Libertarianism - the philosphy for people with no children.

Alyssa Bereznak on How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood:

The answer to my question came on an autumn weekend during my sophomore year in high school. I was hosting a Harry Potter-themed float party in our driveway, a normal ritual to prepare decorations for my high school quad the week of homecoming. As I was painting a cardboard owl, my father asked me to come inside the house. He and his new wife sat me down at the dinner table with grave faces.


"We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated," he said in his lawyer voice.

"What does that mean?" I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure -- something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats.

"You would need to become financially independent," he said. "You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here."

This was my moment of truth as an objectivist. If I believed in the glory of the individual, I would've signed the petition papers then and there. But as much as Rand's novels had taught me to believe in meritocracy, they had not prepared me to go it alone financially and emotionally. I began to cry and refused.

Alyssa's dad seems like a kook with what could be an Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, but philosophies do matter, and a philosophy that extols autonomous individualism isn't going to work for children, because, basically, they aren't autonomous.

In fact, the hard-hearted, cold, objective fact is that everyone is not autonomous for long stretches of life.  There is childhood, old age, and various occasions of disability in between, and the secret of a flourishing human life is that humans take care of the disabled.  Alyssa would have been better off if her father had read Alister MacIntyre.