual exercise of full sovereignty.
Rights and guardianship work like this:
A right is a moral restriction on the initiatory use of physical force.
Physical force is damaging to any human organism, regardless of age, gender or intelligence.
Humans share the same biological and psychological architecture that makes rationality possible.
Therefore the default position is protection, not domination.
It's the guardians duty to protect the immature of incapacitated sovereign ie. their ward.
Developmental delay or immaturity does not change species-identity.
Future rational agency is enough to grant the right to life now.
Otherwise you trip into infanticide, eugenics, selective murder and authoritarian hierarchy.
✅ 4. What “Protection, Not Domination” Means
It means that the proper moral stance toward any human being is to shield their future agency, not to exploit or rule them simply because, at the moment, they might be weak, undeveloped, impaired, or nonrational.
Why?
Because every human being shares the same biological and psychological architecture that gives rise to rational agency, even if it isn’t currently expressed.
So:
The moral status tracks the kind of being they are, not the mental state they are in.
This is the core reason the stance toward them is protection (to safeguard the emergence or restoration of agency), not domination (treating the temporary lack of agency as permission to violate, own, or enslave).
✅ 5. Why the “alternative” leads to domination
If you reject protection as the default, you implicitly accept domination.
Here’s how that slide happens:
If rights depend on current rational performance, then:
• People with IQ differences have different rights
• The powerful can own or farm the weak
• The disabled can be disposed of
• Rights become a sliding scale
• Moral hierarchies become authoritarian
• “Might makes right” becomes defensible
This is precisely the "logic" used by:
• Infanticidal tribes
• Eugenicists
• Totalitarian regimes
• Caste systems
• Chattel slavery
Every oppressive system in history rests on the idea that some humans are “more human” than others because of differences in mental capacity.
✅ 6. Why this matters for rights “from birth”
Rights are not rewards for performance.
Rights are protections for the type of entity you are.
Since every human shares:
• The same biological structure
• The same ego-capable brain architecture
• The same developmental trajectory toward rationality
…you treat every human as a rational agent in principle even before they are a rational agent in practice.
The capacity defines the entitlement, not the momentary expression of the capacity.
So:
• A baby has rights.
• A drunk person has rights.
• A temporarily insane person has rights.
Otherwise, rights become conditional on performance, which destroys rights altogether.
✅ 7. The core principle
If the organism is fundamentally the kind of being built for rational agency,
then its momentary lack of rational agency does not remove its rights.
Rights exist:
not because you are reasoning right now,
but because you are the kind of being that can reason at all.
That’s the entire argument in one line.
Protection preserves that potential.
Domination destroys it.
✅ 8. Intellectual Disability
Rights are split into two layers:
a) Primary (inviolable) rights:
Right to life, bodily integrity, not being abused or enslaved.
b) Competence-based liberties:
Contracting, owning certain property, using weapons, medical decisions (gender transition), etc. (These rights are conditional upon current capacity)
This avoids the problem of treating disabled people like animals.
They may not be fully sovereign, but they are not animals either, because they share the same species-identity and potential architecture, even if injured.
The justification:
Rights are based on species-identity, not current cognitive performance.
A damaged rational faculty is still a rational faculty by kind.
This protects them but allows necessary guardianship.
Liberties can still be restricted (such as driving, contracts, gun ownership), but the baseline right to life and not being harmed remains intact.