The Voluntary Life

An AI narration of the article 'The Boomer Contradiction on Children's Rights' by Jake Desyllas.
Since the 1960s the West has settled on a curious pair of beliefs about children: that they have no rights at all before birth, and strong, enforceable rights the moment after it. Most people hold both positions at once and feel no strain. Jake Desyllas argues that the strain is real, and that it cannot be relieved by good intentions. Any principle robust enough to grant a newborn rights reaches back before birth; any principle that denies rights to the unborn reaches forward to the newborn, the infant, and sometimes the older child. He shows one prominent libertarian philosopher openly admitting he selects his premises to reach the answers he already wants — and sets out the four positions available to anyone willing to confront the contradiction rather than avoid it.
First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/9/15/the-boomer-contradiction-on-childrens-rights on 15 September 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'The Theory of State Ownership of Children' by Jake Desyllas.
Who owns a child? One long-running answer, older than the modern state and still very much alive, is: the State does. On this theory parents are not the child's natural guardians but an obstacle — a rival authority that cannot be trusted to raise loyal citizens, and whose influence must therefore be diluted or removed. Jake Desyllas traces the idea from Plato and Aristotle, through Rousseau and the French Revolutionaries, to Hegel, the American Progressives, and the founders of sociology, and shows that it survives intact in contemporary political philosophy — where theorists openly write to advise the State on what parents should be permitted to do with their own children. The quotations are the argument: read in their own words, the advocates of State ownership are remarkably candid about what they want.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:58 Antiquity
1:39 Rousseau and the Revolution
2:56 The Modern State
First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/4/7/the-theory-of-state-ownership-of-children on 7 April 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'Argumentation Ethics Entails Self Ownership From the Beginning of Life' by Jake Desyllas.
A reply to Stephan Kinsella's comments on an earlier critique, this episode argues that the Hoppean rights theory already settles a question Kinsella leaves open: when does an individual come to own their own body? Jake's contention is that self ownership cannot be something acquired, recognised, or granted at some unspecified later point. A body cannot be homesteaded by the being who needs it to do the homesteading, and any rule that lets others confer self ownership by fiat is, by the theory's own standard, non-objective and conflict-promoting. The only rule that does the job is self ownership from the very beginning of life. Along the way the piece presses a harder consequence: if you try to ground rights in rationality, you have to follow Singer and Tooley all the way to the legitimacy of infanticide.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
3:37 Rationality and Infanticide
6:28 Are Rights Inherent?
First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/12/19/argumentation-ethics-entails-self-ownership-from-the-beginning-of-life on 19 December 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'A Critique of Stephan Kinsella's Approach To Rights Theory' by Jake Desyllas.
Stephan Kinsella famously overturned the libertarian case for intellectual property by refusing to prejudge the conclusion: instead of assuming IP was valid and hunting for arguments to fit, he followed the arguments wherever they led. In this short piece, Jake Desyllas turns that same standard back on Kinsella's own theory of rights. He argues that when Kinsella asks not *whether* but *when* we come to own ourselves, he is using exactly the motivated reasoning he so effectively diagnosed in others — quietly assuming that rights must be acquired rather than inherent. Drawing on Kinsella's own words, Desyllas shows the symmetry between the two cases and makes the case that the question of inherent versus acquired rights deserves to be reopened without a thumb on the scale.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:25 The Problem Of Motivated Reasoning
First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/8/6/a-critique-of-stephan-kinsellas-approach-to-rights-theory on 6 August 2025.

An AI narration of the article 'Three Views of the Relationship Between Parents and Political Authority' by Jake Desyllas.
Philosophy of the family looks like one of the least political subjects there is. This episode argues the opposite: that it is one of the most political, and that the philosophers who write about parents and children usually have an agenda they are not advertising. The perennial problem for rulers is that obedience has no good justification, and forcing an outnumbered majority is expensive — so it is far cheaper to persuade, and cheapest of all to persuade people while they are children. That raises a question the philosophical tradition has answered in three incompatible ways: are parents the State's allies in producing obedient subjects, an obstacle to be dismantled, or the last line of defence against political authority? This opening episode sets out all three positions and the interests behind them.
First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2025/4/3/three-views-of-the-relationship-between-parents-and-political-authority on 3 April 2025.