Welfare or Agency? Children’s Interests as Foundation of Children’s Rights

In the debate on children’s rights, reference is often made to children’s interests but very little attention is paid to what the interests of children actually are, how they come about, and how they contribute to the foundation and understanding of children’s rights and to a practice oriented towards these rights. The author explains the complex relationship between children’s rights and interests, while illuminating some of its reasons and consequences. Since children’s rights are to be understood as human rights, the author takes a more general approach to the political and moral philosophical debate on human rights, in which reference to interests plays an important role. He relates the most important arguments in this debate specifically to children’s rights and offers an interest-based theoretical justification of children’s rights as agency rights.