According to the interest theory of rights, the primary function of rights is the protection of fundamental interests. Since children undeniably have fundamental interests that merit protection, it is perfectly sensible to attribute rights, especially welfare rights, to them. The interest theory need not be hostile to the accommodation of rights that protect agency because, at least in the case of adults, there is a strong connection between the protection of agency and the promotion of welfare. Children have welfare rights (...) similar to those of adults. But children lack the agency rights adults have because children initially lack and only gradually develop the kinds of capacities for agency that are necessary for agency rights. Children's rights to culture, religion, and free expression are ill‐conceived. (shrink)

This article offers an account of at least some of the non-preparatory dimensions of education and their significance for a theory of educational justice. I argue that just schools should play a role in facilitating goods of childhood. I also defend an egalitarian view about the access children should have in school to the resources and opportunities associated with the non-preparatory dimensions of education.

This article asks whether being a child is, all things considered, good or bad for children. I defend a predicament view of childhood, which regards childhood as bad overall for children. I argue that four features of childhood make it regrettable: impaired capacity for practical reasoning, lack of an established practical identity, a need to be dominated, and profound and asymmetric vulnerability. I consider recent claims in the literature that childhood is good for children since it allows them to enjoy (...) special goods that aren't available in adulthood, or which are harder to access in adulthood. I raise some difficulties for these claims. Then I argue that whatever version of these views survives my criticism will not establish that childhood is overall good for children. This is because the goods of childhood aren't significant enough to outweigh the bad features associated with being a child. I conclude by suggesting that the badness of childhood for children means that we are likely to owe more to children than to adults. (shrink)

Is childhood valuable? And is childhood as, less, or more, valuable than adulthood? In this article I first delineate several different questions that we might be asking when we think about the ‘value of childhood’, and I explore some difficulties of doing so. I then focus on the question of whether childhood is good for the person who experiences it. I argue for two key claims. First, if childhood wellbeing is measured by the same standards as adulthood, then children are (...) worse off than adults. Second, if childhood and adulthood wellbeing are measured by different standards, then we cannot compare them, and children are neither better off nor worse off than adults. This has some counter-intuitive implications, such as that we do not harm persons by depriving them of a childhood, nor by keeping them as children for elongated periods. (shrink)