ABSTRACT
It was Ronald Dworkin who, nearly 30 years ago, urged us to ‘take rights seriously’ (1977). It is a pity that his argument did not specifi cally extend to children. Indeed, that in a little noticed passage a decade later he stumbled on the dilemma of what ‘Hercules’ (the ideal superhuman judge) should do when he thought ‘the best interpretation of the equal protection clause outlaws distinctions between the rights of adults and those of children that have never been questioned in the community, and yet he . . . thinks that it would be politically unfair. . . . for the law to impose that view on a community where family and social practices accept such distinctions as proper and fundamental’ (Dworkin, 1986, 402). Nor has he ever returned to this dilemma; a pity because it beautifully encapsulates the problem of what to do when the supposedly ‘right answer’ is morally the ‘wrong answer’.
