by Kevin Olivier

Created on: February 21, 2009

It is an inarguable matter, whether or not a parent should make moral decisions for their child. The answer is undoubtedly yes, parents have a right to, and a responsibility to.

Before a certain age, children do not have the capacity to make morally based decisions on certain matters. The simple reason for this is because they do not have the life experience yet. To live at home, under parental care, your capacity to make morally based decisions is directly proportional to your life experience.

If a child steals something from a store, the parent has the responsibility to teach it that it is morally wrong. Just as one trains a dog to sit, parents train their children to develop a societally accepted moral code. Societally accepted does not be from family to family or country to country. It is a world-wide societal connection we are all a part of. It is the fundamentals of what is considered to be right and wrong. If you ask anyone in the world if killing is wrong, they most likely would say okay; but if you ask whether killing an infidel or person of another faith is wrong, then their answer may be different. This is where moral axioms become twisted and distorted.

A parents moral judgement will never be far off from the communities moral code because in each community, we all live by a similar one. In the united states, we believe it to be morally wrong for women not to vote, while in the middle east it is held wrong for women to even walk out of the house without a male.

There is one instance though, where making moral judgements for children is wrong and should not be allowed; it is process of indoctrination. All around the world, parents indoctrinate their children into religions with very strict moral codes, most with are similar to societies, but some which are dangerously different. An excellent example of this would be how children are brought up in the muslim faith, for which the penalty of apostasy is death in certain countries. The children are taught to help others and live a good life, but along side that they are also taught that the most holy thing to do was to give up your life, and take the lives of infidels, in the name of your religion. This danger was clearly seen on September 11th, 2012.

In summation, yes parents have a responsibility to train their children to accept a societal based moral code, but when fundamentalist religious ideals are intertwined, the parent has no right to push it onto their child; for the child's sake, and for humanity's sake.

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