Good Questions Have Small Groups Talking -- First Freedoms

Turns out, this is a very difficult assignment and does not always meet with success. They find someone who has already written something brilliant—books by people like Beth Moore, Billy Graham and John Piper—and turns it into a curriculum. I try to do a similar thing with my lessons. Each question is footnoted with answers taken from some of the best commentaries ever written. I also include great illustrations and stories from illustration books, trade books and devotional books.

Quotes from world-class sources make these lessons different. By the way using the strategy of fellowship and a decent lesson we have grown from 12 to 40 in 2 and a half years. By using Good Questions Have Groups Talking there is always something that penetrates my spirit and sets my mind to work.

Josh Hunt's Good Questions, try it. Your teaching will be anointed! God has utilized the Lesson's from Good Questions to minister to us. The questions are really good for facilitating meaningful conversation. Our class grew from 10 people to more than 40 in one year!!! We don't have a room big enough for us now.

The format saves us time in preparation in order that we might be able to work on the ministry needs of our class. I love using your lessons. I use them almost every Sunday. They really do get the conversation going. I usually learn more from my class input in 45 minutes than I do studying the background info, for hours, on each lesson. These lessons nearly always provide insight I would never have seen. Thank you for taking the time to write these lesson questions. I believe my presentation would be a lot less interesting without your help. I have started an outreach Bible study in our gym during the Sunday School hour.

I have trained 10 people to be table leaders for three weeks and we are now ready for outreach. Thank you very much for your ministry.

How to Live the Christian Life. Discipleship as a Sport. The Gospel of Jesus. I try to make teachers sound brilliant by providing great quotes from your favorite authors in every lesson. If Max Lucado ever wrote anything about this week's passage, I will likely find it. If you are not crazy happy with Good Questions, we will gladly refund your money. Here is my personal email: I served for 11 years as a Minister of Education. In this role, I lead a group. Each week I wrote up a lesson that consisted of 20 or so questions that I would use in class to teach my group.

The group grew and we needed to divide. Big surprise—I really struggled to find teachers. One of the guys I talked to about teaching made a suggestion. He said if I would continue to prepare my lesson as I was doing, he would take a class. He took the class, I continued writing lessons and all was well. For it to work, the teacher needs to have reasonable biblical background, spiritual maturity, and good people skills.

Before long other teachers heard about the lessons, and I started distributing them to the whole church. People liked the lessons. Teachers like them because they saved them time. Students liked them because the classes were not boring lectures any more. The classic teacher-types were only mildly interested.

They liked to study and read and dig it all out for themselves. But a lot of others really liked them. And, here is the most important thing. I never struggled again to get adult teachers. I can read 20 questions. I can lead a Bible Discussion Group. The church did well. In the 11 years I served as Minister of Education, it nearly tripled in size, going from one service and one Sunday School to four services and four Sunday Schools.

Of course, the lessons were not the only reason. I served under three good pastors. There were other contributing factors. Church Growth is nearly always holistic and complex. But every growing church needs to create new groups and the key to creating new groups is to get more leaders. Good questions made it easy for me to get new leaders.

As an argument it thus bears some comparison with a view that expresses general scepticism about rights in the context of adult-child relations and which emphasises the particular character of the family Schrag ; Schoeman This view draws attention to the quality and nature of the relationships within a family.

These are marked by an especial intimacy and by deep, unconditional love between its members. One can grant that many families do not conform to this ideal and yet acknowledge that when the family does conform to the ideal it is a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, form of human association. What arguably follows from this ideal of the family is the inappropriateness of asserting or claiming rights.

For to do so would be to subvert and ultimately destroy what constitutes the family as the distinctive form of human association it is. Appeal is being made here to a familiar and oft-drawn distinction between two ways in which individuals engaged in a common enterprise or bound together in some enduring association can be assured of their beneficent, or at least minimally good, treatment of one another.

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One way is by the recognition—in law or custom or shared morality—of rights that all individuals can claim, or by rules of justice—similarly and generally recognised—which provide an assurance of fair treatment. Another way is by reliance on the dispositions or attitudes that the individuals bound together have—spontaneously and naturally—towards one another. Thus, for instance, if each is motivated by general benevolence in respect of all then no one has any need to claim or assert what is due to him as of right or rule.

In the case of the family, it is argued, neither justice nor benevolence suffices but love does. Of course children may have rights against those who are not family members a right, for instance, that their school teachers provide them with information and skills. Some rights are held against particular individuals. Others, including the most important ones, are held against everyone, including parents and other family members.

A further and quite distinct allegation is that not only is there no need for any such claims, but that allowing them to be made will erode, and in due course destroy, the dispositions and attitudes that rendered the need for rights and rules of justices unnecessary in the first place. This further claim is an influential one in the general critique communitarianism makes, within political philosophy, of what is characterised as a rights-based and individualistic liberalism see, for instance, Sandel , 32—5.

In the context of the family the claim is that granting its members rights will subvert and bring about the end of the love between them that made rights superfluous in the first place. The arguments considered thus far have appealed to the role that rights generally do and should play in our moral lives. A further argument considers what would actually follow from granting rights to children Purdy The argument is that we need as adults to have acquired certain traits of character if we are to be able to pursue our goals and lead a valuable life.

To acquire these traits it is essential that we not be allowed as children to make our own choices. Granting children the liberty to exercise rights is destructive of the preconditions for the possibility of having fulfilling adult lives. The central, and empirical, premise in this argument is that children do not spontaneously and naturally grow into adults. They need to be nurtured, supported, and, more particularly, subjected to control and discipline.

Without that context giving children the rights that adults have is bad for the children. It is also bad for the adults they will turn into, and for the society we share as adults and children. The third step in defence of the denial of rights to children is to provide reassurance that such a denial is not bad for children. One can thus maintain that rights do not exhaust the moral domain. There are things we ought to do which do not correspond to the obligations we have as the correlates of rights.

As adults we should protect and promote the welfare of children. It need not follow that they have rights against us. But does not talk of the rights of children nevertheless still serve a political or rhetorical function by reminding of us of what must be done for them? Might not such talk also serve as a critique of the extent to which we, as adults, may maintain children in an artificial condition of dependence and vulnerability, denying them the opportunity to make their own choices?

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Are not children one of the last social groups to be emancipated as others—women, blacks—already have been, and is not the language of rights the appropriate mode in which to campaign for that emancipation? This is that childhood is not a permanently maintained status associated with oppression or discrimination. It is rather a stage of human development which all go through. Moreover the adults who deny that children do have rights may nevertheless also believe that it is their duty to ensure that the children for whom they have care do pass from childhood into adulthood.

The first claim in the defence of the denial of rights to children is that children are disqualified by virtue of their incapacity to have rights. Liberationists can allow that the key to the appropriateness of giving or not giving rights to children turns on capacity Cohen ix. They will argue, however, that children are not disqualified from having rights by virtue of their lack of a capacity that adults do have. Note that on this view children are entitled to both welfare and freedom rights whereas those who concede that children lack the latter in virtue of a certain incapacity can still insist that they ought to have welfare rights where such an incapacity is not relevant.

There are two respects in which this liberationist case might be modified or qualified. The first is in its scope. The liberationist might claim that all children are qualified to have rights, or she might claim only that some children are so qualified.

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The latter is the more plausible position in view of the fact that the very young infant is evidently incapacitated. Indeed some liberationists seem to recognise as much even whilst they insist that every child should have rights Farson , 31, , and If the scope of the liberationist claim is thus limited it does not amount to the view that no line dividing human rights holders from humans who lack rights should be drawn. Rather it is the view that such a line has been drawn in the wrong place.

A second possible qualification of the liberationist view is that giving rights to children will play an important part in their acquiring the qualifying capacity. It is not thus argued that children are capable now and are illegitimately denied their rights. It is rather that they will only—or at least will more readily or will at an earlier stage—acquire that capacity if given their rights.

The denial of rights to children is, on this account, one significant element in a culture that serves artificially to maintain children in their childlike state of dependence, vulnerability, and immaturity. Again the qualification can concede that children of a very young age are not capable enough to have rights, and will not acquire that capacity even if given rights.

Yet it insists that the denial of rights to children of a certain age on account of their alleged incapacity is simply self-confirming. They cannot have rights because they are incapable but they are incapable only because they do not have these rights. One plausible version of the claim refers to the facts of experience. Children, or at least children of a certain age, may not differ markedly from adults in respect of their cognitive and volitional capacities. They may be as capable as older humans of making their own minds up about what to do and be as independent in their resolution to act on their choices.

But they may simply not have had as much experience of the world as their adult counterparts. Grant that such a lack of experience can be attributed to a lack of opportunities to exercise choice. If such a lack of opportunity is in turn attributable not simply to not having been around for as long but to a denial of the freedom to make their own choices, then there is a powerful case for liberty rights being extended, even if cautiously, to these young people. There are different ways in which the liberationist claim about capacity—whether qualified or not—can be made. For example it may be said that children can make choices if what this means is expressing preferences.

Of course the response is that the ability to choose, thus minimallydefined, is indeed possessed by children even fairly young children but it is not a capacity sufficient to qualify for rights ownership. What is needed for that is more than simply the ability to express or communicate a desire; what is needed is an ability to understand and appreciate the significance of the options facing one, together with independence of choice.

But the animal does not have a general capacity of choice sufficient to qualify it as a holder of liberty rights. Liberationists might move in the other direction and argue that the capacity which qualifies adults to have rights is in fact not a capacity that most, or perhaps any, adults actually possess. Thus it will be said that no adult fully understands the nature of the choices she faces, nor is she consistent in her beliefs and desires, nor is she really independent of the influences of her environment and peers. This is that the alleged differences between children and adults in respect of a qualifying capacity are not sufficient to warrant the ascription of rights to the latter and their denial to the former.

One way then to charge that age is an arbitrary means of distinguishing those qualified and those not qualified to have rights is that there is, in fact, no real division of capacities. Thus, either it will be said that this age is the wrong dividing point or that using any age is wrong. The first objection may concede that there is a better age to be used, just as the second objection may concede that there is a way, better than using age, to mark the division.

The initial and obvious reply to the second objection is that age as such is not the issue but rather the reliable correlation of age with the acquisition of those capacities that qualify a person for the attribution of rights. Some liberationists may thus not dispute that there should be a threshold age—one beyond which adult rights are acquired—but think that the conventional or orthodox threshold is fixed too late.

Liberationists may also simply deny that there should be any threshold on the grounds that there just is no difference between children and adults in respect of their respective capacities for any threshold age to mark. This version of the arbitrariness claim concedes that if age functions as a threshold it does so only inasmuch as it reliably correlates with the acquisition of capacities which are necessary qualifications for the possession of rights. In sum, the arbitrariness claim amounts either to the denial that the acquisition of the specified capacities does correlate with the threshold in question or to the denial that there is any age at which the capacities are acquired.

There are two ideas. The first is that although the threshold of age does serve to mark a difference within the class of human beings it is being human as such which is important. Or, relatedly, what is being distributed, namely rights, is so important that all humans should have them. It is being human which should make the difference not being of a certain age. Rights are too important to be denied to some humans on account of their lesser age and given to others on account of their greater age.

The reply is simple. Being human does matter and it is precisely because they are human beings, albeit young ones, that children are entitled to be treated in ways that non-humans may not. However it is rights that are being distributed and to that end a threshold age does mark a significant point. Although having rights is better than not having them, those who lack rights do not lack any moral status whatever. Children are acknowledged to be humans and yet to be young humans. However, it may still be insisted that a threshold age does not mark a significant enough difference.

A year-old differs greatly from a 4-year-old. Someone who is 18 years and 1 month does not differ greatly from someone who is 17 years and 11 months. It is understandable that the year-old should have rights whereas the 4-year-old should not. But this is not the case for the latter pairing. This is a point about the extent to which real differences between classes are displayed by the members of each class at the edge of these classes. The reply will be that the criticism concedes a difference between being too young to have rights and being old enough to have them.

These differences are not arbitrary. Moreover a threshold has to be fixed. The fact that there may not be significant—or significant enough—differences between the members of the two classes being distinguished at the edges of each class is the price one pays for having to operate with a threshold. But is this price one that has to be paid? The complaint is that age does not always reliably correlate with competence.

Thus using age may risk unfairly penalising some who are in fact competent just as it may risk unfairly rewarding some who are in fact incompetent. Moreover the penalties and rewards in question—lacking or possessing rights—are far too important to run such risks. Why then should one not take each individual on her own and determine whether or not she is qualified be have rights? The problems with the suggested use of a test are various. First, there is the sheer administrative scale of its employment in such a case as human rights.

Second, there is the problem of agreeing a determinate procedure for testing. How exactly are we to examine someone in respect of their competence to possess rights? Third, there is the problem of fairness. Any test must not unfairly disqualify some group of putative rights-holders by, for instance, having a bias in the testing procedure which, in effect, discriminates against that group. Fourth, the administration of any official test—and especially one whose passing yields such important goods—is subject to the risks of corruption or of misuse for the self-interested ends of those administering it.

Again this can not be true of the use of age as a threshold. To summarise, these problems attaching to the use of a test are large and insuperable. The charges of arbitrariness can be argued to be false or overstated. Children do differ from adults in respect of their competence to possess rights. A threshold of age may be the appropriate way to register that difference. One should, thus, acquire rights only on reaching a certain age.

However, two riders to this summary are appropriate. First, different rights may be acquired at different ages. After all it is plausible to think that the capacities needed for, and qualifying a person to possess, different rights are themselves different. More particularly, different rights would seem to require different degrees of competence. Liberty rights entitle their possessors to make choices, and the matters in respect of which choices are made differ in their complexity, importance, and consequential impact. Those who are allowed to choose require greater or lesser amounts of maturity, independence, and deliberative proficiency in order to be able to make these different kinds of choice.

The decisions to marry, consume alcohol, serve in the armed forces, undertake paid labour, vote, buy goods in a shop, travel unaccompanied, and open a bank account seem to presuppose different levels of understanding and autonomy. Assuming that these levels are progressively acquired at different ages it makes sense to accord the corresponding rights not all at once but in stages. Second, there should be an ordered but consistent acquisition of rights.

If children are assumed to display the competence required for one kind of right, they should not be refused another kind of right which presupposes the same or even a lesser degree of ability. It would not make sense, for instance, to deny a young person the right to refuse medical treatment but allow them to choose to die in the armed services of their state.

The liberationist may make one last move. He may concede that children do lack the capacities that are a prerequisite for the possession of rights. There are, however, various problems with this move. Most of these exactly parallel those discussed earlier that beset the idea of entrusting the choices of a child to a representative. First, who are to be the advisers? These may be selected by some fact, such as their biological kinship or their socially recognised role of guardianship, but this fact does not ensure that they will be the best advisers.

A parent is not, by the mere fact of parenthood, qualified to give her children the best advice. On the other hand there is unlikely to be any clear fact of the matter as to who is the best adviser or what is the best advice. Indeed the various adults who might best advise a child could well give conflicting advice. Second, how is one to determine what should guide the advice?

Is it what the child would herself choose if competent to choose or what is in the best interests of the child? The problems with understanding either determination will be discussed in Section 7. Third, is the child still free to act or not on the advice given? If the child is not so free then the role of the adviser is a strictly paternalist one.

This is so even though it has been conceded that she is not competent to recognise what is in her best interests. In this case the role of adviser is beside the point. Not using what could be borrowed leaves one with the lack—and its consequences—that made the borrowing necessary. On the other hand if a child can distinguish good from bad advice then the borrowing is unnecessary.

The child can give as good advice to herself as would be given to her by an adviser. But then no adviser is needed and this is precisely what Cohen denies. If children can have at least some rights, what rights should they have? One can consistent believe both that there are things we ought not to do to children and that children do not have rights. Yet as human beings ought children to have the basic rights that humans have?

Since children are humans they are surely entitled to the basic human rights. But there are some rights possessed by adults which children cannot possess. This is a view defended by Brennan and Noggle Brennan and Noggle These are rights associated with particular roles, and possession of the relevant right is dependent on an ability to play the role. Thus doctors have rights that their patients do not, and car-drivers have rights that those who have not passed their driving test do not.

This argument is interesting not least because it does not provide, in respect of their rights, a fundamental distinction between adults and children. After all some adults could conceivably possess no more than the basic rights possessed by children since they might have none of the abilities required to play any of the roles associated with the role-dependent rights.

However it is not obvious that children do have the basic human rights that adults have. But it is just this right that is normally denied to children, and it seems that Noggle and Brennan do deny, in effect, that children have this right. To say that children do not have all the basic human rights that adults do is not to deny them their status as humans. After all it makes sense to insist that children have — as humans — a basic right to life. Yet it also makes sense, as suggested, to say that children do not have an adult right of self-determination. However it is not controversial to state that children are human, and in saying this to insist that they are entitled to a certain moral regard.

Most who believe that adults have rights which children do not have make the cut between liberty and welfare rights. Feinberg distinguishes between rights that belong only to adults A-rights , rights that are common to both adults and children A-C-rights , and rights that children alone possess C-rights Feinberg Thus a common position is that the A-rights include, centrally, the liberty rights, and that the A-C-rights include, centrally, the welfare rights. To repeat, liberty rights are rights of choice how and whether to vote, what to say publicly, whether to practise a religion and which one, which if any association to join, and so on whereas welfare rights protect important interests such as health, bodily integrity, and privacy.

What might be included in the C-rights? Feinberg distinguishes between two sub-classes of C-rights. There are, first, those rights which children possess in virtue of their condition of childishness.

Although Feinberg does not further divide this first sub-class of C-rights this can be done. There are the rights children have to receive those goods they are incapable of securing for themselves, and are incapable of so doing because of their dependence upon adults. These goods might include food and shelter. There are, second, the rights to be protected against harms which befall children because of their childlike vulnerability and whose particular harmfulness is a function of a fact that they befall children. These harms might include abuse and neglect.

Note that some adults might be argued to merit the same degree of rights-based protection on account of their childlike vulnerability and dependence. Finally, there are goods that children should arguably receive just because they are children. Further they do so because the state or condition of childhood calls forth and requires this protection.

We should be careful to distinguish protection from provision or welfare rights. Children, along with adults, have welfare rights but the content of these will differ between children and adults. Thus grant that both children and adults have a welfare right to health care. In the case of children but not that of adults paediatric care and treatment is appropriate. But that fact is no different in its significance from the fact that amongst different adults the proper form of health care should vary in line with their various disabilities, diseases, and circumstances. These are the rights given to the child in the person of the adult she will become.

They are the rights whose protection ensures that, as an adult, she will be in a position to exercise her A- and A-C-rights to the maximal or at least to a very significant degree. They keep her future open. Such rights impose limits on the rights of parents, and also impose duties on the part of the state to protect these rights.

A couple of things are worth noting about these rights-in-trust. But he also speaks of rights-in-trust of class C as protecting those future interests a child will have as an adult. This implies that they are also anticipatory welfare rights Feinberg , —7. Hence this sub-class of C-rights ensures that the adult can later exercise both her A-rights liberty and her A-C-rights welfare. It may not be possible to quantify in a determinate fashion the number of options open to a future adult.

Furthermore some fulfilling life choices are only available at the expense of denying the child a number of otherwise possible choices.

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For instance, a child intensively trained to realise his considerable innate musical abilities may be unable to pursue careers that would have been open to him in the absence of such a dedicated education. The following further criticisms can be added. Requiring that a child be brought up to be able eventually to choose between as many options as possible may impose unreasonable burdens on parents. It also seems implausible to think that a child suffers if she is denied one or even several possible insignificant further options beyond some threshold number of choices.

Is it really harmful to a child that she does not learn to play all of the orchestral instruments and is thereby denied the opportunity to pursue a solo career in those she does not? Finally some future options are surely morally base or in some other respect without value Mills Feinberg does sometimes talk only of the harms of closing off significant life choices. Yet he does also on occasion employ the language of maximisation.

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However it seems much more plausible to suggest that a child should have enough autonomy to be able to make reasonable life choices. The preconditions of autonomy are both internal a capacity to think for oneself, to acquire and appreciate relevant information, and a volitional ability to act independently and external the provision of a range of feasible and valuable options.

In respect of both conditions it is perfectly possible to have a good sense of what counts as adequate autonomy, even if there is no clear bright line marking the point of sufficiency. These are the rights of a child to develop her potential so that she enters adulthood without disadvantage. Arguably this makes no difference since the child and the adult are one and the same person. Although this is a metaphysically contentious claim Parfit grant that child and adult are merely distinct temporal stages of a single individual.

Whether each temporal stage of the person has the same interest in the child developing into an adult is a further issue which will be considered shortly. However child and adult do stand in an asymmetrical relationship to one another in a way that does not seem to be true of the different temporal stages of the same adult. After all adult Smith can now exercise her liberty rights in such a fashion that at a later time she is not able to exercise them and her welfare rights, to the same degree as she can now.

Smith can, for instance, choose now to enter into a slavery contract or to engage in a dangerous sport that risks death or serious disability. A child, on the other hand, is denied the right to make choices that will fetter the adult exercise of her rights. This is justified by three thoughts. First, a child, unlike an adult, simply lacks the ability to make considered choices and should not have liberty rights. An adult can make unwise choices but is presumed to possess a general minimal capacity which the child lacks to make wise choices.

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Third, a life in which choices can be made is more valuable than one in which they cannot. So the preconditions for the possibility of such a life should be secured. That is just to say that the child must allow for the possibility of becoming its adult self. However consider the case of a child who will not develop into an adult, say someone who is suffering from a terminal disease that will prevent her living beyond the age of majority. Such a child lacks developmental rights.

Or rather she has them but her circumstances do not allow for their protection. However, she does still have welfare and protection rights whose correlate duties can be discharged. The child has an interest in not suffering harm and in enjoying a certain standard of life even if she never lives beyond her childhood. When, for instance, we provide a child with health care or protect her from abuse we not only thereby serve her immediate interests as a child but we also ensure that she will grow into a mentally and physically healthy adult.

Even the education of a child can be represented as not merely of instrumental worth to the future adult but of value to the child here and now. A child has an interest now in learning things and does so independently of what this might later mean for her future adult self.

What kind of adult does her childhood self have an interest in developing into? The answer to this question is important not least for indicating appropriate constraints on any parental upbringing. There is a very influential and recognisably liberal view of what sort of adult a child has an interest in developing into. This is an autonomous individual, one able independently to evaluate and to choose as appropriate its own ends. On the liberal view a child is not autonomous but can with the proper upbringing become autonomous.

This view is most directly contrasted with a conception of the individual as equipped with a set of values and beliefs, authoritatively acquired during its childhood as a result of its upbringing, and not open to revision, or at least not open to any substantial revision. Returning to the case of the child with the terminal illness. She will not develop into an adult. Can we say of anybody that she has an interest, as a child, in developing into an adult, an interest that is frustrated by her terminal condition? Or is there an interest in only being a child and never becoming an adult?

Grant that the child-Q and the adult-Q are two stages of one and the same individual. Could we speak of a conflict between the present interest of child-Q in staying a child and the future interest of adult-Q in child-Q developing into her later adult self? The latter interest seems perfectly straightforward.

However it is at least controversial whether everybody does have an interest in growing up. Work on the putative goods of childhood can be used to argue that childhood as such has a value that adulthood does not, with the further questions arising of whether the former value exceeds the latter and of whether they can be compared at all Gheaus ; Hannan It has has been argued that it would be better for human beings never to have been born Benatar Even if this is not a general truth it may be true of some humans that not growing into adulthood and ceasing to exist is better than becoming an adult.

This might be true, for instance, of somebody facing the prospect of a life of unrelieved, extreme pain and misery. Could there be an interest—even without such a prospect—in being forever child? Such an interest cannot be physically satisfied in this world. It is satisfied in the fictional world of Peter Pan but the author of that fantasy, J. If we mean only by the imagined interest that of remaining childish then it is hard to see how any individual in our world could, if rational, have such an interest.

It is quite another to remain a child in our adult world. Childhood is something best appreciated by the child. It is also something that needs to be left behind. If children are not thought to have the A-rights, and, chiefly, do not have the liberty rights to choose for themselves how to conduct their lives, nevertheless they are not morally abandoned to their own devices.

Section 8 discusses the right to be heard. This section discusses the best interest principle, henceforward the BIP. The principle has been given different explicit formulations. The former is the more familiar version of the principle and it is this understanding of the principle that will be discussed. The difficulties with this maximising interpretation will be considered in due course.

There are therefore at least four possible weightings: The question however is how much. A consideration that is paramount outranks and trumps all other considerations. It is, in effect, the only consideration determinative of an outcome. But although no considerations outrank a primary consideration there may be other considerations of equal, first rank.

Furthermore a leading consideration does not trump even if it outranks all other considerations. A primary consideration is not the only consideration determinative of an outcome. So it should be evident that a and b are equivalent, and that the real contrast is between a paramount consideration that trumps all others and a primary one that need not.

In effect the interesting choice is between a and d. Indeed a debate took place as to which of these two versions should be included within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child with the weaker formulation being eventually adopted Alston There is a difference between considering how in some matter the child most directly concerned is affected and considering how any policy or action in respect of that one child may also have consequences for other children.

Indeed we might consider how any policy or action at all has implications—even if very indirect and attenuated—for all children. Even if there were several children the court had to decide in respect of each individual child what was the most appropriate course of action. There is a still further question of how we should understand the scope of the best-interests principle.

The BIP has operated in at least two important domains Kopelman a. One is in the medical context when determining which option should be selected for an ill or diseased child. Here, where there is unresolved argument as to who should now raise the child, the court must decide.

However, beyond these two specified domains, the BIP has also been given broader application in respect of all policies and laws affecting children. This is certainly what the UN Convention Article 3. There are at least two kinds of difficulty in accepting the BIP for a summary of various criticisms see Kopelman b. Each will be considered in turn. As to its import the BIP is, in the first instance, a maximising maxim. It requires that the best shall be done for a child and not simply that good or enough must be done. In some contexts where the BIP operates there appears to be a determinate number of options, and perhaps even only a pair of options.

This seems to be the case in custody disputes and medical decision-making. In this context the better option is the best. By contrast in the area of general policy affecting children there seem to be very many different possibilities. Yet even with custody and medical decisions we can expand the range of possible options. Thus what might be best for the child is not that she is cared for by either of the parents claiming custody, but that she is adopted by someone else entirely.

Again, what might be best for the child is not that she receive the medical treatment on offer rather than not do so, though it may well be better that she does. What is best is that she is treated by the most skilled medical personnel within the finest medical facility, with no expense spared, and so on. But then the obvious criticism of the BIP is that it is unfeasibly demanding of agencies charged with the care of children. Should we really demand that our law and policy makers do the best for children rather than charge them with doing enough for children?

So the BIP is not best interpreted as a maximising principle. We should do so much for a child; we should not be obliged to do everything that in principle we might do. A second problem of the import of the BIP is that it does not, as it stands, take account of the interests of others. In the first place I might be able to improve the situation of child A but only at the cost of worsening that of child B. Every child should be considered of equal value. Yet we may not be able to promote the interests of every child to the same degree. The BIP directs courts, social workers or medical practitioners in some case to promote the interests of a particular child.

This should not be done by treating the interests of any other child who might be affected as having no value or a lesser value than those of the particular child attended to. Yet, as with adults there are questions of what fairness requires in balancing the interests of the different children affected by any decision or state of affairs. It would not be reasonable to expect that parents should view the interests of their own children as having the same weight as that of other children. It is reasonable to ask policy makers and care professionals to do so. In the second place we cannot be required to promote the best interests of a child over and above, and without regard to, the interests of any relevant adult.

It might be in the best interests of a child that her guardian give up every waking minute to her care. But no adult should have to sacrifice her own welfare for that of her child. One way to understand this phrase is by reference to what a child would choose for herself under specified hypothetical circumstances. Each interpretation will now be examined in turn. Some urge that what is best for any child is necessarily indeterminate. There certainly is no fact of the matter in this regard for we must attach values to the options and their outcomes in respect of any choice of action towards a child.

However it will be said that independently of questions of value we cannot, with certainty, determine what is best for a child. We cannot in practice make complete and accurate assessments of what will be the outcome of each and every policy option that we might adopt in respect of a child Mnookin How can we know with certainty whether this child will flourish if raised by this set of parents rather than by some others in an alternative setting?

Even where we are seeking to rank the outcomes of the options within a simple custody dispute between mother and father things may prove impossibly difficult. The BIP is indeterminate even where there are only two possible decisions to be made Elster , — This difficulty can be spelled out in the following fashion.

Imagine that indeterminacy afflicts each of the four conditions of a full decision procedure Parker , 29— For a decision to be made the possible options must be known, the possible outcomes of each possible option must be known, the probabilities of each possible outcome occurring must be known, and the value of each outcome must be known. Independently of the uncertainty in respect of the last condition—value of the outcomes—there is uncertainty in respect of the other three conditions.

This is probably true. However, it is not clear why the problem is one that is especially or uniquely true of policies affecting children. Any political or legal determination is going to face such indeterminacy in the specification of choices and their outcomes. Of course once we put values back into the equation there is, arguably, clear indeterminacy. Moral pluralists will hold that it is not possible to rank as better or worse different kinds of life. Each realises its own distinctive but strictly incommensurable set of human excellences.

How then can we say that there is a best life for a child to grow into, rather than a range of equally possible yet incomparable lives? The pluralist claim is not directed uniquely at the case of children. The value of some at least of the lives of adults, are for the pluralist, strictly incomparable. Grant that the pluralist claim is false and assume that there is for each and every child a uniquely best life that it could be brought to lead.

There is a still further difficulty. We do happen to disagree in our basic values. Indeed it is a commonplace of contemporary moral and political philosophy that equally sincere, conscientious, and reasonable individuals espouse fundamentally different, and frequently conflicting, views about morality. This is important for a further reason. An education or upbringing shapes the values of the emerging adult. The fact of extensive disagreement about what is best for children, or for a child, is often set in the context of broader cultural disagreements about morality in general.

It is said that the BIP is subverted, or at least rendered deeply problematic, by the existence of these deep and pervasive cultural disagreements Alston ed. Most moral philosophers will acknowledge that a universal moral principle that all are agreed upon can nevertheless have differential application in differently specified circumstances. Here we do not dispute what in general terms is best for a child. But we do recognise that what it is best to do for any individual child will depend on the particular conditions in which that child finds itself. There is a BIP specific to each culture.

What culture A thinks is best for any child is best for any child. What culture B thinks is best for any child—even though it contradicts what culture A thinks best—is also what is best for any child. Moral relativism, in some form, has its defenders but its attendant problems are well documented.