The Intrinsic Goods of Childhood
I’m interested in children’s rights but also more generally in the
relationship between rights and value. Many, or most, children’s
rights are justified in terms of the adult persons that the children
may become and the goods those adults lives may contain. Perhaps the
most famous paper on children’s rights, "A Child’s Right to an Open
Future," makes this explicitly clear. Our focus on children is largely
future directed. For the most part, I think this makes sense. But I
also think there is a danger in focusing too much on the future and
neglecting the goods of childhood. This is especially true if some of
the goods of childhood are valuable in their own right, and even more
so if some of those goods are incommensurable with the goods of adult
life. (The moral philosopher Michael Slote makes this point but doesn’t develop it much
further.) Suppose, for example, there is no amount of good in the
future that could outweigh a childhood of suffering and misery. Let me
give two examples to illustrate this point. Both are areas in applied
ethics where this point makes a difference.
First, the literature
on a child’s right to good sex education is entirely adult-directed.
Sex education for children is justified entirely in terms of producing
mature and competent adult sexual decision makers. There is little or
no recognition of the positive role sex plays in the lives of
teenagers. We focus on protecting children from adults and on the adult
choosers they’ll become but largely ignore the positive aspects of teen
sexuality. The dangers here should be obvious. The most important
strategic consideration is having one’s educational materials dismissed
as largely irrelevant. We also fail children if we cannot provide them
with the information they need. For philosophers, we also get it wrong
if we neglect those aspects of the good life that occur before adult
life begins.
Second, the literature on children and sport likewise
focuses on adults. And this cuts both ways. Sometimes an appeal to a
balanced childhood is justified in terms of maximizing choices for
adult life. This is a common argument against children’s involvement in
one sport in a serious way. At other times the appeal to the adult
athlete the child could become were her potentially fully developed is
used to argue for children’s participation is seriously demanding
sports. Both arguments have in common that they ignore the goods that
occur within childhood.
Other examples?
