Ethics in Light of Childhood

4. What Is Owed Each Other?

87 THE QUESTION OF ETHICAL aims finally gives way to a third question of ethical obligations. At a certain point, others are not just parts of my own or anyone else’s story, but also irreducible human beings in and of themselves. What might be desired or hoped for runs up against what is owed to others—including oneself as an other to oneself—regardless of narrative outcomes. A child can always have better health, but some basic level of health care is morally required. Persons and societies owe others a certain dignity and respect as others in their own right. But how should the nature of moral obligation be understood in light of children ? Both historically and today, obligations have tended even more than aims to be based on the lives and experiences of adults. Especially since modernity, ethical respect has been based largely on the notion of human beings’ independent autonomy . The basis for responding to others is thought to lie in the fact that others possess their own social rationality or freedom. As feminists and others have recently pointed out, such a basis for moral life is open to various kinds of criticism. Above all, it leaves open the question of how moral “rationality” itself is to be defined and who has the power to construct it. When it comes to children, the problem becomes even more acute. For so long as human dignity is grounded in rational autonomy, children will tend to be marginalized more than any other group. This is not because children do not also possess reason and independence. It is because, in a social context defined chiefly by individual freedoms, children will generally have less experience in the world with which to exercise them in relation to others. It will be easier to think of children as taken responsibility for than as practicing responsibility themselves. This modernistic approach has resulted in a profound paradox for contemporary moral thinking regarding childhood. On the one hand, adults are anxious about their individual and societal responsibilities toward the children around Chapter 4 What Is Owed Each Other? them. It is obvious that children suffer great systemic and relational harms and need to be treated with greater respect and liberated from marginalization. But on the other hand, the very grounds on which moral obligation is understood implicitly denies children their full humanity. The languages of autonomy, agency, and individuality—as well as of virtue, character, and community—can certainly be applied to children, but they are first rooted, or so I will argue, in the experiences and perspectives of adults. Merely extending them from adults to children will not make children equal. The only way past this paradox is to reimagine the nature of moral obligation itself from a child-inclusive point of view—for children and adults both. This can be done, I argue in this chapter, by rethinking the very concept of moral responsibility in terms of responsiveness to the other. “The other” is a term developed in phenomenological ethics, most famously by Emmanuel Levinas, to describe each human being’s demand for irreducibility. Here I revise this notion in a more fully childist way. I argue that each “other” demands that selves and societies respond creatively to them by decentering as far as possible their own horizons of meaning and activity. Both children and adults should expand their circles of moral relation toward others as their own new and changing “second centers.” Otherness, in other words, should be creative of selfhood. If the moral aim from the previous chapter is to expand the self’s moral circle outwards into a wider narrative, the moral obligation is to expand it asymmetrically in response to each other. The first grows the self around itself, the second around not-self or otherness. Moral responsibility means shifting one’s center of gravity to include others insofar as they are not reducible to one’s narrative alone. The world I create for myself should be disrupted and stretched out as far as possible by genuine human difference. A child in poverty does not ask only for my fuller life story, but also for my radical transformation. She calls upon not only my creative powers but also my openness to her creating me. Each new child, and every human other, brings a new center of creativity into the world which demands an ever more fully decentered humanity. HUMAN BEING AS OTHER Thirteen-year-old Tony Anderson has been living in...