What may we rightfully do to children? In practice, and largely untroubled by bad conscience, we compel them to school (an interference not merely with their freedom of movement, but also, hopefully, with their mental activities), we prohibit or nullify many ordinary actions; in general, we place great weight on the distinction between adult and child in our moral and legal dealings with children. In the course of examining the justification of compulsory schooling, I have come to the tentative conclusion that my initial question cannot be given a morally satisfactory answer because of a tension endemic to the whole of our moral thought. I proffer the following remarks in the hope of provoking more thorough enquiries.
In speaking of ‘our moral thought,’ or the principles imbuing it, I shall sometimes be referring to what may be presumed implicit in our generally approved policies; at other times to the self-conscious, critical activity of explicitly formulating and evaluating principles and conclusions such as we find in some moralists and the more interesting moral philosophers. It should be apparent which of these two is in question, but, where necessary, I shall indicate the latter reflective activity by the term ‘critical’.
In examining the grounds for moral or legal discriminations I assume two principles: that these discriminations should be based on recognised factual differences; and that these factual differences should be perspicuously relevant to the discriminations erected upon them. As critical weapons, the first of these is usually of little avail. If our critical moral thought had merely noted that ‘black’, or ‘slave’, or ‘non-W.A.S.P.’ was a characteristic used as a basis for different treatment from us, our moral heritage would be rather more despicable than it actually is. It was an advance to recognise that the colour of a man’s skin was a morally irrelevant feature, that it had nothing to do with that person’s capacity to feel pain, to feel concern for others, or for himself, or with whatever else counts in moral appraisal. While we can easily see that the second principle is the more powerful, our lack of clarity about the nature of perspicuous relevance2 means that its power is somewhat indeterminate. I think we are happier with judgements of irrelevance, and it is on these that I mostly rely.
So, then, is being a child a morally relevant property? To most people the answer to this question is so obviously positive that it has not been worth asking. Fitzjames Stephen put the normal view with characteristic vigour in connection with the legal relevance of being a child: "If children were regarded by law as the equals of adults, the result would be something infinitely worse than barbarism. It would involve a degree of cruelty to the young which can hardly be realised even in imagination. The proceeding, in short, would be so utterly monstrous and irrational that I suppose it never entered into the head of the wildest zealot for equality to propose it."3 But he also noted, and I think agreed, that "minority and majority are questions of degree, and the line that separates them is arbitrary."4 Given my principles, one would have thought that this admission, that adult, sane, human beings do not emerge at an instant, butterfly-like from a 21 year old chrysalis, but that there is rather a continuous and fairly smooth sequence from birth to adulthood (and indeed, through it to death), would lead enlightened moral thought away from insistence on a largely arbitrary chronological criterion towards more subtly organized discriminations. Whether the law could afford to be as delicate in these matters as moral thought is a question I shall leave aside; for some of my purposes, it is enough to observe that, for instance, at least a large amount of educational practice could embody a sophisticated moral awareness.
We have, then, in practice, an important distinction between adults and children less than about 18, and a suggestion that the facts that might underpin morally acceptable discriminations are rather less cut and dried. But what facts are these? What facts are relevant, perspicuously or dimly, to compulsory education and a host of other differences in treatment?
I mentioned earlier a capacity to feel pain as something that seems relevant to one's status as a member of the moral universe, but this of course gives us no way to differentiate between children and adults — indeed Peter Singer has recently used it as a means of extending the kingdom of ends down to about the shrimp.5 Nor is there any plausibility in claiming that the younger you are the less you feel pain.
Again self-respect and a concern for others are dispositions that can be manifested from a very early age. Nor would any differences in the kind or range of such concern seem able to justify the paternalistic interferences we are investigating.
If children and adults are alike in these respects it is surely true that children are very ignorant of the world and are not habituated to dwell on the more distant consequences of their actions; perhaps these facts permit us to withhold many liberties, ‘in their own best interests,’ just as we think, and Mill thought, that we may interfere with someone unwittingly about to swallow cyanide. While children may indeed be found in such situations more commonly than adults, it does not seem that one can conjure up a justification for generalised control from such considerations — having removed the cyanide we do not thereafter supervise our adult’s drinking habits, let alone his other occupations. If ignorance and neglect of consequences is to be regarded as a sufficient ground for interference, beyond the range of cases of probable and unforeseen harm,6 then many adults should likewise lose their liberties — a paternalism acceptable perhaps to Plato but not to the temper of our more democratic politics. We rather regard potentially damaging ignorance or precipitancy of judgment as something we ought to offer to alleviate, not as something we are permitted to remedy without consent.
Other aspects of thought, of rationality more or less precisely understood, might be invoked; but, even supposing them relevant, we do not, despite the extensive research of Piaget and others, know much about the potentialities of children, and it is important here to see that potentialities are what matter — if a child could understand a moral argument it is important not to treat him as if he can’t and won't. As before, if we stick to what he actually does we could find ourselves discounting many adults for their ways of thinking. Ww may note here that people usually learn the kinds of thinking appropriate to various adult enterprises, such as voting, or budgeting for food, by participation in them. It is then not surprising that compulsory non-participants may fail to show the appropriate kinds of thinking, but this failure can obviously not be invoked as a reason to continue to exclude them.
Another range of undoubted factual differences between adults and young children falls under the concept of maturity. But while maturity can be clearly understood in physiological terms, these are equally cIearly irrelevant to justifying the coercion of the young,7 however much they may help to explain it. And if we try to spell out what maturity of thought, feeling, emotion or judgment come to, many supposedly responsible adults will again be left beyond the pale. It is also very tempting to think that judgments of maturity in these respects are themselves inescapably value-laden, and thus fail to provide a clearly factual basis for moral discriminations.
Again, self-sufficiency, where not merely another way of talking about maturity, but rather involving financial independence, supposes a particular economic system which is not, at least for critical moral reflection, God-given and unalterable; and it is itself a matter of degree, though this may be somewhat obscured by the legal superstructure. Such socially contingent economic dependence of a child on an adult may, when taken as an unalterable given, generate a duty in the adult toward the child which itself gives the adult power legitimately to enforce his will upon the child, much as Locke said.8 The justification in such cases will usually arise from the compelled behaviour and its concomitants satisfying more of the child’s wants than his being left to shift for himself; though it may not seem to the child, or to some of the rest of us, that the social system that produces such outcomes should be tolerated. When considering a relation of economic, or other, dependence it is useful also to insist on the distinction between refraining from compelling someone and indulging his every whim; but I am insufficiently clear about these matters to be happy in so doing.9
Having seen that each of the preceding suggestions is insufficient on its own to ground the moral differences between adults and children, we might wonder whether they are stronger in combination. There are, we might argue, a host of features in which children differ from adults — in what they can do unaided, in how they think or feel, in what they find interest in, we may take from Nozick10 the factors of long-term planning and being able to endow life with a meaning as typically adult, and so on. This mass of factors correlates so well with the simply measurable fact of chronological age that, for practically all ordinary purposes, we can use the latter kind of fact as a guide for moral discriminations that find their ultimate justification in the former facts. The few adults who lack almost all these normal adult characteristics are indeed not treated as sane responsible, people but as imbeciles. We could imagine — since we are outlining a development in moral thought — a converse promotion for children who are in many respects ahead of their peers, and not just prodigies in one very restricted domain.
This may sound a reasonable argument — and something like it may suffice for some practical purposes — but it is unsatisfying for reflective moral thought. We may usefully recall Blake’s aphorism:
"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.Moral issues are minute particulars. The argument just outlined offered us a rule of thumb, but such rules are to be accepted no more willingly than the various instances that fall under them. The rule derives no authority simply from its being general. Each case falling under it must be weighed on its merits, that is, in the present instance, on the merits of the particular features of children it directly involves. If, as we have suggested, these features do not provide a morally satisfactory answer in these individual cases the rule of thumb simply fails. Nor can anything be made of the fact that the proposed rule runs together several different facts about children. Perhaps we could get some mileage out of this if we had previously found that the various facts alluded to each contributed to, though were not singly sufficient for, a justification for paternalism and complusion. Putting them together (when they actually were involved together in a particular instance) might then give us all the moral justification we need. But our previous judgments were of irrelevance, were to the effect that each of the features singly gave no moral justification. I do not see how we could then concoct a sufficient justification out of several totally non-existent ones.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer".11
Having found little comfort in admitted factual differences, some may be inclined to retreat into the occult or the straightforwardly false. Examining the child’s place in democratic theory, Schrag discusses, and finally rejects, a proposal to make the franchise dependent on passing an examination in politics. Cohen, likewise rejecting the proposal, claims that Schrag’s cardinal error is his failure to distinguish between a person’s abilities, that can be displayed in tests, and his rational capacity, which is a presupposition of democracy and which adults have, though "very many of them behave quite irrationally a good deal of the time".12 While no tests, however cleverly constructed, can reveal the presence or absence of this rational capacity, Cohen claims to know both that the young, "in the early stages of their growth," do not have it and that possibly a few adults don’t either. It is pretty clear that Cohen’s preferred capacity is either occult or widely shared by children: it seems simply the ability to think in non-insane ways, and this is a property of most children from whenever they think at all.
But perhaps things are other than I suppose: "the child has no conception of its own of how it should live, which its parents and teachers can pronounce to be inferior, and so feel justified in imposing their own superior conception on it. The child literally does not know how to live, and must be taught to do so. If it is not taught in one way, it will be taught in another; it feels the need to be influenced, to be guided, to be put on its feet morally and spiritually... We impose our standards on our children, not because our standards are better than theirs, but because they have none of their own."13 True, children do not come into the world equipped with a blue-print for the New Jerusalem, or merely for their own life; there are some standards, wants, etc., that children don't have. But, firstly, there is no reason why they may not come to adopt them by contagion, as it were, ‘caught rather than taught,’ and secondly, if they don't yet have them they do have other wants, at least from a very early age,14 though they may lack the self-consciousness to pontificate about standards, and we need more of an argument for compelling them to adopt our preferred wants before they wish to. Plamenatz’ tacit evaluation of the kinds of choice open to young children comes into the open in a remark by Downie and Telfer, "they have not got the knowledge and experience to make any choice worthy of the name".15
So far, then, we have seen little in children in themselves to serve as a perspicuous basis for our treatment of them. The other main approach, which often fails to recognise that it leaves our treatment of children as at best a necessary evil, is to find some desirable state of the future person that requires the sorts of compulsion of the child that we are concerned with. Thus we are told that "discipline imposed from without is a necessary preparation for self-discipline or autonomy".16 Paul Nash gives two more such reasons: "conformity through acculturation is necessary to give form and power of expression to the child and able him to carry on a genuine dialogue with those who share his culture."17 And we should note that Downie and Telfer devalue the child’s choices with his own best interests at heart: "there are some talents which have to be cultivated young if at all, so that the adult’s ability to make a valid choice (one with plenty of possibilities) itself depends on early restriction of liberty."18
While there are certainly many problems in invoking a person’s future best interests to justify present interventions, we may avoid these issues of principle by noting that the above examples crucially depend also on the present compulsion being the only means to the future end, and that a fatal defect in them is that, in the relevant areas, our knowledge of the future effects of present coercion or indulgence is mostly no better than Victorian prejudice against masturbation, and consequently cannot be seriously invoked to justify anything. Does anyone really know what is necessarily required for self-discipline? How many talents can only be cultivated young?19 In the above examples the connection between compulsion and future benefit is empirically dubious, or there is no compulsion anyway — children do not need to be coerced into learning their mother- tongue. It is noteworthy that Nash only mentions the ‘indoctrination’ he thinks inevitable in bringing up children in connection with teaching reading, not how to speak. His use of ‘conformity’ blurs the vital distinction between willing and unwilling conformity. While these objections serve, I think, to undermine many overconfident uses of this kind of argument, they do not touch the principles involved. And these principles are of fundamental importance. I have been assuming something like a liberal or Kantian position that prima facie one should respect a person's decisions, one should not force him to do what may eventually be seen as the better thing, that something’s being a talent, or a worthwhile activity, means only that it is permissible to introduce people to it, to argue for it or urge it in other acceptable ways, but not that we may compel introduction. If such a principle is to be overridden in the case of children it must be because of some radical failing in what they have already, which is to say some of my earlier negative points are mistaken. Hopefully this is so, but my point so far is that this has not been adequately demonstrated. People assume rather that their treatment of children as exceptions to general liberal principles is justified so there must be something wrong with where children are; if they asked, instead, ‘should we compel children to change?’ things would not be so easy.
Coercion and constraint seem, then, not to be clearly necessary for any sufficently desirable individual outcome. The last kind of justification I shall mention appeals not to the benefit to the grown-up child but to other members of society. "If education fails to foster feelings of social cohesiveness and mutual loyalty there will always be the threat of social disintegration."20 Or less apocalyptically, "nobody believes that children ought to be allowed to do what they please, or ought only to be prevented from doing themselves an injury; everybody admits that they must be brought up, even though the process is sometimes painful to them, to be tolerable and useful neighbours."21 There are two ways of taking this type of argument: either it assumes that the well-being of certain members of society is sufficiently important to sacrifice the liberties of other members, which does not make any point about children qua children; or it assumes a morally significant divide between child and adult and embodies a proposal about how adults may treat parts of the non-adult environment. At the moment we have been concerned to query the assumption; I shall come back to the proposal.
Before moving on, we should note a recurrent feature of the above proposals, that a stress on rationality, or the kind of life a person inclines to, say, might let some children into the kingdom of ends while also ruling out some present adult members. I have been taking this as an objection to these characteristics, and it does at least indicate that our actual moral thought is probably inconsistent if it does rely on such features; but, of course, consistency is possible the other way too. We might decide to value consistently the collection of varied features that distinguish most adults from the rest of sentient life and be prepared to swallow the consequences — that animals, foetuses, young babies, imbeciles, unconscious human vegetables, etc., may not be members of the moral order. Of course, if this were the consequence, it would not necessarily licence us to kill, maim, or eat them; but it would run counter to at least some moral common-sense.
All is not well with our moral thinking. I wish now to suggest a possible source of the trouble we have found. It lies, I conjecture, in a tension within our moral thought between universalistic principles and the contingent categories of our social life, which I shall label ‘s-r categories.’ By the latter, I intend a generalisation of the observation made by Broad22 that what he called 'self-referential altruism’ is a common component of moral thought, indeed the content of most of our more generous sentiments. Self-referential altruism involves my family, or my friends, or my compatriots; it involves principles framed in terms that refer to the holder of the principle. I wish to generalise this thought to principles framed in terms of the roles recognised in a particular society, as master, slave, waitress, mother, manager, etc. This generalisation retains the essential contrast with universal principles, principles which mention only clearly morally relevant properties;23 and, as we have seen, there are not many plausible candidates for such properties.
Critical moral thought usually undermines the moral relevance of s-r categories, so our sophisticated thinking continually finds itself embarrassed when confronted, as we were above, with practices that hinge on such categories. It is often the recognition of the gap between professed universal principles and s-r practice that leads to the accusations of adult hypocrisy that many more perceptive children make. And an insistence on the universal principles leads to 'idealistic' solutions, such as McClellan’s dissolution of our problem — we should eschew any treatment of young people that would be unacceptable for adults; we don't know that such a society is impossible, so let’s try it.24 A similar taking seriously of the universal principles underlies dissatisfaction at the conservatism embedded in much moralising, that starts from socially given but, in universal terms, unacceptable situations and then tries to plaster over the cracks with some diluted morality.25
We have already briefly noticed one kind of resolution of this tension which is pure obfuscation. It is the habit we have of creating a mythical morally relevant property to ground s-r discriminations. Such factitious parts of our intellectual equipment Gellner once labelled, following Hume, ‘je ne sais quoi’ concepts.26 This miserable procedure is actually advocated by Schrag who thinks that to avoid the dangers of totalitarian paternalism we should all believe in a vitally important distinction between adults and children, though fully aware that the facts do not support us. Conceding a likeness to Plato’s ‘noble lie,’ he yet concludes, "if so it is not one in which a few deceive the masses for their own good but rather one in which we all believe for our own good."27 But this will not do (apart from the simple question of truth) — most of us, the adults, would not believe in it anyway, unless critical reflection on morality is denied us too; but more to the point, there would be many occasions on which the consequences of the belief are insisted upon with respect to children who are bright enough to see through it, and to their own disadvantage. All Schrag can do is to appeal to the utility of the general practice of insisting on this fictitious distinction, but any such move is open to the standard objection that attempts to reduce any acceptable rule-utilitarianism to act-utilitarianism; which is to say, an objection that would at least move us towards more subtly organised discriminations.
Despite the counter-revolutionary consequences of our s-r practice, and despite the conflicts it engenders with less restricted principles, we might ask whether something can be said for it. This is an enormous question, but to answer it in one sentence — if a broadly Humean view of morality is correct, a view that places moral thought and practice squarely among one’s inclinations, emotions, reactions, and so on, then one might very well expect that s-r principles would be accompanied by much greater motivation than the dictates of pure reason. Of course, such a view need not deny that we can change our principles on reflection, but it may well allow that we are going to start, and usually finish, with principles framed in what I am calling s-r categories.
I have suggested that the difficulties we found earlier in searching for a morally perspicuous basis for the distinction between adults and children exemplify a general tension between pure universalistic moral principles and the clutter of socially given categories that are embedded in most of our dealings with the world. In universal terms there is no basis for socially important distinctions, so these discriminations cannot be given the requisite moral justification, they have to be accepted as part of the framework within which moral questions are allowed to arise. But if we do continue to operate with a moral distinction between adults and children, either simply by accepting it as one of the givens, not to be critically examined, or by adopting the kind of position suggested at the end of section I, we still have the question of how we should treat chhildren, an instance of the wider question of how we should treat anything that falls outside the moral order proper. It is clear that this wider question, in our society, is intimately linked with notions of property; and it will be suggestive, I think, to conclude by seeing the place of children in the context of various possible views of property rights.
In a recent extended discussion of two books dealing with the moral and legal status of animals, plants, and the inorganic natural environment, John Rodman has indicated at least three attitudes we might take up towards the denizens of the non-moral.
One influential tradition has assumed that the non-human world is man's property for the taking, to dispose of as we please. Much, of course, needs to be said about what gives particular people property rights in parts of nature, but the fundamental permission to appropriate and exploit is what matters to us now. Children have been seen to be thus at the mercy of their parents, or rather their male parent, as Locke’s summary of Filmer indicates: "This Fatherly Authority then, or Right of Fatherhood . . . is a Divine unalterable Right of Sovereignty, whereby a Father or a Prince hath an Absolute, Arbitrary, Unlimited and Unlimitable Power, over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of his Children and Subjects; so that he may take or alienate their Estates, sell, castrate, or use their Persons as he pleases, they being all his Slaves, and he Lord or Proprietor of every thing, and his unbounded Will their Law."28 Or as Lord Justice James said in 1878, "the right of a father to the custody and control of his children is one of his most sacred rights."29
A second more mitigated view still acknowledges man’s at least de facto lordship over nature, but enjoins on him a duty to conserve it, to protect lesser forms of life as far as possible. This kind of paternalistic conservationism is probably the directing force behind many ecological movements and much recent legislation concerning children. They are still property, but their parents may not sell their labour power, may not maltreat them, and so on. Indeed, almost no property right leaves the owner’s will ‘unbounded’.
The radical and exciting view that Rodman canvasses sees this paternalism as degrading. He asks us to recognise other species’ individuality; they are other nations whom we must respect. He sees that this view goes naturally with the abolition of our ordinary notions of property: "a society not based on the principle of property but on the principle of propriety, i.e., the principle that action should be appropriate to the nature of all parties involved in the transaction, accompanied by the corollary recognition that nonhuman species exist ‘in their own right’ (have their own origin, structure, tendencies, etc.) and not simply ‘for us’."30
Despite Rodman’s emphasis on norms given ‘in the nature of things,’ an emphasis that is notoriously unable to dissociate us from generalised pollution and destrution, he lets slip the fundamental feature of this third attitude, which is a deliberate abstention from certain man-made relations to nature, "a need to experience a realm of reality beyond the manipulation of commodity production and technology".31 While much should be said in elaboration and evaluation of this general stance, let me end by asking whether we could adopt this third view for children.
One source of trouble might be that whereas we could let birds be birds, and radishes radishes, children are going to turn into us; they aren’t going to do their own thing. And we believe this so firmly because being human is so essentially social, and we do not believe that social existence is innately programmed into the human infant. It might be, generalising wildly beyond Chomsky, that a schema for social existence is innate, but the actual form it takes, the surface structure as it were, certainly isn’t; and it is that inculcation which is in question.
It may be worth pursuing the language analogy a little further. Children must learn a language, but there is no language that children must learn; no language that deserves to be inculated rather than another. This parody of ω-inconsistency32 is harmless in the case of language just because languages are morally neutral; but if, pace McClellan, socialisation necessarily involves some compulsion, it rises to plague us in these wider aspects of ‘acculturation’, because social relations aren’t morally neutral. The universalistic principles of critical moral thought, if they point to any determinate social relations, would tend toward some utopia out of touch with any actual human society; nor would they easily excuse a coercive introduction to particular s-r categories, just because they are there. So we see that if rights over children are abjured, the obvious imperfections of our social relations make it impossible to find a satisfactory justification in universal terms, the only terms we think can give us a morally acceptable and not simply an expedient justification, for a coercive initiation into them. So either we cannot get a morally acceptable answer to our original question, or we must radically revise our expectations of morality.
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© E.P. Brandon, 2002, HTML last revised 30 December 2002.
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