The Right of Children to Be Loved

This chapter aims to satisfy critics of rights who believe correctly that rights should not be claimed without consideration as to whether they can be justified. To restrict the scope of the chapter, it assumes the following: there are rights, in particular human rights; children, even very young ones, can have rights; and there are positive rights. The chapter proposes that this right can be grounded as a human right and by showing that love can be an appropriate object of a duty. Furthermore, it also challenges the common notion that the duty to love a child belongs only to the biological parents. If the right of children to be loved is in fact a human right grounded in the fact that children need to be loved to develop essential capacities needed for a good life, then we, as a society, also need to accept part of the duty to promote a child's being loved as our responsibility.