What is it about a person's becoming an adult that makes it generally inappropriate to treat that person paternalistically any longer? The Standard View holds that a mere difference in age or stage of life cannot in itself be morally relevant, but only matters insofar as it is correlated with the development of capacities for mature practical reasoning. This paper defends the contrary view: two people can have all the same general psychological attributes and yet the mere fact that one person is at the beginning of a life and another in the middle of one can justify treating the younger person more paternalistically than the older one. Recognising the moral relevance of age, moreover, is crucial if one is to accommodate both the liberal moral ideal of respect for autonomy and our demanding educational aims, given that these otherwise come into conflict with one another.

Some philosophers think that fostering children's autonomyin the sense of critical, rational reflection on our beliefs and goalsis an appropriate aim of public educational policy. Critics say that this amounts to championing an Enlightenment outlook over ways of life rooted in faith and tradition. The most common response to the critics is to assert that children have an interest in autonomy, not because autonomy is intrinsically worthwhile, but because it is instrumentally valuable in discovering how to lead a good life. Finding fault with this Instrumental Argument, I argue that the best case for autonomy is that critical, rational reflection is something we all already rely on in everyday life to figure out which beliefs are worthy of our assent and which goals are worthy of our pursuit. The question is not whether children will reason, but whether they will reason well or poorly. Teaching children how to think critically is, thus, best understood as helping them meet their own emerging standards of rationality. And, given that we have a duty to respect others as reasoning beings, we in turn have a collective duty to foster young people's capacity to distinguish good reasoning from bad.

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John Locke occupies a central place in the contemporary philosophical literature on parental authority, and his child-centered approach has inspired a number of recognizably Lockean theories of parenthood. But unlike the best historically informed scholarship on other aspects of Locke's thought, those interested in his account of parental rights have not yet tried to understand its connection to debates of the period or to Locke's broader theory of natural law. In particular, Locke's relation to the seventeenth-century conversation about the role of generation in grounding ‘paternal power’ is not well-known. Understanding this background is interesting in itself, but more importantly, it can provide us with a deeper appreciation of what Locke is actually saying, as well as a useful vantage-point for surveying current debates about parental rights.

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