http://crookedtimber.org/2004/01/08/youth-voice-and-power/ Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made Fri, 25 May 2012 07:10:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://crookedtimber.org/2004/01/08/youth-voice-and-power/comment-page-1/#comment-12721 Invisible Adjunct Fri, 09 Jan 2004 13:08:46 +0000 http://crookedtimber.org/wp/?p=858#comment-12721 I read the Schapiro paper quickly, so I'm almost certainly missing something. Initial impression: this is a dangerous line of argument. Most adults I know (self included) wouldn't meet the criteria of attributability most of the time, if ever. Moreover, at no point have we "liberated" ourselves from "the governance of instinct." Grant that there is a "species life" dimension to the kind of creatures that we are (which is to say, human animals), children are probably no closer to or farther from that dimension than adults. What makes human infants and children so dependent on others is precisely the fact that they (which is to say we) are not governed by instinct. Unlike, say, turtles, who hatch themselves and go on their way, humans are born without knowing what to do because almost all of what we do has to be learned. What children lack, I think, is not reason (many adults lack reason as defined by Schapiro, and that's not a good enough reason to not treat them as full moral persons), but experience or practical wisdom. Though it's difficult to avoid a development telos in thinking about childhood and children, replacing the developmental model with a notion of childhood as liminal state does not strike me as a very satisfactory position. There is no liminal state between nonhuman animal and full adult. We always are just whatever it is that we are (some sort of thinking, reasoning, feeling animal) at every point, from childhood to old age. In legal and moral terms, the challenge is to treat children as full persons and ends in themselves while acknowledging their relative lack of autonomy. I read the Schapiro paper quickly, so I’m almost certainly missing something. Initial impression: this is a dangerous line of argument. Most adults I know (self included) wouldn’t meet the criteria of attributability most of the time, if ever. Moreover, at no point have we “liberated” ourselves from “the governance of instinct.” Grant that there is a “species life” dimension to the kind of creatures that we are (which is to say, human animals), children are probably no closer to or farther from that dimension than adults. What makes human infants and children so dependent on others is precisely the fact that they (which is to say we) are not governed by instinct. Unlike, say, turtles, who hatch themselves and go on their way, humans are born without knowing what to do because almost all of what we do has to be learned. What children lack, I think, is not reason (many adults lack reason as defined by Schapiro, and that’s not a good enough reason to not treat them as full moral persons), but experience or practical wisdom. Though it’s difficult to avoid a development telos in thinking about childhood and children, replacing the developmental model with a notion of childhood as liminal state does not strike me as a very satisfactory position. There is no liminal state between nonhuman animal and full adult. We always are just whatever it is that we are (some sort of thinking, reasoning, feeling animal) at every point, from childhood to old age. In legal and moral terms, the challenge is to treat children as full persons and ends in themselves while acknowledging their relative lack of autonomy.

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