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to parliaments, police forces, courts and prisons to prevent harm to a citizen’s life or property – but more ambiguous varieties of mischief should remain within the exclusive province of conscience. Thus the stealing of an ox is a matter to be investigated by a police officer, whereas the oppression of someone’s spirit through two decades of indifference in the bedroom is not.
    This reluctance to get involved in private matters is rooted less in indifference than in scepticism, and more specifically in a pervasive doubt that anyone could ever be in a position to know exactly what virtue is, let alone how it might be safely and judiciously instilled in others. Aware of the inherent complexity of ethical choices, libertarians cannot fail to notice how few issues fall cleanly into unassailable categories of right and wrong. What may seem like obvious truths to one party can be seen by another as culturally biased prejudices. Looking back upon centuries of religious self-assurance, libertarians stand transfixed by the dangersof conviction. An abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behaviour of others trembles before the likely answer: who are you to tell me what to do?
    4.
However, there is one arena in which we spontaneously favour moralistic intervention over neutrality, an arena which for many of us dominates our practical lives and dwarfs all other concerns in terms of its value: the business of raising our children.
    To be a parent is inevitably to mediate forcefully in the lives of one’s offspring in the hope that they will some day grow up to be not only law-abiding but also
nice
– that is, thoughtful with their partners, generous-spirited towards the fatherless, self-conscious about their motives and uninclined to wallow in sloth or self-pity. In their length and intensity, parents’ admonishments rival those laid out in the JewishMishnah.
    Faced with the same two questions which so trouble libertarian theorists in the political sphere – ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ and ‘How do you know what is right?’ – parents have little difficulty in arriving at workable answers. Even as they frustrate their children’s immediate wishes (often to the sound of ear-splitting screams), they tend to feel sure that they are guiding them to act in accordance with norms which they would willingly respect if only they were capable of fully developed reason and self-control.
    The fact that such parents favourpaternalism in their own homes does not mean that they have cast all their ethical doubts aside. They would argue that it is eminently reasonable to beunsure about certain large issues – whether foetuses should ever be aborted beyond twenty-four weeks, for example – while remaining supremely confident about many smaller ones, such as whether it is right to hit one’s younger brother in the face or to squirt apple juice across the bedroom ceiling.
    To lend concrete form to their pronouncements, parents are often moved to draw up star charts, complex domestic political settlements (usually to be found fastened to the sides of fridges or the doors of larders) which set forth in exhaustive detail the specific behaviours they expect from, and will reward in, their children.
    Noting the considerable behavioural improvements these charts tend to produce (along with the paradoxical satisfaction that children appear to derive from having their more disorderly impulses monitored and curtailed), libertarian adults may be tempted to suggest, with a modest laugh at such a palpably absurd idea, that they themselves might benefit from having a star chart pinned to the wall to keep track of their own eccentricities.
    5.
If the idea of an adult star chart seems odd but not wholly without merit, it is because we are aware, in our more mature moments, of the scale of our imperfections and the depths of