Ethics in Light of Childhood

1. Three Enduring Models

13 Chapter 1 Three Enduring Models HUMAN BEINGS are historical creatures. We not only live within time, like all things, but we also construct the meaning of time through stories, rituals, traditions , and cultures. Present experience aims toward anticipated futures and is interpreted through the lenses of understandings and beliefs from the past. Children demonstrate this historicity of human life acutely. No child chooses the inherited languages and mores that already shape the structures of their lives and thinking from birth. But every child interprets these conditions in new ways for themselves and in relation to their own open and unfolding futures. However diverse human histories and cultures may be, it is always both within and beyond some particular historicity that human beings create senses of meaning, purpose, and obligation. How one understands the significance of childhood for ethics is likewise fundamentally embedded in histories. This chapter, in contrast with the remainder of the book, pauses to examine the history of childism in depth—the history, that is, of ethical thought that has been conducted explicitly in light of childhood. It is easy to assume that childhood is how one perceives it in the here and now. Empirical and everyday observations tell a great deal about children’s and adult’s actions, beliefs, and relations. But even the sciences, and particularly the human sciences, begin within horizons of historically structured presuppositions. Every hypothesis is rooted in a received linguistic world, however much it may also challenge and transform it. Even the concept of “childhood” itself is grounded in particular histories , meaning different things in different times and places. As a result, if we wish to question and transform fundamental ethical assumptions through childhood’s lens, we must start with a careful archeological excavation of the way childhood has been interpreted, for better and for worse, as significant for moral life in our own histories. The history of ethical thought in light of childhood involves a long global struggle to humanize children that in the process has also dehumanized them— 14 History and hence also both humanized and dehumanized humanity. Like the history of thought about women, it has proven over time ethically ambiguous. Contra Philippe Ariès, people have always cared deeply about children.1 But ideas about childhood have not only responded to them imaginatively but also been narrowly simplistic, especially when viewed retrospectively. Unavoidably, in fact, the complexity of actual children could never be matched by the complexity of thought about them. The result has been a long and diverse historical conversation that has often come to sharply opposed conclusions. And it continues to influence children ’s inclusion and marginalization in diverse societies today. In all its different facets, this conversation needs to be unpacked and critiqued so that we may hope to become less simplistic ourselves, to learn from history’s wisdom while overcoming its deficiencies. This chapter examines the history of ethical childism specifically in the West, fromancientGreekandbiblicaltextsthroughtheMiddleAgesandintomodernity. The history examined here will prove useful for developing new ways of thinking in the rest of this book. For many it will be a surprise that this intellectual history exists at all. I examine it through the lens of the three basic questions formulated in the previous chapter—questions about humanity’s being, aims, and obligations— which have animated moral discussions of childhood and adulthood in one way or another across many different times and places. Others with backgrounds that do not originate around the Mediterranean or Europe would be able to tell different stories. The Western ethical tradition happens to be my own historical starting point, and, for good and ill, it has broadly influenced understandings of moral life over a long period of time and around the world. It contains analogies in other traditions, even if these analogies are not explored here. What emerges from this history are three major models of child-responsive ethics that I call top-down, bottom-up, and developmental. The differences between these models are not temporal; they do not succeed each other over time. Each model has been present in one form or another for thousands of years, throughout all phases of premodernity and modernity and up to the present moment. Furthermore , there is no straight line leading over time from children’s relative neglect to their increasing social and human inclusion, nor from comparatively negative views of children to comparatively positive ones. In both actual practice and theory , various understandings in history have appreciated the significance of children...