Sunday, March 22, 2015

[nabpwujy] Parents not abandoning their children

In a completely anarchic society, what incentives are there for parents not to abandon their children?  In particular, both parents abandoning a child before he or she can fend for himself or herself.  The inspiration is that there do seem to be anarchic societies, yet they don't seem to be suffering drastic population decline due to child abandonment.

Hypothesis 1: The biologically hardcoded behavior of parent-child bonding, especially mother-child bonding, is enough.

Hypothesis 2: The biologically hardcoded behavior of parent-child bonding is not enough.  However, this combined with the observation that there doesn't seem to be vast amounts of child abandonment anywhere leads to a profound corollary: there are no true anarchies.  Every society, even if it does nothing else, finds ways of making parents behave properly, perhaps through informal regulations enforced by the extended family.

If hypothesis 1 is true, then laws forbidding abandoning children are redundant and unnecessary.

If hypothesis 2 is true, then the situation is more complicated.  We predict that if such laws were repealed, then society will naturally develop informal mechanisms to accomplish the same task.  However, those natural mechanisms might be to reenact the laws.

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