"Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded"
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Palmer’s line is doing boundary-work: it draws a bright, almost bureaucratic map of who counts as a full rights-bearing agent, and who gets sorted into categories that justify diminished autonomy. As a libertarian educator, he’s defending a core vulnerability in libertarian rhetoric: the charge that “adult choice” gets treated as a sacred solvent that dissolves every social obligation. By stressing distinctions among adults, children, and people with serious cognitive impairments, he’s preempting the gotcha question: if consent and responsibility are the measuring sticks, what happens when someone can’t reliably consent or be held responsible?
The subtext is less compassionate than managerial. The sentence isn’t primarily about care; it’s about liability and legitimacy. It reassures the listener that libertarianism isn’t naive about vulnerability, and that it can make room for guardianship, institutionalization, or limits on contractual freedom without abandoning its philosophical spine. That’s why the phrasing leans on “recognize” and “difference” - the language of classification, not solidarity.
Context matters because the wording dates itself. “Retarded” and “mentally hindered” land today as both outdated and revealing: a tell that the speaker is operating in an older policy/academic register where disability is framed as deficit first, personhood second. That framing quietly invites a follow-up question libertarians often try to keep offstage: once you grant the state or families authority to declare someone “not fully competent,” who polices the border so it doesn’t expand from the truly incapacitated to the merely inconvenient?
The subtext is less compassionate than managerial. The sentence isn’t primarily about care; it’s about liability and legitimacy. It reassures the listener that libertarianism isn’t naive about vulnerability, and that it can make room for guardianship, institutionalization, or limits on contractual freedom without abandoning its philosophical spine. That’s why the phrasing leans on “recognize” and “difference” - the language of classification, not solidarity.
Context matters because the wording dates itself. “Retarded” and “mentally hindered” land today as both outdated and revealing: a tell that the speaker is operating in an older policy/academic register where disability is framed as deficit first, personhood second. That framing quietly invites a follow-up question libertarians often try to keep offstage: once you grant the state or families authority to declare someone “not fully competent,” who polices the border so it doesn’t expand from the truly incapacitated to the merely inconvenient?
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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