The evolution of culture
How anti-rational memes sabotage culture, education and the Enlightenment.
morality
Surely studies show that parents have little impact on how people turn out?
If the ‘research’ alleges that whether you behave morally or immorally, it makes no difference, does that make immoral behaviour unobjectionable?
What is the psychological impact of not taking children seriously?
Whatever might happen in the future, it will still not have been right to behave immorally today.
Surely children are not born knowing right and wrong?
Children are not born knowing right and wrong arises out of the paternalist view of children, which mistakenly holds that children learn moral knowledge through coercion, and that no one would have any interest in improving their moral knowledge unless forced to do so. But actually, coercion impedes and impairs learning, including of moral knowledge, and the vast majority of people including children are trying to do the right thing and trying to improve, including morally, and no one has perfect moral knowledge.
Wants are rightly conditioned by the rights and responsibilities
What a moral person would do, and want, depends, among other things, on what he believes the rights of the various people concerned are. And the consistency of this moral background, helps the parties to interact with each other non-coercively.
Consistent rules set in concrete or children thinking for themselves with parents available to advise
Parents value consistency in themselves but when their children are consistent, the parents call them ‘stubborn’ or ‘strong-willed’.
Why giving children rules and boundaries is a mistake
Children are not born knowing the truth, so we should tell children our best theories, explain why we advocate certain forms of behaviour and not others, and try to persuade them through reason of the truth of our own ideas, but not coerce, manipulate or in any way pressurise them into enacting our theories. For our theories may be false: even becoming a parent does not confer infallibility upon us!
“There are some issues on which I am authoritarian”
Coercion is stressful because it conflicts with most people’s wider ideas about morality, human relationships, and how to run a society, etc. Unless one mentions children or parenting, everyone agrees that consent-based solutions are better that coercion every time. That theory is held on some level by most people. They just suppress it in their parenting.
The Simpsons—the best teacher in the world
A Brit argues that an episode of The Simpsons is a moving classic of American culture.
That something is legal does not make it right or best
An argument that the mere fact that something is legal does not make it right or best. Many different things are perfectly legal; not all of them are good.