It is a legitimate function of the "state" to punish molestation (or assault). Ok. But isn't there a contradiction between the "state" punishing the parent(s), and the idea that there is "no obligation" of the parents to "listen" to the state (supposing that the parents "choose" to "raise" their children that way)? Could clarify what you mean by "no obligation" for the parents to "listen" in the raising of the child? My interpratation of that is that if there is "no obligation" to listen, then there is "no obligation" to obey.
Also, what reason(s) underly the legitimacy of "state" action regarding individual rights? Where do such ideas come from?
Good questions. Molestation is an objective, clearly defined crime. A physical asault, not a lifestyle choice.
That is clearly different than a parent choosing not to buckle their children up in a state mandated safety seat, or not putting a helmet on their head while rollerblading. Parents are under no obligation to obey or listen to the state in these matters. Mandatory education is a violation of parental rights. Minimum drinking ages are a violation of parental rights. There are many more. These things are parental decisions. None of the state's buisness. They are not direct violent crimes.
There is a correlation between this notion of the person as social unit and the notion of the common good as the end of the social whole. They imply one another. The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole. Among the bees, there is a public good, namely, the good functioning of the hive, but not a common good, that is, a good received and communicated. The end of society, therefore, is neither the individual good nor the collection of the individual goods of each of the persons who constitute it, Such a conception would dissolve society as such to the advantage of its parts, and would amount to either a frankly anarchistic conception, or the old disguised anarchistic conception of individualistic materialism in which the whole function of the city is to safeguard the liberty of each; thus giving the strong full freedom to opress the weak.
The end of society is the good of the community, of the social body. But if the good of the social body is not understood to be a common good of human persons, just as the social body itself is a whole of human persons, this concpetion also would lead to other errors of a totalitarian type. The common good of the city is neither the mere collectio of private godos, nor the proper good of a whole which, like the species with respect to its individuals or the hive with respect to its bees, relates the parts to itself alone and sacrifices them to itself. It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts which it flows back and which, in turn, must benefit from it. Unless it would vitiate itself, it imples and requires recognition of the fundamental rights of persons and those of the domestic society in which the persons are more primitively engaged than in the political society. It includes within itself as principal value, the highest access, compatible with the good of the whole, of the persons to their life of person and liberty of expansion, as wel as to the communcations of generosity consequent upon such expansion. If, as we intend to emphasize later, the common good of the city implies an intrinsic ordination to something which transcends it, it is because it requires, by its very esence and within its proper sphere, communication or redistribution to the persons who constitute society. It presupposes the persons and floes back upon them, and, in this sense, is achieved in them. In his The Treatise on the Law St. Thomas Aquinas writes:
Is Law Alwasy Directed toward the Common Good?
Every part is ordered to the whole as the imperfect is to the perfect. The individual is part of a perfect whole that is the community. Therefore law must concern itself in particular with the happiness of the community. qtd. in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics Rousseau writes in The Social Contract: If the State is a corporate body whose life is in the union o fits members, and if the most important of its cares is the care for its own preservation, it must have a universal and compelling force, in order to move and dispose each part as may be most advantageous to the whole. As nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members also; and it is this power which, under the direction of the geneal wil, bears, as I have said, the name of sovereignty. But, besides the public person, we have to consider the private persons composing it, whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. We are bound then to distinguish clearly between the respective rights of the citizen and the Sovereign, and between the duties the former have to fulfil as subjects, and the natural rights they should enjoy as men. Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his pwers, goods, and liberty as it is important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the Sovereign is sole judge of what is important. Every service a citizen can render the State he ought to render as soon as the Sovereign demands it; but the Soverieng, for its part, cannot impose upon its subjects any fetters that are useless to the community, nor can it even wish to do so; for no more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause. The undertakings which bind us to the socail body are obligatory only becasue they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves. Why is it that the general will is always upright, and that all continually will the happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not think of 'each' as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all? This proves that equality of rights and idea of justice which such equality creates originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be really such, must be general in its object as well as its essence; that it must both come from all and apply to all; and that it loses its natural redtitude, when it is directed to some particular and determinate object, because in such a case we are judging of something foreign to us, and have not true principle of equit to guide us. Indeed, as soon as a question of particular fact or right arises on a point not previously regulated by a general convention, the matter becomes contentious. It is a case in which the individuals concerned are one party, and the public the other, but in which I can see neither the law that ought to be followed nor the judge who ought to give the decision. In such a case, it would be absurd to propose to refer the question to an express decision of the general will, which can be only the conclusion reached by oe of the parties and in consequence will be, for th other party, merely an external and particular will, inclined on this occasion to injustice and subject to error. This, just as a particular will cannot stand for the general will, the general will, in turn, changes its nature, when its object is particular, and, as general, cannot pronounce a man or a fact. When, for instance, the people of Athens nominated or displaced its rulers, decreed hounours to one, and imposed penalties on another, and, by a multitude of particular decrees, it had in such cases no longer a genearl will in the strict sense; it was acting no longer as Soveriegn, but as magistrate. This will seem contrary to current views; but I must be given time to expound my own. < It should be seen from the foregoing that what makes the will general is less the number of voters than the common interest uniting them; for, under this system, each necessarily submits to the conditions he imposes on others: and this admirable agreement between interest and justice gives to the common deliberations an equitable character which at once vanishes when any particular question is discused, in the absence of a common interest to unite and identify the ruling of the judge with that of the party. From whatever side we approach our principle, we reach the same conclusion, that the social compact sets up among the citizens an equality of such a kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights. Thus, from the very nature of the compact, every act of the Sovereignty, i.e. every authentic act of the general will, binds or favours all the citizens equally; so that the Sovereign recognizes only the body of the nation, and draws no distinctions between those of whom it is made up. What then, strictly speaking, is an act of Sovereignty? It is not a convention between a superior and an inferior, but a convention between the body and each of its members. It is legitimate, because based on the social contract, and equitable, becaseu common to all; useful, because it can have no other object than the general good, and stable, because guaranteed by the public force and the supreme power. So long as the subjects have to submit only to conventions of this sort, they obey no one but their own will; and to ask how far the respective rights of the Soveriegn and the citizens extend, is to ask up to what point the latter can enter into undertakings with themselves, each with all, and all with each. We can see from this that the sovereign power, absolute, sacred, and inviolable as it is, does not and cannot exceed the limits of general conventions, and that every man may dispose at will of such goods and liberty as these conventions leave him; soo that the Sovereign never has a right to lay more charges on one subject than on another, because in that case, the question becomes particular, and ceases to be within its competency[.] And in his Discourse on Political Economy he writes: The body politic, therefore, is also a corporate being possesed of a wil, and this general will, which tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of every part, and is the source of the laws, constitutes for all the members of the State, in their relations to one another and to it, the rule of what is just or unjust: a truth which shows, by the way, how idly some writiers have treated as theft the subtlety prescribed to the children of Sparta for obtaining their frugal repasts, as if everything ordained by the law were not lawful.