Parental authority is fiduciary, generating duties toward children, not property rights against interference.

Evidence

Mill’s harm principle explicitly excluded children from its scope — children lack the “maturity of faculties” that makes state non-interference valuable — making Mill unavailable as direct support for anti-prohibition arguments. Nozick’s minimal-state framework does not address children specifically, but its opposition to “patterned” regulatory intervention in private life has been used in conservative advocacy against corporal punishment prohibition. The philosophical deficiency of the Nozickian argument on this point is that parental authority is a fiduciary relationship, not a property relation — it generates duties toward the beneficiary, not rights against external interference — which is precisely what Nozick’s framework is designed to protect against. — , The Rod and the Child, 7838

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the liberal harm principle and rights-vs-duties debates found in other political theory sources. — connects to: Parental religious conviction does not override children’s bodily autonomy. — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 9371; Children’s rights rest on present humanity rather than future adult status. — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 8848; Religious liberty does not extend to imposing non-consensual harm on children — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 7789

Related

• Parental religious conviction does not override children’s bodily autonomy. (similarity 0.84)
• Religious liberty does not extend to imposing non-consensual harm on children (similarity 0.82)
• Children’s rights must be balanced against parental religious liberty. (similarity 0.81)
• Rights framing shifts the burden of justification from prohibition advocates to parents (similarity 0.79)
• The family-autonomy argument would also block bans on child labor and domestic violence (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Religious liberty does not extend to imposing non-consensual harm on children #expands (0.75) — , The Rod and the Child, 7789
• Parental religious conviction does not override children’s bodily autonomy. #corroborates (0.70) — , The Rod and the Child, 9371
• Children’s rights rest on present humanity rather than future adult status. #expands (0.55) — , The Rod and the Child, 8848