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Assigning Responsibility for Children’s Health When Parents and Authorities Disagree: Whose Child?
Parents and physicians do not always agree on how to care for a child. In
such cases, the state may be asked to arbitrate. Alternatively, the state, for reasons of
its own, may seek to restrict parental authority over matters pertaining to children’s
health and safety. Much work in this area has focused on the primacy of the child
in question. Other work has focused on the parent–child dyad. The needs of other
stakeholders, and of the state itself, have received inadequate attention. Furthermore,
the appropriate limits of state power have not been sufficiently interrogated. Much
liberal democratic thought has pointed out the potential for abuse of government
power, but much ethical literature has not seriously considered the impact of govern-
ment intervention into private relationships. In this chapter I begin to outline the
problems the book will consider. I try to show that there is no principled way to settle
many controversies over parental decisions. My argument is based on the doctrines
of value pluralism and liberal pluralism. However, society owes children the oppor-
tunity to flourish. The elements of flourishing should be determined empirically to
the greatest extent possible, rather than by armchair speculation.
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