“[H]ow do… parents come by the goodness which they allegedly impart to children by brute force?”
– Tim Starr
From the archives: Posted on 26th November, 1994
[This old post is for historical interest only.]
I had written:
“The argument that ‘I, as the parent, have to pay for their mistakes’ is easily solved: don’t pay for their mistakes if you don’t want to. If you don’t want to pay their dental bills if they neglect their teeth, then make that clear to them ahead of time and stick to your position. Let them pay (or not) for their own dentistry.
If they don’t have any income, then they’ll have to take that into account in deciding whether or not they prefer not brushing their teeth and having to get a job to pay for possible dentistry in the future or not. If you tell them: ‘Do it, but if you don’t I’ll pay for your dental work anyways,’ then they’ve got less incentive to prevent the dentistry in the first place.”
Someone replied:
“Maybe this is a valid tack to take with a 16 year old—but not with a six year old.”
I don’t see how the age of the child changes anything. I think what you’re trying to say is that if your child is old enough to have been sufficiently indoctrinated into the absolute goodness of what you’re trying to get the child to do, then your preferred outcome is more likely. But what I question is why all you care about is whether the child brushes his or her teeth, without caring about whether the child does this because the child thinks it’s in his or her own best interest based upon their own independent judgement or whether they do it because their parent said so.
“In general, I think that the need for and/or justifiability of coercion is inversely correlated with the child’s abilities: An infant may be learning at a furious rate, but still knows very little, and can’t even control her limbs.”
Their muscular abilities aren’t very great, either; does that mean that adults should do all their lifting for them? If they’re weak, then how are they to gain strength if they aren’t allowed to exercise what little strength they have? Same goes for making decisions: if they aren’t much good at it yet, then how are they going to get any better at it if they aren’t allowed to make their own decisions the best they can?
“Infants have to be coerced into wearing diapers and clothes, even though they’d probably prefer to avoid the latter. Young children may have to be coerced into teeth brushing and bathing, as the idea of tooth decay and skin rashes may be awfully appealing.”
If children are naturally attracted to the bad, then how is this overcome? How does anyone become good? This is just a version of the doctrine of Original Sin, that people are inherently evil by nature and that all goodness is the result of overcoming our own human nature under the influence of some external authority. But since we’re speaking of parents, who are just as human as children, then how do those parents come by the goodness which they allegedly impart to children by brute force? Where does their goodness come from?
See also:
Tim Starr, 1994, ‘The Original Sin argument’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-original-sin-argument