Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about kids.
Speaker: Is childhood by nature a moral horror?
Speaker: Should kids get the right to vote?
Speaker: Can the very young understand philosophy and would they benefit from it?
Speaker: Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us for our seventh episode.
Speaker: We're talking about kids today.
Speaker: And I know they say this every single week, but I mean it this week for sure.
Speaker: This is like the number one episode I've been looking forward to doing since we planned out this podcast.
Speaker: We plan on doing an episode on kids from like the inception of Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: Megan just said this like 20 minutes ago upstairs.
Speaker: So she is really genuinely excited to talk about this.
Speaker: And I am too.
Speaker: Yeah, this is my number one topic.
Speaker: And I think, I mean, so part of that is, you know, we should probably lay our cards on the table before we even get started.
Speaker: We're not exactly like an unbiased source completely on this topic.
Speaker: Right, Frank?
Speaker: I mean, we're unabashedly pro-kid.
Speaker: We have a kid.
Speaker: We're pro-kid.
Speaker: So there you go.
Speaker: We like kids.
Speaker: There will be no consideration of anti-kid arguments in this episode.
Speaker: Well, maybe some consideration.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: They can be irritating.
Speaker: So kids as a philosophical topic has... So there's a sense in which this has kind of gotten some renewed interest in philosophy lately.
Speaker: You can see in the work of the philosopher Agnes Callard, in the work of L.A.
Speaker: Paul, these are two philosophers who have recently done work that involves...
Speaker: Discussion of children via discussion of parenthood.
Speaker: So there's been a lot of renewed interest in the topic of parenthood, what it means to be a parent, how one rationally or irrationally decides to become a parent.
Speaker: But really, those are more discussions about parenthood than they are actually about kids.
Speaker: Yeah, but kids do come up in philosophy sometimes, though, Megan, right?
Speaker: So it's not entirely a fringe topic.
Speaker: Yeah, kids, sadly, kids don't always come up in the happiest circumstances in philosophy.
Speaker: Sometimes we see discussions of kids come up in discussions of infanticide.
Speaker: So in work on the ethics of abortion, you'll often see discussions of infanticide.
Speaker: Some people think that an entailment of particular views on the ethics of abortion
Speaker: is that at some point in a child's development, infanticide may be morally permissible.
Speaker: So some people like Jeff McMahon, David Boonin, I think they argue for these positions and then other people argue against them.
Speaker: So we get a discussion of kids and discussion of, you know, when it's maybe like okay to kill them.
Speaker: So those are important conversations, right?
Speaker: But we're going to try to keep a little light here.
Speaker: And those are, you know, people are familiar with these conversations anyway.
Speaker: So we're going to try to, as always, explore some new territory.
Speaker: New territory.
Speaker: So here's some new territory for us to explore.
Speaker: I was scrolling Twitter, you know, like one does, a couple weeks ago, I think, and I ran across this tweet.
Speaker: I don't even remember who tweeted it, but the tweeter said something like... It was very short.
Speaker: It was something like, childhood is morally horrifying.
Speaker: And obviously, you know, it sparked a reaction, and the commenters were kind of trying to get her to elaborate on this, and what she was saying was, well...
Speaker: There's like an intrinsically horrifying feature of childhood, which is that you're vulnerable in every way, especially, you know, when you're very young and dependent on adult humans to take care of your every need.
Speaker: And often these adult humans are, you know, very imperfect, like most of us are, and that there's something like really, truly terrible about that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think what that might stem from is a particular view about well-being, or what is it to live a good life?
Speaker: So when philosophers talk about this sort of thing, one factor that I think is often assumed to be an important element of well-being is autonomy, right?
Speaker: We like autonomy.
Speaker: John Stuart Mill, for instance, 19th century British philosopher,
Speaker: He thought that was one of the most important things for whether your life goes well or not, whether you have the freedom to choose, to make your own choices.
Speaker: And children lack this sort of thing.
Speaker: So it seems like if autonomy matters a lot, then they lack a crucial element of well-being.
Speaker: So just by their very nature, they're going to be living bad lives until they get older when they can be autonomous.
Speaker: And I mean, we can't talk about autonomy without talking about Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: He thought that autonomy was necessary even for someone to have any moral value at all.
Speaker: So autonomy seems to be a crucial aspect of well-being.
Speaker: Well, one might wonder whether it's a crucial aspect of well-being for everybody or for every stage of life.
Speaker: So, for instance, it might be the case that autonomy is one of these things that you need to live a good life when you're in your middle years, but maybe autonomy is less important when you are younger.
Speaker: So when you are in childhood or infancy,
Speaker: autonomy is not really super important.
Speaker: So maybe we need to have different lists of things that are necessary for a good life, that are lists of things that are relevant to whether our life goes well or not.
Speaker: A list might include things like health, friendship, achievements, self-expression, stuff like that.
Speaker: That's what a list of these sort of things might look like.
Speaker: Maybe you need a different list for childhood.
Speaker: Maybe the list of things that make
Speaker: where a good childhood is different than the list of things that make for a good life in your middle years.
Speaker: So some things that might be distinctively goods for children but are not goods for adults could be stuff like innocence or carefreeness.
Speaker: It might be good to be innocent and carefree as a child, but maybe if you're an adult and you're super-duper carefree, that might border on being negligent.
Speaker: If you're super-duper innocent as an adult, that might border on naivete.
Speaker: So
Speaker: That's an interesting kind of thing that this discussion of well-being and children makes me think of.
Speaker: The idea that our standards for what a good life is need to be relativized to different stages of life.
Speaker: There's a list of goods for when you're an adult, a list of goods for when you're a child, and maybe even a list of goods for when you're in old age.
Speaker: So one text I've been reading recently is Cicero's essay on old age.
Speaker: And he makes precisely this sort of point when it comes to old age.
Speaker: He says a lot of people think old age is really, really bad, but that's because they're judging it by the wrong standards.
Speaker: They're judging old age by the standards of the middle years, where we care about action and bodily strength and that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And that's all well and good for your middle years, but when you get to old age, you need to judge old age by a different set of standards.
Speaker: The well-being for the elderly needs to be relativized to their stage of life.
Speaker: Yeah, so prima facie, that seems pretty plausible.
Speaker: So first, okay, so first of all, let me give this tweeter whose handle and name I cannot remember.
Speaker: I don't even think I followed her.
Speaker: But let's give her her due.
Speaker: On the face of things, it does seem pretty plausible that autonomy is a crucial good for well-being.
Speaker: And it does seem like especially young kids really lack autonomy.
Speaker: So like her view doesn't seem like totally like out there to me.
Speaker: Like when one puts it that way, I can see its pull.
Speaker: Autonomy seems like a really good thing.
Speaker: And in fact, I can't think of, I don't know, I can't think of a kind of vice one might fall into if they had like too much autonomy, right?
Speaker: So you can maybe think of innocence as, you know, falling into vice.
Speaker: If you're innocent for too long in your life, you become naive.
Speaker: But I don't know, autonomy doesn't exactly strike me as a feature like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think maybe there could be an excess of autonomy.
Speaker: So maybe having too much control or desiring to have too much control over things could be bad.
Speaker: I think people do complain about this sometimes.
Speaker: They feel the crushing weight of responsibility.
Speaker: Kind of unrelated topic, but think about Michael Sandel's criticism of genetic enhancement.
Speaker: So his claim is we should avoid wanting to use...
Speaker: new technologies to enhance ourselves, to be super duper smart and super duper strong because that manifests this bad desire, the desire for mastery.
Speaker: There's something nice about not being wholly responsible for our fate.
Speaker: And I think when people look back to childhood and long for those carefree, innocent days, they're reflecting this idea that there's an excess of autonomy they have now, this crushing weight of responsibility, and they long for those days when they didn't have that.
Speaker: So I do think there could be an excess of autonomy.
Speaker: OK, I mean, I guess so maybe one thing I could say in her defense for that is like, well, you know, maybe people who did actually have good caretakers and wearing, you know, were well taken care of can look back on their lack of autonomy with this kind of, I don't know, rosy view.
Speaker: But but maybe someone who who didn't have that would have the opposite reaction.
Speaker: Like, wow, I was really much worse off back then.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Theodora, our baby, she's living it up, man.
Speaker: We do all this stuff for her.
Speaker: She doesn't worry about anything.
Speaker: She's living the life.
Speaker: She has not enough autonomy right now in the sense that we probably do too many things for her.
Speaker: One other thing I think you could say against this view that childhood is inherently morally terrible because of the lack of autonomy is one might think that in fact humans aren't that autonomous and that to feel very self-sufficient or highly agential is just to kind of be deceived about how much your...
Speaker: well-being is like intricately connected to everyone else around you.
Speaker: Yeah, this is like the feminist critique of the subject of political philosophy, like stemming from Hobbes, I guess.
Speaker: Who is the agent in our theorizing and political philosophy?
Speaker: It's this sort of rationally self-interested, autonomous agent who doesn't have any dependence and has no dependencies.
Speaker: That is a fiction.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then the critiques of that are apt.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in, you know, kind of like postmodern neoliberal or whatever society, like, you know, however you want to label the society we're in now, it's no mystery that we do as a culture highly value, at least like the illusion of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Speaker: And so it's I think it's really easy as people get older and age out of childhood to think, well, this is something I should try to attain.
Speaker: And someone might critique that and say, well, insofar as you think you've attained that, you've really, you know, to some extent become self-deceived.
Speaker: And so actually you're worse off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I mentioned earlier that the political philosophers often assume a conception of an individual where that individual is rational, self-interested, autonomous, doesn't have any dependencies or dependents.
Speaker: And this is why I think political philosophers, political philosophy in general, mainstream political philosophy,
Speaker: has a really hard time with children.
Speaker: What's the popular view in political philosophy about where our rights derive from or why the government's legitimate?
Speaker: It's a social contract theory.
Speaker: In broad outline, social contract theory says that what gives...
Speaker: a government legitimacy is that we all implicitly consent to some kind of social contract.
Speaker: We all know that it's in our interest that there is some government that we leave the state of nature where everyone's at war with each other.
Speaker: We want to invest in some sovereign, the authority to punish those that break the law, etc., etc.
Speaker: But children, right, can't sign contracts.
Speaker: So they're sort of like left out of this whole scheme.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Children famously don't consent to be created or born.
Speaker: That's kind of the battle cry of the antinatalist philosophical groups like, oh, actually, reproduction is bad because life contains a lot of suffering and kids can't consent to this.
Speaker: So, right, for social contract theory, obviously the social contract theorist doesn't actually think that citizens sign a literal contract in most cases.
Speaker: But there's kind of this metaphorical sense in which we do by consenting to continue living in the region.
Speaker: We implicitly consent to the social contract.
Speaker: But, of course, kids don't have that choice.
Speaker: They can't just...
Speaker: Although when I was a young kid, my favorite thing to do was to try to run away and kind of like go like live in the woods, you know, like Thoreau style.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I couldn't do that because I simply would have died.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But Frank, you actually do some work a little bit in like...
Speaker: Political philosophy broadly construed specifically on the work of or the application of the work of the political philosopher John Rawls.
Speaker: And he was a social contract theorist in a sense, although much different from the social contract theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau, like the early moderns.
Speaker: Do you want to does Rawls have anything to say about kids?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, Rawls is a social contract theorist, so his view is going to be subject to the same sort of critique.
Speaker: And people have criticized Rawls for this, that his idea that the correct principles of justice are those that rational, self-interested individuals would agree to if they didn't know various things about themselves or they didn't know...
Speaker: their race or their gender or their religion or what social class, economic class they're born into.
Speaker: If they didn't know any of those things, what sort of principles would they agree to to best maximize their own self-interest?
Speaker: Rawls thought that that's the way to think about justice at this sort of institutional level.
Speaker: What principles would rational, self-interested, autonomous individuals agree to behind this veil of ignorance in order to promote their own advantage?
Speaker: So again, we're assuming a conception of an agent that is kind of problematic, that only represents some people and certainly only some people at various stages of their life.
Speaker: And other political philosophers have criticized Rawls' view for this.
Speaker: It leaves out animals.
Speaker: Animals aren't these rational, self-interested agents trying to promote their own self-interest.
Speaker: Children don't satisfy the criteria of Rawls' idealized contractors.
Speaker: Some people have pointed out that people with disabilities might also be left out of Rawls's contractual arrangement.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think of political philosophy's difficulty with children as being part of this kind of general conversation, this general critique of the social contract approach to political theorizing.
Speaker: So let me ask a clarifying question because someone might come back and say, well, Rawls' picture totally has room for children because just like you're ignorant of a lot of other things about yourself behind the metaphorical veil of ignorance, you're also ignorant of your age.
Speaker: You know, you might be 40, you might be 90, you might be three.
Speaker: But as far as I understand you, what you're saying is, well, that doesn't really work because to even...
Speaker: engage in the game of the veil of ignorance, you have to have the kind of like rational capacities that young children by nature lack.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: I'm not.
Speaker: So I should say that I am a philosopher's science who has dabbled into Rawls's political philosophy.
Speaker: You don't want the Rawls mafia coming out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the Rawls.
Speaker: So certainly political philosophers would probably think I'm stupid about Rawls.
Speaker: But it does seem like on its surface Rawls' view is going to have a hard time dealing with the sort of groups that I've been pointing out that it seems to leave out.
Speaker: So maybe there's probably literature on this trying to extend this sort of veil of ignorance contract, social contract idea to these other populations.
Speaker: Like maybe we can say, well...
Speaker: You know, we should imagine that these people, these groups have like a representative.
Speaker: These people.
Speaker: These people have a representative that is sort of behind the veil of ignorance and trying to like look out for their interests or something like that.
Speaker: But on its surface, it seems like Rawls is leaving out children, leaving out animals, that sort of thing.
Speaker: And it does seem like a point to a limitation to this social contract approach.
Speaker: which I am like kind of sympathetic.
Speaker: I mean, I wrote a paper about Rawls, trying to apply it to solve various problems.
Speaker: I kind of like Rawls.
Speaker: I want to make Rawls great again.
Speaker: But it does seem like there are certain problems here.
Speaker: Namely, that engaging in these very thought experiments that he's considering implies that you have a certain level of ability to think abstractly and rationalize and stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So speaking of representatives, a way that we often think of representation in our great nation is by voting for political representatives who, at least in theory, are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents,
Speaker: in Washington or at the state level or whatever.
Speaker: And one thing that gets brought up from time to time is that, you know, sometimes we'll use words like universal suffrage, meaning like everyone has the right to vote now.
Speaker: Of course, this wasn't always the case.
Speaker: We've gotten less and less restrictive about who can vote from only land-owning married white males to, you know, now pretty much all adults can vote.
Speaker: But importantly, who can't vote still?
Speaker: Chat GPT.
Speaker: Ha ha ha ha.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And we want justice for chat GPT right now.
Speaker: Also, children.
Speaker: Children cannot vote.
Speaker: Minors cannot vote.
Speaker: If you're under 18, you can't vote in at least in any national or statewide elections.
Speaker: I guess you can vote in like your high school elections.
Speaker: When I was in first grade, we had an election in our class and it was I guess it was Bob Dole versus Bill Clinton.
Speaker: I think Bob Dole won.
Speaker: It was a mock election.
Speaker: Yeah, it was a mock election.
Speaker: It's kind of weird in retrospect.
Speaker: I couldn't imagine that happening today.
Speaker: Bob Dole.
Speaker: So so kids can't vote.
Speaker: Most of us don't really think about that that much.
Speaker: But one might think that that's an injustice or at least potentially an injustice.
Speaker: So, Frank, imagine you are like Jay Lenoing someone on the sidewalk and you're like, should you wait?
Speaker: Jay Leno.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: More updated reference.
Speaker: Oh, Lord.
Speaker: Jimmy Fallon.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: You go up to someone on the sidewalk with a microphone and you say, should kids vote in presidential elections?
Speaker: They're almost certainly going to say no.
Speaker: Why do you think they're going to say no?
Speaker: Why do you think there's this impulse that most of us have against minors voting?
Speaker: So I think people would say kids shouldn't vote because they're just not cognitively sophisticated enough.
Speaker: They can't appreciate the gravity of the situation.
Speaker: They can't respect the responsibility that is involved in voting.
Speaker: One might worry that if kids had the right to vote, they would vote for like, you know, Blippi or Miss Rachel.
Speaker: These sorts of, I don't know what Blippi and Miss Rachel are.
Speaker: These are like YouTube videos.
Speaker: Shows for kids.
Speaker: You don't have kids.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So, yeah, if you give, like, five-year-olds the right to vote, they're going to elect, like, Blippi and Miss Rachel as president, and we don't want that.
Speaker: I mean... Well, Miss Rachel's nice, but...
Speaker: Yeah, so I too, like the average person on the street, I think have like, you know, initially this seems strange to me, the idea of like young children going to the voting booth and voting for president or whatever, house candidates.
Speaker: But it is a little bit hard to formulate an argument about why.
Speaker: There's this really interesting paper that I read in the Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy.
Speaker: And the paper is by a friend of mine, Eric Weiland, and it is called...
Speaker: What is it called?
Speaker: It's called something really simple.
Speaker: Should children have the right to vote?
Speaker: Should children have the right to vote?
Speaker: That is what it's called.
Speaker: And this paper is really great because it goes through four arguments about why children shouldn't vote.
Speaker: And he just sort of argues that all of these arguments don't really establish their conclusion well.
Speaker: So maybe we should be more skeptical of this assumption than we think.
Speaker: So the first argument that he talks about, and I'm just going to go through these briefly in the actual article, which we'll link to, he gives different versions of these arguments and he considers objections to his responses and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: I'm just going to talk about the four arguments that he considers in this paper in a kind of a brief way.
Speaker: The first one is that, well, children shouldn't get a vote because their interests are already fully represented by their parents.
Speaker: So it's not unjust to deny them a right to vote, that their interests are going to be represented by
Speaker: when their parents vote.
Speaker: The second argument is that children will be if children were given the right to vote, they would just be pressured to vote in the same way that their parents would.
Speaker: And so it's it's not actually representing their interest.
Speaker: It's just another vote for their parents interest.
Speaker: The third argument is that children are not intelligent slash rational slash informed enough to vote well and therefore should not have the right to vote.
Speaker: And the fourth argument is that we can justly prevent children from doing a lot of the things that adults have the right to do.
Speaker: And whatever it is that makes it OK to prevent children from consuming alcohol or driving or whatever, that same thing justifies preventing them from voting.
Speaker: Yeah, arguments one and two are pretty interesting because they remind me of the sort of stuff that people would say who oppose women's suffrage in like 19th and early 20th centuries.
Speaker: They would say, well, you don't really need to give women the right to vote because it's going to be redundant.
Speaker: They're going to vote the same way as their husbands or they're going to be pressured to vote the same way as their husbands.
Speaker: So those, I think, were not very good arguments.
Speaker: So I worry that these sorts of arguments, one and two, the ones you mentioned, where we apply the same sort of reasoning to not give children the right to vote, they're going to suffer from the same sort of difficulty.
Speaker: Like, why assume the interests are going to be the same?
Speaker: Why assume, especially with, like, teenagers, why assume that they're going to succumb to pressure?
Speaker: I mean, children rebel all the time, right?
Speaker: That's what they do.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And this is and he brings this up in the paper that, right, these arguments were used against women's suffrage, that either women's interests are fully represented in their husband's vote.
Speaker: So who cares if they have the right to vote or the woman or if they're not, she'll still be socially or even maybe literally pressured to vote in the same way as her husband does.
Speaker: And so her interests won't be represented.
Speaker: anyway.
Speaker: And what he says is that, like, yeah, you know, representation is like the goal of voting, but the right to vote isn't like fully utilitarian.
Speaker: It's not like if this goal isn't attained, then there's no good to be had in giving someone the right to vote.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One justification for the for the rationality of voting is that it's a means of self-expression.
Speaker: So this is kind of related to another conversation.
Speaker: Where the question is, does it make sense to vote, especially in a large polity like the United States, where your vote is one among 100 million votes, most likely not going to be the tie-breaking vote.
Speaker: So what's the point of voting?
Speaker: Voting lacks causal efficacy, so it seems irrational.
Speaker: And one response to this, there are several responses, but one response is to push back on the assumption that the point of voting is to affect change.
Speaker: Maybe the point of voting is self-expression.
Speaker: Maybe that's one reason to vote even if your vote is not going to do anything.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or even if your vote, in fact, like ends up not representing your interests or even if there is not a need for your interest to be represented or whatever, there's a certain kind of justice that's achieved just in you having the ability to cast a vote.
Speaker: I think that makes a lot of sense to imagine, you know, two people, two people in a relationship or whatever.
Speaker: One person just makes the unilateral decision to to do something that affects both of them.
Speaker: And even if the other person would have come to the same the same decision, they most likely would want to be included in the deliberation anyway.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And I think your description of like what the everyman would say if asked.
Speaker: That's argument three, right?
Speaker: That's argument.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: That's what, yeah.
Speaker: Argument three, I think, is sort of the quote unquote common sense objection to children voting, that they're not intelligent slash rational slash informed enough to vote well.
Speaker: So the response to this is that while any like trait that we put in there, like children aren't X enough, there's going to be some subset of the adult voting population that also has these traits.
Speaker: They're not very well informed, right?
Speaker: Maybe they're not very intelligent or they're not very rational when it comes to who they choose to vote for.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, endless surveys have been done that showed that people became more well disposed toward candidates if they have an accent that's familiar to theirs or something.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's why, like, Bill Clinton affected his southern accent when he wanted to and didn't when he didn't.
Speaker: And that's why the airport in Little Rock is named after him.
Speaker: And everything in Little Rock is named after him also.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's the standard story they tell you about why Kennedy beat Nixon way back in the 60s?
Speaker: Is that because Kennedy was more prepared for the television interview like Nixon had?
Speaker: He was he wasn't shaved.
Speaker: Well, you know, he kind of looked really, really grumpy and a bad posture.
Speaker: But Kennedy, you know, he looked really, really clean cut and he was prepared and looking confident or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that affected a lot of people's votes.
Speaker: And so what this tells us is that maybe most adult voters or a lot of adult voters are also not exactly rational.
Speaker: And certainly we know most people aren't extremely informed when they go to cast a vote.
Speaker: Should mention, right, so there are definitely philosophers out there that bite this bullet.
Speaker: They'll say, yeah, actually, most citizens should not vote because they are not informed enough.
Speaker: These are people who defend what's it called, epistocracy.
Speaker: The rule of those who are informed, Jason Brennan, political philosopher at Georgetown, has a book called Against Democracy, where he defends this conclusion.
Speaker: He says, look, a lot of people are uninformed.
Speaker: Political science and sociology shows this, and so the vote ought to be more restricted.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So if you are for an epistocracy, you might not be persuaded by this argument.
Speaker: But if you are for an epistocracy, you might also be open to the idea that it shouldn't be age that's the deciding factor about whether someone should or shouldn't vote.
Speaker: There can be really intelligent, rational, well-informed 13 or 14-year-old voters that maybe have a higher score on all of these scales than, you know, some 30-year-old would-be voter.
Speaker: And maybe that means the 13-year-old should get the vote.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then argument four, that we justly prevent children from doing a lot of things that adults have the right to do, like drink alcohol, drive on public roads, enlist in the army, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: What Weiland says about this argument is that, well, why do we prevent children from doing all these things?
Speaker: It seems like we prevent children from doing these things because it increases their risk of harm by a lot.
Speaker: And we think that we can justly, you know, for whatever reason, prevent minors from doing things that increases their risk of harm by a lot.
Speaker: And then he argues, well, voting probably doesn't do that.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Frank, do you have any thoughts about...
Speaker: I found argument for kind of weird because I guess like so so while an appeals to harm as the operative moral concept here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I guess I would appeal to like moral agency or autonomy like children aren't moral agents and they're not fully responsible.
Speaker: That's why, you know, the law treats a minor differently than.
Speaker: And that's not based on like harm.
Speaker: It's based on stuff we've already been talking about, autonomy, agency, the ability to fully appreciate the gravity of your actions, that being fully responsible.
Speaker: So I would appeal to that sort of thing rather than harm.
Speaker: That's just me.
Speaker: Yeah, good.
Speaker: And then maybe that could apply more easily to voting.
Speaker: Like maybe we want voting to be the kind of thing that people take really seriously and can understand the effects of.
Speaker: Although, I mean, I do think that, you know, the cutoff for most of these things is 18, except for alcohol, which is 21.
Speaker: And it I mean, it does seem obvious that children are probably moral agents before that.
Speaker: Yeah, certainly.
Speaker: We just need a number.
Speaker: We need to draw the line somewhere.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But this line also gets very blurred when it comes to like really terrible crime.
Speaker: So if you have like a triple homicide committed by a 15 year old, chances are pretty good that at least they're going to try to charge that 15 year old as an adult because I don't know, feels right.
Speaker: Alright, so speaking of children maybe not being intelligent or rational enough to be informed voters, there's a question in our field, in philosophy, about whether philosophy as a discipline, as an area of study, is something that is important.
Speaker: accessible for children, that children should be exposed to, that children shouldn't be exposed to.
Speaker: And in fact, in Aristotle's most well-owned work on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, he writes that, he says, a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science, for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but his discussions start from these and are about these.
Speaker: And further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable,
Speaker: because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action.
Speaker: So the important points in there, I guess, for our discussion, obviously Aristotle is talking about what he conceives of as political science, not philosophy, but what Aristotle thinks of as political science would probably be understood by contemporary scholars as philosophy, and he thinks that
Speaker: Young men here, so men who haven't reached full-fledged adulthood, they're not going to get much out of these kinds of lessons for a couple reasons.
Speaker: The first one is that they just don't have the requisite life experience, I guess, to really fully grasp the concepts.
Speaker: And also he thinks that because they're ruled by their passions, the study is not going to take as well.
Speaker: Or I guess maybe their passions are going to override their brain when it comes to
Speaker: maybe absorbing the material or something like that.
Speaker: Frank, you have some thoughts on this.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this is a really important question.
Speaker: And personally, too, I think about this a lot.
Speaker: Like when, if ever, do I want Theodora to be exposed to philosophy?
Speaker: I mean, it's already way too late for her.
Speaker: She has children's books on Plato, Aristotle and Confucius.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: Those are good books.
Speaker: Highly recommended.
Speaker: We'll link to those in the bio, too.
Speaker: Yeah, I do think about this a lot, like when it comes to education.
Speaker: So most people, as it stands in the United States, at least, are not exposed to philosophy until college.
Speaker: Sometimes high schools will offer philosophy as an elective.
Speaker: So my high school did.
Speaker: I did not take philosophy because I thought philosophy was dumb back then.
Speaker: Philosophy needs some PR because even when I was a youth, I thought philosophy was stupid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You could have just had bad taste because you also hated books.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't like books.
Speaker: I actually took accounting, took accounting instead of philosophy in high school.
Speaker: That's horrible.
Speaker: Yeah, I know, right?
Speaker: I don't remember how to account anything.
Speaker: But yeah, I do think about this.
Speaker: I mean, as it stands, philosophy is mostly taken by people, if taken at all, in college.
Speaker: Some high schools offer it.
Speaker: So should children be exposed to philosophy?
Speaker: Can children think philosophically?
Speaker: So partly this is an empirical question, and there's a movement called the Philosophy for Children movement where they try to demonstrate, you know, with empirical methods that children really can think philosophically.
Speaker: They can ask and understand these kinds of abstract questions.
Speaker: Some of our colleagues in grad school at UW-Madison were actually involved in this and had a local kind of group of philosophy for kids that they did events with.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's worth, I think it's, if you haven't read any of this stuff, I think it's worth checking out.
Speaker: It's really interesting to read the kinds of conversations that children can have that are philosophical.
Speaker: So I think children are capable of thinking philosophically, are capable of thinking abstractly, especially when it comes to like moral rules and whether it's okay to like break certain rules, it's
Speaker: Children at a very young age have a very pronounced sense of fairness.
Speaker: And there's developmental psychology literature on this.
Speaker: Fairness is a concept kids get pretty early on.
Speaker: So they can appreciate discussions about morality and ethics and stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think they can do it.
Speaker: How exactly to expose them to it is an important question.
Speaker: I think it's something that we're going to be thinking about as parents.
Speaker: And I don't know, for instance, like, I guess, like, I want, you know, Theodora to be exposed to, like, the problem of the external world, like the thing that Descartes wrote about, like, is this all a dream?
Speaker: Are we living in the Matrix?
Speaker: But I guess I want her to, you know, to to first develop the view that we do live in a real world, that things around us are mostly as they seem before she starts questioning everything.
Speaker: Because it doesn't hit as hard if you don't have the prior assumption.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: I think I think it's sort of like there's kind of like a step by step.
Speaker: You need the dogmatic slumber first.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As Kant said, the philosopher David Hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Speaker: But yeah, you need you need that first.
Speaker: I think I think it's important to amass a set of facts, right?
Speaker: A kind of a world view.
Speaker: You need to start from somewhere before you start questioning it.
Speaker: I think it would probably be a bad outcome if Theodore just started questioning everything immediately.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: No, I agree.
Speaker: But this actually personally gives me a lot of anxiety because so we're philosophers.
Speaker: We're used to questioning everything.
Speaker: One maybe downside of this is that it actually, at least for me, makes you personally much less sure of things a lot of people are pretty sure about.
Speaker: And so I have this anxiety when it comes to parenting a kid and teaching her this kind of stuff.
Speaker: Like it does seem like I need to give her solid answers.
Speaker: On the other hand, most of these things I'm not sure about, like when it comes to questions about moral stuff, stuff on free will, you know, questions about God or religion.
Speaker: These these are all things that I have, like so many questions about myself that giving like a definitive answer to them feels dishonest, even though I think it might be better for her to have a belief first before questioning it.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel exactly the same way.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess in some cases it's kind of easy, right?
Speaker: Should I bite my cousin?
Speaker: No, Theo, you should not bite your cousin.
Speaker: But yeah, obviously kids do ask why a lot.
Speaker: And this is one sort of, it's a stereotype of children, but it is important and it is reflective of their capacity to do philosophy.
Speaker: They will question common sense assumptions.
Speaker: Part of what it is to do philosophy is to question common sense assumptions.
Speaker: And kids are really, really good at that.
Speaker: Because they're new.
Speaker: They're brand new.
Speaker: They are not steeped in common sense.
Speaker: And when they hear something that is common sense for most people, they might question it.
Speaker: Frank, did I ever tell you that one of my first philosophical thoughts, it was actually something you just mentioned.
Speaker: And I remember from a very young age, like four or five, having this question in my mind, like, how do I know I'm not dreaming?
Speaker: Because as a kid and even now, I have extremely vivid dreams.
Speaker: And I always had this question, well, I don't know how to distinguish my dream existence from reality.
Speaker: And maybe, you know, at any given time when I think I'm not dreaming, I am.
Speaker: Megan was a much more philosophical child than I was, but I think one of my first philosophical thoughts didn't have to do with metaphysics and epistemology, whether the world is real.
Speaker: Mine was about aesthetics, somewhat surprisingly.
Speaker: So I guess I was drawn, like most people are, to a kind of subjectivism about art, right, or music, or what's good art or good music.
Speaker: It's all a matter of taste.
Speaker: It's in the eye of the beholder, right?
Speaker: But then I thought to myself, hold on a second.
Speaker: Some music really, really sucks.
Speaker: Like Nickelback.
Speaker: Nickelback is just like objectively terrible.
Speaker: And I think this might have been one of my first philosophical thoughts as a teenager.
Speaker: I think to myself, hold on, can I really maintain a subjectivism about art is true?
Speaker: But what about Nickelback?
Speaker: The Nickelback argument for aesthetic objectivism.
Speaker: Yeah, the Nickelback argument against aesthetic subjectivism.
Speaker: That really, really spoke to me.
Speaker: And that was one of my first philosophical thoughts, questioning subjectivity about art via an example of something that's just heinously bad.
Speaker: That's really incredible.
Speaker: It makes sense that your first philosophical thought would be about music, though.
Speaker: Frank's a huge music head, so that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: Back to whether we should teach Theodora philosophy, though.
Speaker: I think when it comes to some areas of philosophy, teaching kids this is absolutely indispensable.
Speaker: So I think of things like formal logic or critical thinking.
Speaker: That, I think, is certainly—that certainly should be taught side by side with basic arithmetic, like, you know, what's an argument, deductive validity, basic instruction, and various logical fallacies.
Speaker: It's unclear to me why we wait until college and we're going to teach this sort of stuff.
Speaker: That seems like absolutely indispensable.
Speaker: So I want I want the door to know deductive logic before she's like 12.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of my Twitter friends, I won't name her on here, but I will probably tag her in the comments.
Speaker: I had actually really hot take on this, which is that we should teach kids logic as soon as possible, like as like from infancy.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure she also studied math.
Speaker: She might be a little biased.
Speaker: I'm sold on that.
Speaker: You think that's a good idea?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Theodore is going to know what a proposition is.
Speaker: She's going to know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's going to be great.
Speaker: I mean, I'm actually sold on this, too, because and you know this, Frank, but for our listeners, I was like I was one of the typical, you know, really, really terrible at math kids until I took logic.
Speaker: And then it all came together for me and I could do math for some reason.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It just made it work.
Speaker: So I actually feel like it's actually really good foundation for like math and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it would be really helpful because then you would like learn sort of what mathematicians are up to rather than thinking of math.
Speaker: It's just sort of this list of arbitrary rules and weird symbols that you memorize.
Speaker: I think teaching formal logic, teaching like reasoning would help with that.
Speaker: Once we start teaching kids logic, it's just a short step from there to getting them the right to vote, right?
Speaker: Because now they are rational.
Speaker: Well, rational on some things, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's circle back, though, to the question that we began the episode with.
Speaker: So is childhood morally horrifying?
Speaker: I guess you didn't really express your view about this, Megan.
Speaker: So what do you think about this question?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think the answer to the question is childhood intrinsically ethically horrifying is no.
Speaker: I think often, in fact, for any individual child, oftentimes, horrifically, the answer is yes.
Speaker: But as a matter of intrinsic fact, I think the answer is no.
Speaker: And that's, I guess, just because I am inclined to this view that
Speaker: People in general, no matter how old they are, are much less autonomous than they think they are.
Speaker: And there is something I think about children and the elderly that reveals this to us and is actually like extremely crucial for society to see humans experiencing these stages of life where their lack of autonomy is, you know, if not more pronounced than theirs is, more visible than theirs is.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I agree.
Speaker: I think autonomy is a little overrated.
Speaker: I think it's important.
Speaker: It's one factor among many in making for a good life.
Speaker: I am kind of drawn to this view that I expressed earlier that I attributed to Cicero, that well-being needs to be relativized to different stages of life.
Speaker: So if you think there's a list of things that make a life go well...
Speaker: The list might depend on what stage of life you're talking about.
Speaker: It's plausible to me the sort of stuff that makes a child's life go well is going to be different than the sort of stuff that makes an adult's life go well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, Frank, do you personally have any philosophical thoughts about having a kid, being a parent?
Speaker: Do you feel like it's changed your philosophical views on anything or brought up new questions or points of view for you?
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: You know Augustine's view about babies, right?
Speaker: Yeah, he thought babies were characterized by being like almost entirely egotistical, selfish, jealous, I think really jealous.
Speaker: Yeah, he thought they were like little tyrants, right?
Speaker: They're really reflective of our fallen nature.
Speaker: So that was his view.
Speaker: I think he's a little too hard on babies.
Speaker: For instance, I've observed a lot of very pro-social behavior in our baby.
Speaker: She likes to take her oatmeal out of her mouth and give it to me.
Speaker: So she's very generous and she shares a lot.
Speaker: So maybe Augustine's view on babies is a little too extreme.
Speaker: What about you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, no, no change.
Speaker: Well, I mean, so certainly the thing I brought up earlier about just having like general anxiety about, you know, teaching her things that I'm unsure of myself, not wanting to lie to her, but also not wanting to, you know, make her radical skeptic before she's five.
Speaker: That's like a big source of anxiety for me.
Speaker: I think I expected becoming a parent and especially like pregnancy and stuff to be this really like intensely philosophical experience.
Speaker: Because you always see cool like think pieces on this or like essays that are like, you know, how how certain movies are metaphors for like the existential like body horrors of pregnancy.
Speaker: How motherhood taught me the meaning of life.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker: Yeah, that kind of thing.
Speaker: And as you know, because I've said this to you before, like pregnancy and early motherhood were like, that was like the least philosophical experience of my life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was very intense, but it wasn't- I was there.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: But it was not philosophical at all.
Speaker: It was I've described it to someone as like purely primal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that was kind of I guess it was like there is a sense in which it was philosophical, like a philosophically interesting experience in that it was like the least philosophical I've ever been before.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Reaffirm, you know, our bodily existence.
Speaker: And we're not these like Cartesian souls or whatever.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: We have a body.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It completely made me fully aware of my animal nature.
Speaker: Just feeling this like switch when I had a kid from feeling like I could never do anyone any harm to being like, if someone's mean to my child, you know, maybe I wouldn't do them harm, but I certainly have the capacity.
Speaker: I think that's a philosophical insight.
Speaker: Maybe it is.
Speaker: Maybe I learned more than I thought I did.
Speaker: All right, so that's all the time we have right now for this episode.
Speaker: Our next episode in kind of an unexpected turn of events is going to be a part two of our episode on aliens.
Speaker: The reason for this is that we kind of got like an overwhelming amount of messages and DMs and emails.
Speaker: from people who really loved the episode but had various things that they thought we should have covered and didn't.
Speaker: And we agreed with them.
Speaker: So we ran a poll, asked people if they'd be interested in hearing a part two about aliens' extraterrestrial life.
Speaker: The episode will probably focus on the Fermi paradox and related questions because a lot of the suggestions we got were related to the Fermi paradox.
Speaker: But for all you listeners out there, if you have something that you wanted to hear discussed in the extraterrestrial life episode that we didn't get to, it is not too late.
Speaker: We haven't recorded it yet.
Speaker: So you can DM us or email us or tweet at us or whatever your suggestions for what you would like to hear in our follow-up episode next time.
