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Why Adults have to be Children First

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Notes

  1. Tamar Schapiro, “What is a Child?” Ethics 109 (1999): 715–738; “Childhood and Personhood,” Arizona Law Review 45 (2003): 575–594.

  2. Sarah Hannan, “Why Childhood is Bad for Children,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (2018):11–28.

  3. Colin Macleod, “Agency, Authority and the Vulnerability of Children,” in Alexander Bagattini, and Colin Macleod, The Nature of Children’s Well-being: Theory and Practice, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).

  4. Anca Gheaus, 2015. “Unfinished Adults and Defective Children: On the Nature and Value of Childhood,” Ethics and Social Philosophy, 9 (2015) http://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v9i1.85; “Children’s Vulnerability and Legitimate Authority Over Children,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 35 (2018):60–75.

  5. Gheaus 2018, op. cit.

  6. Ibid, p. 66.

  7. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

  8. This position is in line with what Weinstock calls the Peter Pan view, according to which childhood is superior to adulthood [see Daniel Weinstock, “On the Complementarity of the Ages of Life,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (2018):47–59)].

  9. Schapiro, op. cit.

  10. Hannan, op. cit.

  11. Macleod, op. cit.

  12. Gheaus, op. cit.

  13. Therefore, our position is closer to that of Schapiro and Hannan, rather than to the Peter Pan view, according to which the transition from childhood to adulthood is a process of decline.

  14. Samantha Brennan, “The Goods of Childhood and Children’s Rights,” in Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod, Family-Making: Contemporary Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). http://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656066.003.0003.

  15. Brennan, op. cit.

  16. It is important to emphasize that Brennan does not claim that childhood is inferior to adulthood. Accordingly, she would vote against giving children pills that would turn them into instant adults.

  17. Hannan, 2015 op. cit., and Weinstock, op. cit. discuss this scenario. Tomlin presents a version of it in “Sapling or Caterpillars? Trying to Understand Children’s Wellbeing,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (2018): 29–46.

  18. Immanuel Kant, On Education, Trans. Annette Churton (USA: Createspace independent publishing platform, 2015), pp. 14–15.

  19. Cristine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  20. Ibid, p. 92.

  21. Weinstock, op. cit. According to the view presented below, adulthood is valuable due to the mental capacities that adults are able to exercise (such as formulating and autonomously following maxims). It could be argued, based on this position, that adults with some mental or cognitive disability have less value than other adults. But this misses an important distinction between two different questions. Stating that adulthood has value as a result of certain sophisticated mental capacities that adults have relates to the question of “what is good for a person to have”. A different question relates to the notion of moral status. According to the position we present, having sophisticated mental capacities is good, but does not imply that we deny in any way the equal moral worth of individuals, regardless of their mental capacities.

  22. For example, Aristotelians take the healthy adult in each species as the standard of good for members of that species.

  23. See Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1921): 5–20.

  24. This deficit of the instant adult corresponds to Weinstock’s aforementioned endorsement condition.

  25. See: Xabier E. Barandiaran, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Marieke Rohde, “Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-Temporality in Action,” Adaptive Behavior, 2009. http://doi.org/10.1177/1059712309343819

  26. We may assume that a being that has purposive agency is capable of carrying out intentional actions.

  27. Michael E. Bratman, “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency,” The Philosophical Review 109 (2000): 35–61.

  28. This is the reflectiveness aspect of Bratman’s account, and here he relies on Frankfurt (1971).

  29. This relates to Bratman’s conception of temporally extended agency.

  30. The planfulness aspect of the account.

  31. Bratman, op. cit., p. 48.

  32. Providing Adelle-2 with mental content requires implanting childhood “memories” within her, such as her first ride on a pony or getting her first dog. Since she did not actually “live” these events, these recollections are not really memories and therefore we will refer to them as “memories” only in the sense of being memory-like.

  33. Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (London: Cornell University Press, 1996).

  34. It should be noted that Bratman bases his notion of identity and temporally extended agency on Lockean accounts of psychological ties (or in Parfit’s terminology, “overlapping strands of psychological connectedness”).

  35. Schechtman, op. cit. p. 159.

  36. Schechtman explains: “The kind of subjectivity required for personhood is precisely that necessary for the kinds of interactions definitive for personhood, and it is organizing one’s self-conception according to these objectively determined constrains which generates that kind of subjectivity.” Ibid. p. 96.

  37. A possible analogy is the autonomous car. The car is programed to drive according to certain maxims (i.e. traffic rules) and to “decide” between different alternatives that may generate different outcomes.

  38. The natural process of becoming an adult, namely the gradual development of physical, cognitive and psychological capabilities, is a necessary but not sufficient condition that must be accompanied by additional requisites, such as adequate nutrition, education, protection from biological or social hazards, and so forth.

  39. Gopnik, op. cit.

  40. Researchers of memory often use the terms episodic memory and autobiographic memory to refer to the same thing. This is probably appropriate in the case of adults, but is less so in the case of young children who only have the latter type of memory. By the age of five, once the child has a notion of a continuous self (rather than a time-sliced self), she has also developed an autobiographic memory. See Gopnik, op. cit.

  41. Schapiro, op. cit.; Hannan, op. cit.

  42. Our thinking about mourning has benefited from Na’aman’s discussion of the phenomenon (see: Na'aman op. cit). Another example is a PhD dissertation, whose value is inseparable from that of the process of writing it. If we woke up one morning and found the dissertation complete and ready for submission without having invested any effort, we would feel that it has much less value.

  43. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, David Kessler. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005).

  44. Mourning is an especially apt analogy in the context of the development of the self, since the death of someone close to us can validate or refute our values or beliefs, especially when the death is sudden. The existing framework of our beliefs and values may not be able to provide an explanation of the new reality and the mourner may experience a loss of meaning in the context of the self, the world and the absence of the deceased.  [See: Robert A. Neimeyer, “Can There Be a Psychology of Loss?” in John H. Harvey Perspectives on Loss, 331–342. (Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel Taylor Francis, 1998)]. As part of the process of mourning and grieving, the survivor must rearrange her identity. She must build a new narrative for herself, on both the personal and interpersonal levels. Although the deceased is materially absent, his presence in the mourner’s memories cannot be denied or ignored, and thus the mourner has to go through emotional transformations that will give new meaning to her self-perception and her relations with others. [See: Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, Continuing Bonds: New Understanding of Grief (Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1996)].

  45. Weinstock, op. cit.

  46. Ibid, p. 56.

  47. Tomlin, op. cit.

  48. Weinstock, op. cit.

  49. We thank an anonymous referee of The Journal of Value Inquiry for raising the objections discussed in this section.

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Correspondence to Efrat Ram-Tiktin.

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Ram-Tiktin, E., Lipshitz, N. Why Adults have to be Children First. J Value Inquiry 56, 201–217 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09771-0

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