ONE of my recurring fears is that I will someday be the proprietor of a screaming baby on a long flight. The contingency is hardly remote: people do sometimes have cause to fly with a baby, and babies cry. For the parents of the juvenile offender, it's a cause of guilt and shame, because your offspring is annoying your fellow travellers and some of them are judging you for it.

Over at Forbes Eric Jackson, noting a couple of recent articles on families in flight, is defiant: "I'd like to respond on behalf of all parents out there: grow up." Dan Drezner would presumably agree. Writing at Foreign Policy, he argues that crying toddlers are the "uncontrollable rogue states of travel":

The parent could try denial, but suffocating children still carries serious legal penalties in most states. Compellence is popular, except if the idea is to get a screaming child to stop screaming, punishment isn't really going to work well. Inducements -- "here, have some chocolate!" -- can work, but the child quickly figures out the associated moral hazard and has an incentive to act out again to get more inducements later in the flight. Using persuasion on crying children is something that non-parents are convinced will work -- until the moment they become parents themselves and realize their own utter stupidity. No, if a child is bawling uncontrollably during a flight, it's not because the parent is derelict in their parenting -- it's because they've already exhausted the first four policy options and have no recourse but acceptance.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Johnson's post has elicited some pushback from beleaguered travellers. Chief among them this weekend was Megan McArdle of The Atlantic (and formerly of The Economist), who took to Twitter to argue that parents of babies should be more considerate of others—avoiding air travel altogether except in cases of extreme need, or at least travelling under strict terms: "Proposed resolution: for every hour your infant screams, you have to buy a cocktail for every passenger on plane."

There's no question that it's annoying when a baby cries on a flight. Still, I find this line of thought somewhat ungenerous. There's a near-infinite variety of ways people can inconvenience other passengers on a flight—by being smelly, by taking up lots of space (either in the seat or in the luggage lockers), by trying to chat them up, and so on. A few weeks ago someone clocked me in the head with a walking stick as he was trying to take it down from the overhead bin. Following Peter Strawson, I think we have to suspend our interpersonal reactive attitudes in situations where people can't help the harm they're causing.

Of course, the crux of the issue here may be that people think the parents in question can avoid causing harm. They can drive or stay at home. But I would guess that in the vast majority of cases parents are just going for the most practical alternative. It's not 1960. Commercial air travel is not fun. A sweaty packet of cheese may be offered as a light meal. When babies cry on aeroplanes, they are often just saying what we're all thinking. That being the case, the best response to a screaming baby on the plane is a stoical one: here's a chance to practice your patience and gin up your karma. Even if you've never been a crying baby or had a crying baby, all of us are a nuisance at some point or another.