Obligations towards Children: Teaching Right from Wrong

In what has accidentally become a week-long series on moral responsibilities towards children in a godless context, I have come to a post about teaching morality to children. What is it to teach children the difference between right and wrong?

There are some who would deny that there is such a thing – that evolution itself has written its moral truths into our brains and there is no ‘teaching’ to be done. I hold that this is a nonsense view that flies in the face of reality – in the simple observation that a lot of people do some very bad things. If morality has been coded into our brains by evolution, then we must either conclude that all of this behavior is moral (because it is how we evolved), or evolution somehow missed the moral mark, and it will take something outside of evolution to find it.

Right and wrong is something to be learned – and if we do not teach the difference between right and wrong, we die – or somebody we cares about dies, or suffers some other horrible fate, in some cases worse than death.

Right and wrong is something that has to be taught. And the best time for learning these things is when one is a child and the brain is still malleable.

So, what goes on in teaching right from wrong?

Once again, M, who has been substantially involved in a discussion with me over the past week, has given me an excellent place to start.

Before I go on, I would like to thank M for his contribution. M has been well-spoken and patient, and avoided many of the pitfalls that too often plague these types of discussions. If we were to teach the right and wrong of discussions on these matters, M would be a role model for virtue.

M wrote, "If you believe that you are not bound by any external obligation, and only your own internal whims, then you are a subjectivist through and through."

The question that popped up in my head called my attention to the phrase, "bound by any external obligation," and ask, “What to heck does that mean?”

Clearly, any claim that moral obligations are binding – regardless of whether they are internal or external – has to be taken as a metaphor. They cannot actually be binding. If they were, then nobody would ever do anything wrong. Doing something wrong means that moral obligations are not binding, in any literal sense of the word. And if moral obligations are not binding, then I don’t have to explain why it is that we are not bound by any external obligation.

If somebody wants to interpret a realist moral position as one that says that no person can perform an evil action – because moral obligations (whatever they are) somehow ‘binds’ us and controls our actions – that person would be creating a straw man.

The idea of being bound by moral obligations is not literal, it is metaphorical. The metaphor compares moral obligations to constraints – to something that ‘binds’ a person the way that rope and duct tape can be used to ‘bind’ a person. It prevents them from doing certain things. In the case of morality, it prevents them from killing, raping, assaulting, robbing, and deceiving others.

Moral obligations are not binding until they are installed. And, trust me, we want them installed. More importantly, we want the correct moral obligations installed on people. Otherwise, they will kill you, rape your children, take your property, burn what’s left, and move on to the next house up the street.

We have no difficulty recognizing the value, in certain circumstances, of physically restraining people. If somebody comes after you with a knife, and you cannot run away, your next best option is to restrain him in some way. There are no shortage of arguments stating that captured and convicted terrorists or rapists are to be confined and constrained in some way to protect those who would otherwise be their future victims.

There is no philosophical difference between this and putting on or installing the psychological constraints of moral obligations.

I hold that all intentional actions (and that is what we are seeking to control through the institution of morality - what we are seeking to limit through our moral bindings, are intentional actions) follow the formula:

(beliefs + desires) -> intentions -> intentional actions

If we are going to constrain people's intentional actions - prevent them from committing rape, terrorism, or theft - we need to work on either their beliefs or their desires or both.

Yesterday, in the post, “Obligations towards Children: Education,” I spoke extensively of the value of true beliefs. Of these two entities – beliefs and desires – beliefs have the capacity of being ‘true’ or ‘false’. Desires do not. A ‘belief that P’ is true if and only if P is true. We act to fulfill our desires given our beliefs, and false beliefs stand in the way of desire fulfillment. A person with the false belief that he can fly is at risk of failing to fulfill his desire to get off of a tall building and make it home in time for dinner.

Desires, on the other hand, have no capacity to be true or false. Desires simply exist. In this, desires are like height, weight, age, hair color, pulse, blood pressure, and any other physical property a person has. There is no sense in which a person with a desire for chocolate ice-cream is ‘right’ and the one who desires vanilla is ‘wrong’. This makes no more sense than saying that the person who is 5’11” is the correct height, and the person who is 5’ 10” has the wrong height.

We have the capacity to bind people so that they will not perform certain types of intentional actions by altering their desires. Give a person a strong aversion to blowing up innocent people and that person becomes less likely to strap on a bomb and head off to the local pizza parlor. The stronger the aversion, the smaller the chance of blowing up innocent civilians becomes. Give him an aversion to taking property that does not belong to him and you can leave your purse under your desk at work without fear the money inside will show up missing.

We can bind people against performing certain types of actions by giving them an aversion to performing those actions, and by increasing the power of the desire to perform alternative actions. A person with a strong desire to help others will be too busy helping others to find time to blow anything up.

Now, let's return to M's original statement. "If you believe that you are not bound by any external obligation . . ."

The bindings of an external obligation become effective once they become internalized. To internalize a set of norms is to acquire a set of desires and aversions consistent with those norms. From that moment on, those desires and aversions will determine one’s actions.

Though the binding of an obligation does not exist until it is worn – until it is internalized; the obligation itself exists even before it is worn. The parent who says to a child, “Don’t do that; it is wrong,” is not saying to the child, “Don’t do that. You have an aversion to doing such things.” In many cases, the child will realize that he did not have an aversion to doing what he did. If he had an aversion, he would not have performed the act.

Instead, the parent is saying, “Don’t do that, you should have an aversion to doing such things. Good people have such an aversion. If you do not acquire it, then you are not a good person.”

Desires are not taught to children, or to anybody, through reason. Desires are taught through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment, and through the development of good habits. There is no set of facts that a person can memorize that will cause him to have an aversion to lying. There is, however, the stern shouting of an angry parent, followed by some form of punishment, that has some historic measure of success at causing children to acquire an aversion to lying.

There is no syllogism that will cause a child to want to help others. At most, he will learn that helping others is sometimes useful. However, helping others for its usefulness is not the same as kindness, and it does nothing to motivate a person to help others in those cases when he realizes, “There is nothing in it for me.”

However, praise at those who are kind, a habit of helping others, and a role-model of kindness all show some promise at molding a child’s desires, so that the child himself becomes somebody who helps others because he likes to help others, and for no other reason.

Lessons such as these explain how children come to be bound by obligations.

Furthermore, people generally have a great many powerful ‘reasons for action that exist’ to motivate parents to put these moral constraints on their children. Of course, we have ‘reasons for action that exist’ to motivate parents to install those moral constraints that promote the fulfillment of other desires, and inhibit the thwarting of other desires.

Some people may talk of other ‘reasons for action’ – such as intrinsic value or God’s wrath. However, those are ‘reasons for action’ that do not exist, so they are not ‘reasons for action’ at all. What some people believe we have reasons for action to have parents install in children is not necessarily the same as what we do in fact have reasons for action that exist to have parents install in children. People – particularly religious people – can be mistaken about the constraints we have ‘reasons for action’ to put on others.

The only ‘reasons for action that exist’ are desires. The only obligations that we have ‘reason for action’ to have parents install in children are those that tend to lead to the fulfillment and avoid the thwarting of other desires. But we certainly do have ‘reasons for action that exist’ to insist in installing those obligations. These are the obligations to be made binding.