Abstract
When we raise children what we are typically aiming for is a kind of flourishing; we want childrento live well as children, and to grow to become adults who live well too. Undoubtedly, part of what we are aiming forwhen we aim for a child’s flourishing is that they meet their developmental milestones well, and that they succeedamong their peers. We are also generally interested in how a child regards themselves; we want children tobelieve that they have value, and that what they care about has value too. We also typically want children to havean appreciation for their relative value among others; that they are important among many other important beings,and we want them to act well in that knowledge. Of course, not all persons who raise children aim for those ends.Some do not care for how a child conceives of themselves, or whether the child flourishes at all. Others care fortheir children, and how they conceive of themselves, but aim poorly. As result, some children come to believe thatthey only deserve love and kindness when they succeed at meeting a caregiver’s ends. Some children come tobelieve that they have no worth at all. And yet other children, rather than believing they are unworthy, come toregard themselves as of superior worth; as children, for example, who bully and sneer at other children for being adifferent race, a different class, gender, ability, etc. may. When a child comes to understand themselves in theseterms, we typically see it at best as morally problematic, and at worst as a tragedy. Despite our interest inchildren’s self-conceptions, and the vast literature on how to conceive of and regard children, there is relatively littleregarding how children should conceive of and regard themselves. In order to explain how children shouldconceive of themselves it is my contention that a new account of self-respect is needed for the context of childhood;one that is responsive to the moral value of children, as well as their developmental capacities to recognize thatvalue. Given that developmental psychology is complex and subject to significant variation as children develop, myaim in this paper is to offer a snapshot of what I take self-respect to amount to in early childhood. In particular, Ifocus on an account fitting for children between three to six years of age.
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Notes
See for example, Dillon (1992b: 60, 1997) and Telfer (1968).
One notable exception is Michele Moody-Adams (1995). On Moody-Adams’ view children can meet what she describes as the “minimum content of self-respect”, where this is to “hold the conviction that one best affirms one’s own value by using one’s abilities and talents to contribute to one’s survival. One who fails to act on this account fails to affirm self-respect” (1995: 284). Moody-Adams’ view departs in a number of ways from most views of self-respect, and so I have not focused on it here. Her view is also subject to the same challenges of comprehension that the other mature model presents for children, as I will describe below.
A similar point is made by Schapiro. She says “the immature agent has to adjudicate her conflicting motivational claims on the basis of something like principle…but she cannot adjudicate those conflicts in a truly authoritative way for lack of an established constitution…Thus the condition of childhood is one in which the agent is not yet in a position to speak in her own voice because there is no voice which counts as hers” (Schapiro 1999: 729).
In a similar vein arguing against children having something akin to self-respect John Deigh writes “…it would certainly be a precocious child who at the age of four or five had a well-defined self-conception, who organized his life around the pursuit of certain discrete and relatively stable aims and ideas and measured himself by the standards of which is necessary to achieve them” ( 1983:234 ).
This view is expressed by Amy Mullin and Eva Kittay. Mullin, for example, claims that of children we “can only legitimately expect what is developmentally possible” (Mullin 2010: 158). She says, for example, that “it is morally appropriate for caregivers to expect children who have the capacity to do so to attempt to show respect for them as individuals to value them as persons” (Mullin 2010: 163). In a similar vein, Eva Kittay holds that “when the charge is able to respond morally to the dependency worker, she too has an obligation” (Kittay 1999: 54).
Kant himself appears to endorse a similar view. As Tamar Schapiro explains, on the Kantian picture, while children do not have the same moral status as adults, morality prohibits children from being treated in particular ways that would “hinder children’s development as deliberators”, as an inability to deliberate well is an obstacle to morality (1999: 721). If a self-conception of worthlessness hindered children’s development in this way, then actions that brought it about would presumably be prohibited.
Indeed, this is true too for adults. In the case of adults, however, accounts of self-respect are well equipped to explain what is problematic about cases like these. A mature model would standardly determine that self-conceptions like these are at odds with a person’s self-respect. For children, however, there is no appropriate model that is fitting to explain why such a self-conception is problematic.
As Baris Korkmaz explains, infants and very young children do not recognize that they, or other persons, have minds or mental states; that persons have “beliefs, desires, plans, hopes, information, and intentions that may differ from our own” (Korkmaz 2011: 101). Young children do not, that is to say, have a “working theory of mind (ToM)” (Korkmaz 2011: 101).
Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
It is important to note that ‘typicalities’ not only do not account for variation of the kind I have already described, but they also to not account for cross cultural variation. This is due to, among other things, limited research and the dominant presence of Western science within the sphere of research; studies in psychology often fall into the WEIRD category of research; studies “created under the architecture of Western understanding”, administered to White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic” (“WEIRD”) participants, presented as the ‘norm’ (Choudhury & Farranti 2018: 39). As Henrich et. al (2010), and others have argued, however, this group is “frequently unusual and not representative of large-scale human populations” (Choudhury & Farranti 2018: 39). What is taken as a ‘typicality’ then, should be understood with these limitations in mind.
Thelen and Smith claim that cognitive systems are flexibly arranged—more so in children than adults—such that their components and their organization can change in the moment, and across situations “rather than being governed by rigid stages that are consistently applied across time and situations” (Siegler et al. 2014: 165).
Determining what has happened in an interaction will not always be easy or immediate—i.e. has the child’s self-conception crumbled in that instant, or are they just feeling despair about the unpleasantness of it all? In situations such as these, however, what has transpired will become more evident by the presence or absence of the other dispositional requirements.
See for example, Dillon’s ‘Personal Recognition Self-Respect’ (1992a: 134).
There may be circumstances where a child cannot express their preferences—due to fear, for example. For the child to have self-respect they need only view those preferences as important, and in fact choosing not to express their interests in situations of danger can be an act of self-respect in so far as it expresses value for their interests of avoiding that danger.
Examples of responses with intentional content include indignation, which may be experienced as a feeling of anger, irritation, a racing heart, etc., accompanied by the belief that someone has treated you wrongly. Or arrogance that may be experienced as a feeling of hostility, perhaps displayed with a sneer, and accompanied by a belief of one’s own superiority. Examples of emotional response without intentional content may include a non-specified anxiety, fear, or confusion; emotions that are experienced without a clear object, or a collection of thoughts to latch onto.
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Ryan, N. Self-respect & Childhood. J Ethics 27, 51–76 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09400-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09400-x