“The idea that children need to be coerced to make consent-based decision-making possible is incoherent.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
From the archives: The original post was posted on 10th June, 2000
Demosthenes had written:
“The point is that morality—the theory and practice of how conflicting demands should be reconciled—is the air traffic control system of human relationships. And it is not possible for two rival air traffic control systems to share the same air space. At least, not without a lot of casualties.”
“It follows that the evolution of a shared value system (at least as regards interpersonal relationships) should be the paramount goal of every family.”
“Without a progressive convergence of ultimate values, any talk of noncoercion is just wishful thinking. People who have fundamentally divergent ends in life cannot coexist noncoercively—at least not within a single family, or a single friendship.”
David Deutsch replied:
“I think that this is very false. It’s none other than what Popper calls The Myth of the Framework in all its horror. It is true that there exist pairs of divergent aims that cannot coexist noncoercively in the same family. But that is an unusual case, and occurs only when at least one of the aims is profoundly wrong. The normal case is that it is not the content of people’s aims that causes trouble, but the irrationality with which they are held. The idea that the child in the example of this thread had aims that are incompatible with treating him noncoercively is a bad mistake, I think. If (which I do not necessarily accept in this case, though I accept it could happen and does happen) there was no way of treating him noncoercively, it was because his means of achieving his aims were flawed. My guess above, that his parents had concealed their moral theories from him, is one possible way this could have happened. But he still wants to do right; he does not need to be intimidated or conditioned or mindlessly ‘inculcated’ with this want.”
Yes, and in the context of Taking Children Seriously families striving for consent-based interactions, Demosthenes is in effect suggesting that we might as well all forget the whole thing, because it is all obviously totally impossible. In Demosthenes’ scheme of things it is impossible, because he is saying that we can’t start from where we are, with all our myriad hang-ups and other imperfections, but only from somewhere else that, he asserts, is impossible to get to without coercion.
But in fact we can only start from where we are, and try to improve and solve problems from there. There is no way of creating the knowledge Demosthenes suggests we must share in order for Taking Children Seriously to be remotely possible, except through reason, reason in each individual’s own mind and reason in the interactions between the parties.
It is not, as Demosthenes would have us believe, differences in values per se that make consent impossible, it is the way in which those values are held, namely, whether they are entrenched or not.
How do values become entrenched? Are people born with entrenched values? No! They are entrenched by coercion.
And yet Demosthenes is advocating coercion to inculcate the values the parent believes right.
What if the parent is wrong?! What if we inculcate the wrong values?
It seems the height of arrogance to think that we are not going to be making any mistakes in this value-inculcation. And then we shall have done something positively evil ourselves in the name of making consent-based decision-making possible. We shall have made it impossible for the child to replace the false theories we have entrenched. If we do what Demosthenes is suggesting, we shall be systematically sabotaging the growth of knowledge—improvement in ideas—in the sphere of moral theories.
And what about the effect of this coercion upon the evolving relationship between parent and child? Will it help? Will it make the child think that the parent believes in the idea of consent? Will it help the child to want to seek consent? Of course not! It will only do the opposite. It will send the child the clear message that he is absolutely not trusted, and will destroy his reasons for trusting the parent. It will send him the message that when you think you know best, you put the boot in, to ensure that your will prevails, just like your parent is doing to you. And perhaps it will also teach him to justify this in the name of inculcating consent-based decision-making values!
The truth is, Taking Children Seriously is difficult. For those of us raised by people bent on inculcating their values in us, we have an uphill struggle against our psychological compulsions to do the very same thing to our children. We have a lot to overcome. There are bound to be many failures. This is going to take more than one generation. We are making a little progress (or a lot, depending on your expectations!)—we are doing better than our parents did. We hope that our children will do better than we are doing. The more we can think about the ideas, strive to improve, strive for consent, the better. People do make progress!
If we take the view that unless we are a lot closer to perfection than we in fact are, we might as well not bother, how is that going to help? It isn’t. That sort of thinking leads only to stagnation. It is guaranteed to prevent progress. We have no option but to start from where we are and to try to improve from here. We cannot turn our backs on consent-based decision-making, because that would be to act against our own deeply-held values.
So while I welcome any suggestions for how to make it more likely that we shall be able to interact creatively and consensually, including the idea that it is vital to express our best theories (including moral theories, as I have always said), I do not think it helpful to be told to forget the whole endeavour.
Indeed, it is rather puzzling that Demosthenes claims to agree that consent is the way to solve problems, while simultaneously advocating coercion in the name of making consent possible down the line, as it were. Is consent the way to solve interpersonal problems or isn’t it?
See also:
- Why not argue for Taking Children Seriously in terms of rights?
- What Taking Children Seriously taught me about resolving conflicts
- Trying to turn philosophy into science is a mistake
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 2000, ‘Inculcating consent?’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/inculcating-consent