Isn't it still voluntary that children choose to work insane overtime?

Isn't the employer providing compensation for the children, which they accept in the first place?

Do you begrudge an employer who provide you food and shelter and a chance to live another day in exchange for some work?

For a child, there is a very real chance his entire life could become dominated by insane work policies. He really shouldn't be deciding whether or not to accept those policies until he reaches a certain level of maturity.

Also, you say that we should accept child labor in the name of progress. However, if we do not discourage this practice now, then it will always be accepted later, after China or whoever is a "modern" country.

How do you know if you have the informed perspective? What is a informed perspective anyway?

How do you determine maturity, for that matter? Only parents have that kind of knowledge, and we don't know if they are particularly good parents.

Will his life really be dominated by insane work policies? What do you consider insane?

All of this is because some people don't have knowledge. Therefore, we're going to make laws outlawing certain type of labors, damn the unforeseen consequences, and damn the teenage stakeholders!

It's really a shame we can't have a nice, intelligent conversation on HN without one side of the debate being demonized in the process.

The employer is not the person who should provide food and shelter for kids - that's the parents' job. And 'some work' is often a euphemism for development-stunting, dangerous, exhausting labour which can harm the child for life.

Of course, one can argue that the child needs to work to survive, if its parents cannot support it. That's a separate issue. In this case the child needs a responsible adult to act in locus parentis, whether that is another adult or a state or charity. However, banning child labour is not an immoral choice and refusing to accept the products of it is not immoral either. I am surprised at your apparent astonishment that people are against the entire concept of child labour.

I suspect that your next argument in favour of the concept is that it would be immoral to take away the job of a child who relies upon that support. I'd argue that, in fact, the moral lapse lies with the parents and society that allows a vulnerable person to be put into that position without having had a chance to mature properly first.

It was a commonly-received 'truth' that the earth was flat. But the fact is, everybody can be a victim of potentially abusive deals, not only children.

Child labor need not be abusive. And Another fact you are forgetting is that children are moral agents and so their choices are to be respected.

Children may be more likely than an adult to make a wrong decision. However, it still does not follow that consents law and labor laws actually solve the problem. Young adults still need to accumulate experience and knowledge about potentially abusive deals.

I suspect that your next argument in favour of the concept is that it would be immoral to take away the job of a child who relies upon that support. I'd argue that, in fact, the moral lapse lies with the parents and society that allows a vulnerable person to be put into that position without having had a chance to mature properly first.

That is to assume that society and parents have unlimited resources at their disposal. It may be the only moral option.

Banning child labor does not in actual meaning child labor will not occur. All that does is put child labor in the black market and from the prying eyes of upstanding members of society.

I think that the idea is to allow children to accumulate a certain base level of experience in an effort to prevent them from being the exclusive target of adults who know how 'innocent' they still are to the ways of the world. Obviously you can't make a blanket rule that applies perfectly to everyone, but the alternative is to have no rule and throw everyone to the wolves. I guess this works if you have a strictly Darwinian view of the world and feel that the children that can't cut it deserve to be exploited/killed/whatever as a weeding process so that the society of adults doesn't have to deal with them, but I don't subscribe to that newsletter.

This to assume that rule-making will make children better off. It may be in fact, the opposite.

Another alternative is that children in apprenticeship will see how superior the adults are and will be more cautious of what deals that they accept. A skinny boy won't think he's stronger than the village's blacksmith.

We think children are naive, but that's partly because we refuse to expose everything to children, preferring that they will be innocent.

At one time, it was pretty necessary for children to be an adult at a young age. Now that we live in luxury, we can afford children to live out of touch with the world until it is time for them to enter adult society.

Think of the children swallowing traces of wines in France at an early age. They grew up drinking for the taste. Where as young American adults who turned 21 engaged in bringe drinking more often or for the drug effects.

By this argument, pimps are really philanthropists.

However if an employer is the only one who will give a job, than, it is a morally superior outcome to starving.

Taking that job away will in fact, create an inferior moral outcome.

Would you pose the same question to someone that used the saying, "I'm whoring myself out?"