I had high hopews for you Myrkul
I claim that any parent has a responsibility to attend to the well being of his/her offsspring due to Jurius Naturalis. The natural laws.
Then, your child has rights? Believe it or not, we are actually in agreement here. The problem comes in when
you attempt to protect those rights by violating them. (This may be a familiar argument.) Why do you disrespect those rights by hitting them, or otherwise abusing the child?
Either path arrives at the same end. The goal of parenthood is to raise adults, but how civilized they are is secondary to the simple fact that they are adults.
It could be argued (and this is in fact, my argument) that an uncivilized "adult" is not grown up, but merely grown larger.
Therefore, the root goal of parenthood is to increase the odds of the child's survival to adulthood, by any and all methods possible.
Were we simple beasts, I would agree with you. Of course, humanity is not a simple beast, we are a reasoning creature (most of us, anyway). The root goal of parenthood is to raise offspring worthy of having offspring themselves. Given that rape is not an acceptable manner of procreation, a parent is therefor obliged to raise a child that is socially acceptable to the opposite sex.
It cannot be reasonablely argued that spanking a child does not work as a behavior modificaition method;
Oh, it works, alright... Just not necessarily as intended.
thus if the goal is to keep the kid away from the traffic in the street, even at the potential cost of the relationship between parent and child, the end of survival literally justifies the means in some cases.
It truly pains me to see a libertarian utter the phrase "the ends justify the means." You should know as well as I do that the means
determine the ends.
The key here is that I don't have to argue the relative effectiveness of corporal punishment as behavior modification compared to other options, I'm simply arguing that a parent has the right to choose that option if all others known have been exausted, and that you don't have the right to interfere with that decision.
On the contrary,
Jurius Naturalis, the child has rights. If you are violating them, I will intervene just as if I see a mugging on the street or one adult beating up another. If it's not OK for you to beat someone who has the ability to fight back, what makes you think it's OK to do it to someone who does not?