ABSTRACT
Freeman has rightly pointed out that ‘an important contribution of feminist moral theory has been to question the firmly embedded assumption that moral agency and citizenship rights require as a pre-condition that a person be independent, totally autonomous’.43 Referring to the work of Gilligan and Friedman, he argues that ‘dependency is a basic human condition’ and that ‘it is also possible, as is argued within feminism, to accord respect and participation rights in decision making to those who are dependent’.44 Freeman’s position on dependency and children’s rights is one with which we would concur, and we would point also to those feminist writers who have felt compelled to respond to O’Neill’s arguments. Olsen, for instance, while ‘generally sympathetic’ to some of O’Neill’s approach, suggests that, while she ‘is correct that children are dependent in many ways that adults are not dependent ..., this difference is not itself a problem for children’.45 However, this does not mean that adults are never dependent or vulnerable. These are not conditions unique to children.
