Posts by Stephen Glaister
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In the Bro'Town arument - the "clip round the ear" remark taken literally isn't consistent with the Borrows amended proposal. Not sure what to say about that. Perhaps just that it feels to me like there are some class issues that haven't been been much addressed in this debate.
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Hope it's OK to post some (long but I hope juicy) notes on Deborah's scolding of me!
We all know that children need teaching: what is at issue here is the method(s) we use to teach them.
Fine, so long as you don't go directly to that point rather than, as it were, via the "under authority" step.
We do ignore assaults all the time. A friend gets into a heated situation at a pub: we grab them by the arm and pull them away. A stranger steps out in front of a bus: we push them back, roughly.
Right, and in these cases [the security guard case is a little different] there is no relation of authority involved so that patient's consent etc. is really central, and (a) it'll normally be fulsomely given with thanks a few seconds later and (b) arguably it was there all along implicitly (perhaps particularly clearly so in the friend case): "You have my back. If I ever get into trouble, just get me outta there, right?" But the basic vision of a sovereign individual over whom you have no authority (not even if you are married to them) is intact.
And let's be quite clear that we have not, for a long time, accepted that the personal nature of a relationship somehow makes violence more acceptable.
OK, but you're already starting to run stuff together, and to risk begging the question. The thing that's been rebuked from history is the idea that some adults, e.g., women, aren't properly the authors of their own lives, and that, instead, rather like large children, they are properly always under some other adult's authority (hence don't vote, don't own or inherit property, don't get custody, may be controlled and disciplined by anyone who has authority over them, and so on). It was a long haul through the 20th Century to get courts to take seriously that wives in no way cede authority over themseves to their husbands and in particular to get various sorts of domestic assaults taken seriously. In sum, domesticity doesn't amount to anyone becoming an authority over anyone else. Violence is one way that someone's illegitmate authority over you can be expressed, but it's only one. If someone won't let you leave the house but otherwise treats you very nicely, they're still imprisoning you, and wronging you. The issue is your ability to be an authority in your own right and to direct your own life as you see fit. Violence is bad according to this analysis not intrinsically, whatever that would mean, but because it conflicts with/massively undermines your capacity to direct your own life.
Chlldren. They aren't authorities in their own right. They have no consent to give. They don't get to direct their own lives, so the absolute sovereignty framework just described does not apply to them. A parent is not endeavoring to respect her child's autonomy (it doesn't exist yet), she's trying to raise it to be autonomous: installing autonomy, growing it. That doesn't mean a parent as the relevant authority figure has carte blanche w.r.t her children, but it does mean that there can be no automatic inference from what's (even in principle) criminal behavior w.r.t. adults to what's criminal behavior w.r.t. one's kids. That there will be massive differences between these two cases is inevitable (childhood as imprisonment, haw haw!), but there will be a hell of a lot of overlap: anything that injures the child for a start.
Remember the 'It's not just a domestic' campaign? It used to be that giving the missus the biff was thought to be just a private matter, deplorable maybe, but nevertheless not something the police needed to worry about, even if the missus had bruises and broken ribs.
I agree that domestic matters including child-rearing (in any reasonably developed society) can't ever be a purely private matter, or in any way beyond the reach of the law. Abusive and injuring parents should of course be prosecuted. That's what "unreasonable force" was supposed to get at in s. 59, and any acceptable precisification of that clause will reproduce at least that level of prohibition/criminalization.
The analysis in the child case is, however, necessarily more complex than in the partner/other adult case and it just does leave open logical room for there to be a category of physical punishment that's non-injuring, non-abusive, non-cruel, non-inhumane, and non-degrading. The analysis itself does not guarantee that there's anything actually in that category, but evidently many parents and long tradition do think that there is something called "smacking" that fits the bill. And they are not be preapred to be talked out of that (which is the status quo after all) by any combination of the shady moves I've tended to complain about on this thread!
We do care about what happens in personal relationships, we do think that physical violence is unacceptable, and we do not think that it is right for one person to impose their will on another by the use of force.
I agree.
But before you say, "Oh, so the police will interfere in every case," remember that the police do not turn up every time a wife pushes a husband, or a husband pushes a wife. The police turn up, and prosecute, when bodies are bruised and broken, and then it is simply not acceptable to claim that you were using reasonable force to correct your partner's behaviour.
Again I agree for all the reasons mentioned above. It's certainly is very depressing to think about the realities of adult relationships. So much for absolute personal sovereignty when in the real world nothing gets done before somebody's injured. Deborah, I'm now completely de-pressed.
As for erring on the side of caution - we do, in general, accept this principle. We have a speed limit of 100kph, even though in some cases, it would be safe to drive faster.
That case doesn't have enough structure to decide whether there's anything especially cautious going on! The main cases I mentioned were cases in which whether some critter has some status is a matter of passionate debate, at least in some circles. (Curiously, big animal-rights supporters tend to be big pro-choice-on-abortion people, and big fetal-rights people tend to the huge carnovores! So almost everyone is pro-choice about either eating meat or about abortion, hence almost all of us endorse at least one on-going holocaust according to at least one impassioned group in society. Yee-haw!)
Abortions are generally limited to the first trimester, because we are just not sure enough about the status of the fetus past about say, 23 weeks (the first trimester ends around 13 or 14 weeks).
Like driving at 100 Kph this doesn't count as being cautious to the true-believers!
We eschew capital punishment, just because it is too easy to get it wrong.
I'm against the death penalty on two practical grounds that are very important in the normal run of criminal justice (i) the problem of (uncorrectable!) error, and (ii) the problem of equitable administration (which was and is the big stumbling block as far as US jurisdictions are concerned - e.g., Maryland recently abandoned it because they had simply horrible black/white stats). But, hey, for example, I'm all for killing Saddam and other dictators (not the way they actually did it tho'!) where error's not an issue and the whole trial is "one-off" and outside the normal run of criminal justice.
True anti-death penalty believers, however (e.g. Helen Clark), think the DP is wrong in principle hence oppose it even for dictators. In Clark's eyes I'm not sufficently cautious, and probably you aren't either.And if a principle of caution operates anywhere in this debate, it operates in favour of overturning section 59, because it would lead us to protect the vulnerable i.e. children.
See earlier remark about abortion. Tthe true believers think that as soon as the zygote starts dividing the genetic fuse has been lit that will burn until that creature with that genetic formula dies, and that any line-drawing after that point is arbitrary. (Curiously, some creationists who couldn't give a crap about DNA and parallel phylogenetic trees in general, love the DNA in this case!)
Claiming that the principle of caution leads us down some slippery slope is a cheap debating trick
I wasn't urging the existence of a slippery slope (google Eugene Volokh's wonderfully complex papers on the topic if you haven't tho'). I was saying that when there's a seemingly intractable debate about moral status, we mostly do and should leave it up to individuals to make the decision about what to do. Knowing that they're the ones who'll have to live with the consequences of doing the wriong thing if it is wrong, we don't cautiously substitute our decision for their own.
That's absolutely the case with smacking. Your child's around in your life until you grow old and die... if there is a price to be paid for smacking them you'll have to pay it. And if you're cold or cruel/cutting or diffident or uninvolved with then, you'll hear about that later too...
it is dead easy to make judgments at either end of a slippery slope, and very difficult in the middle. But that's what we are being asked to do here.
I think that the authority dimension represents a fundamental disjunction so that there's not a single phenomenon or hyper-slope (e.g., of violence-and-imposition-of-will level) we're crawling down in this case.
Just becuase we can analogise to one end or the other of the slippery slope, and make an easy judgement there, doesn't mean that our judgements about the middle are correct. So quit playing around with pseudo philosophical structures, and start telling me exactly why you think we should be able to hit children, without any jargon or labels. What is it about children that makes it acceptable to hit them?
I think I've already answered this in the sense that I've explained why setting things up in this way is a trap. But....I do tend to think that smacking (not "hitting", "beating" etc. ) is a move within the parenting game that very occasionally some parents will want to make. You've tried everything else, you really have, and it's come to some point where the options are just ugly: some real pain is necessary and nothing's risk free. They may hate you forever if the punishment is that they don't get to to camp or whatever it is. Smacking may be the least of it in my view and better that than have the parent access their own cruelty and malevolence.
Example: My own most hated punishment experience as a child was from a teacher (standard 2) who confiscated something of mine - a stencil set birthday present from my sister I'd just brought to school that day on my birthday. For no very good reason, the teacher had another child take the stencils to the incinerator specially to ensure they'd be burned. God I hated that woman. Still do.
I don't think the anti-choicers about smacking are for this sort of malevolent crap, but I in fact fear that this sort of harder to quantify stuff is what's truly damaging and what freaks kids out most, and perhaps may receive a boost if smacking had to end. Call this the "unintended consequences" argument.
Beyond that: the parenting world is indefinitely complex and various. Bloody. Hard. Job. I'm squeamish about pronouncing definitively to anyone about how to do such things. I love your chocolate frogs for example. But I'm suspicious about my love for them. It's kind of clever-clever - the sort of thing a bo(urgeois)bo(hemian) could love maybe. But if I like it, it probably shouldn't be a rule for everyone! Call this the "I'd rather be ruled by the first 1000 names in the Boston phone-book than by the Harvard faculty" argument.
I also, deep down, wonder about about the perspective of small families vs. big families. I have the sense that in very large families there isn't time for anything fancy so that there ends up being a causalization of "clip round the ear" stuff that is in fact harmless and doesn't mean what your average tut-tutting twin-bobo family having-its-first-kid in-their-late-30's thinks it means. I revolt at the thought of imposing "my" own class's values and sensibilities on others who I'm prepared to believe are considerably salt-o'-the-earthier than me. (But I would have found some way to keep some smoking bars too.) Call this the "Bro'town" argument (which either complements the Unintended Consequences argument or subtlely undermines it - I'm not sure which!)
Lose the hi-falutin' tone
Hi-falutin'? Moi?
and start arguing directly, and trying to prove exactly why children should not have the same basic rights as other New Zealand citizens.
That I can't do... _It's_ exactly the wrong way to set things up. We may have isoloted a meta-disagreement that we cannot get around.
Tell you what, if you don't agree with my views, why don't you come around and smack me to set me right and teach me how to behave?
Ouch! You are yourself an authority Deborah. No one can teach you anything you don't want to be taught! Anyway, you have your cheerleaders!
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Hi ya'll: Thanks for all the comments, and my apologies for views I've misatrributed to people. Yikes, before any proper name used insert "If I've understood him/her correctly..."
A couple of people have mentioned that "system installation" is bit grating. I agree, at least to some extent. I use it, however, because it's relatively un-hackneyed, suggestive, and short! It doesn't imply a "blank slate" (very roughly, I agree that you have to already know a lot to acquire a first language or a range of gestures, etc.. Face-tracking, object occlusion, imitation/mirroring propensities: you name it we probably have to have it from the get-go for any interesting post-natal development to occur.) but it does embody the idea that there's some important first stage in a human life - call it development - that is different from later learning stages.
The first language acquistion step which is also the step of acquiring ones body and a wider culture and world is different, so differrent that you're helpless and dependent until that step is completed. I know you can keep learning and developing for the rest of your life, but surely all of that builds on the original set of competencies you acquired in innumerable ways. After that first step you're not a helpless and dependant creature any more and that's why you then get to vote, sign contracts, have your own dependants, feel the full weight of the criminal law, and so on.
I see no prospect of being able to do without a distinction of this kind... and regard all attempts to undermine it as seriously confused. I alluded to this at the beginning of my very first post in this thread here. Anyhow, hope that helps a bit.
In my second post in this thread here I mentioned what strikes me as backsliding by people.... If it's not boring people to tears... I'd like to have another crack at this.
Example: Screaming, protesting figure is lifted up and carried out of the restaurant by an adult
Is an assault taking place? "Assault" is a very broad notion about infringement on people's bodily integrity and personal sovereignty (no physical harm as such as technically required). Here's a standard commentary on this idea:
"Is it right that the criminal law should extend to mere touchings, however trivial? The traditional justification is that there is no other sensible dividing line, and that this at least declares the law’s regard for the physical integrity of citizens."(A. Ashworth, Principles of Criminal Law (4th ed. 2003), at p. 319)
And it's easy to see the sense this makes. Think about yourself on your next date. And a hell of a lot of property law turns on extending this idea of absolute integrity out from one's own body. If someone comes in and snoops around your place while you are out but is very careful not to disturb, break anything etc. then, even though there's no actual harmful effect of their entry on you or your property - you'd have nothing to complain about if they'd only gotten your permission! - as it stands they violate and wrong you, and the law can help you out on that (trespass etc.).
So what's going on in the restaurant case? Well, who knows, but if the screaming, protesting figure is a kid (as it almost will be - I've never actually seen another adult hauled away by someone as in the example!) then the answer is, almost certainly, "parenting as usual, nothing to see here, move along".
Now, you can try to regard this result as a great injustice, and as a child being "targetted for assault" (Ian said something like this - it was so harsh!) in a way that adults aren't. You can, if you like regard childhood as one long technical assault, and also just one long wholesale technical violation of broader child sovereignty.
But that would be strange. The image of children as umbarge-taking, frustrated adults-in-childrens' bodies biding their time before they overthrow the adult despots who rule them does, however, make for good comedy!
Like it or not, as I see it, independently of issues of smacking, what we absolutely have and need is the following transaction: Q. Is there an assault going on? A. No, just parenting as usual.
Regardless of what it looks like the law is saying when it allows for this sort of possibility, it's not saying that there's an assault that we're choosing to ignore, or to excuse, or to allow to take place as the lesser evil... or any such thing. (Let alone that in that case the child has fewer rights than an adult being hauled away.) No, the law's saying what we all in fact say: that there is no assault and more positively that some parent is probably doing a bang up job. Give those people a star. There but for the grace...
Well, the point's a very general one, and it's about authority in general and parental authority in particular. I addressed this at length in my very first post in this thread here.
Now we can start to argue about what good parenting is and what the responsible exercise of parental authority is. And about whether smacking ever has any place in that. Broader norms of anti-cruelty, anti-degradation, and so on can guide that discussion. Questions about how to fit together smacking of kids with non-flogging of prisoners can be pressed. Empirical issues can show up big time. And so on.
The thing you absolutely must not do, however, is backslide and start immediately talking about assaults being rained on kids etc., or their having fewer rights. That was all provisionally answered at the previous stage. It's true that one probably will want to go back after concluding the norms-/rights-guided discussion and codify in the criminal law what the actionable rights-violating parenting looks like. But one musn't do that first, i.e., when one's trying to calculate what's beyond the parental pale.
Or at at least, that's how things seem to hang together to me!
I've introduced a couple of abstract points - personal-ness, system-installation - that at least formally distinguish parental authority from authority over prisoners (and over aged relatives etc.). I have one or two ways to flesh those points but they're not quite ready yet. David, Rob, Deborah, Graeme and others have given me too much to think about damn it! Thanks.
Briefly though on Deborah and Rob's "err on the side of caution" suggestion. I don't like such moves in general: Down that path lies no meat, no pets, no abortions, no same-sex couple adoptions, no GE, and who knows what else. We can't really live like that, can we? (See also the criminalization of all of childhood point above.)
I do think that the sort of winnowing down that Borrows attempts is cautious in spirit, and I'd personally be happy to exhibit further caution by pushing smacking ages down at the top (the way Canada did in 2004). All systems are pretty installed (!) by the time anyone's a teenager, right? The niche of smacking therefore seems to me to be as last ditch parental tool for ages terrible twos- to-11. But maybe that sort of thing's best left for general parental guidlines/advice? An occupational hazard of thinking about this topic is starting to think almost as though one is going to raise other people's kids for them! Since that's absolutely not the case, there's a clear argument for caution going the other way. In any case, the empirical literature looms as a big reading project to get clear(er) about such details wherever they might ultimately go.
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I'm written a lot in this thread so... thanks to everyone for putting up with me!
I hope it's OK if I contribute one more time to state where I think the first half of David's Southerly piece goes wrong.
David thinks that all physical punishment is "cruel, inhuman or degrading" and that some non-physical punishment is too. The people he's supposed to be fairly engaging with, however, think, at least to a first approximation, that some physical punishment isn't "cruel, inhuman or degrading". My sense is, for example, that Burrows's amendment about "transitory and trifling discomfort" etc could pretty easily have tacked onto it (or maybe even be replaced by) the provision "[hence] that isn't either cruel, inhuman, or degrading". (And sometimes courts have taken resonableness alone to imply non-"cruel, inhuman, or degrading")
In this way, David virtually ignores his opponents views - begging the question against them [on which more later] - preferring instead to shoot fish in a barrel several times over, having helped himself right at the beginning to the most favorable possible terms of trade for his own position. [sorry about the mixed metaphors!]
For example, he is able to have great fun at the expense of people who say that they wouldn't feel comfortable smacking but who want to preserve the choice for others to do so. How can, he rightly asks, someone be in favor of other people choosing to dish out the "cruel, inhuman or degrading"? [Bumper stickers that fall afoul of this sort of point are, of course, commonplace: "Opposed to x? Then don't have an x!" But if you are deeply opposed to x, you think x shouldn't happen, not just that you don't like x and wouldn't do x yourself.] There are, of course, perfectly good pro-choice positions to hold in this case as in many others, and it's a symptom - alarm bells should have ringing for people – of how unfairly David has set things up, that only conceptually confused pro-choice-about-smacking positions are left on the table.
Consider also David's concession that if no non-physical forms of punishment are effective in disciplining children then they must be physically punished after all- i.e., endure at least some "cruel, inhuman or degrading" punishment as the lesser of the available evils. That's a kind of tragic vision/predicament. People sometimes preemptively stiffen their backbones like this for, say, what they'd allow theselves to do to terrorists with ticking atom-bombs... Again, it's an alarm-bell-inducing symptom of the unfairness of David's basic way of setting things up that it comes to this about jolly smacking.
Let's now go back to that first fateful step - in a way it's the whole ball-game: How does David know (by what right does he assert) that all physical punishment is "cruel, inhuman or degrading" (CIoD)? Here's all that he says:Proponents of this argument would point out that we don't permit physical punishment of criminals. Our society has decided that it would be "cruel, inhuman or degrading" to beat or hit them. So why do we allow physical punishment of children? Sue Bradford obviously falls into this school of thought. She thinks that what is "cruel, inhuman or degrading" for an adult is also "cruel, inhuman or degrading" for a child.
In earlier notes (esp. here) I drew attention to 2 especially salient differences between the cases: in the child case it's personal and it's system-installing, and in the prisoner case it's neither of those. I won't repeat those points here but it's important to note that David doesn't even attempt to address them (or anything like them). David also leaves himself no room to consider the deeper challenge such considerations pose: what I call their "anti-reductiveness". These are the crucial points. Everything else is just shadow-boxing and misdirection to the extent they're not dealt with. So much more to say, but will stop! [Note though the comedy that results from insisting contrary-to-my-own-view that prisoners and kids must get the same under-authority treatment. No smacking then but it's leg-irons and cuffs every time we're at the mall, and everyone gets locked in their rooms at night! Kerazy.]
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Colin said:
Hmm, as I've pointed out before, it becomes interesting when you apply the justification for smacking children (diminished understanding of the consequences of their actions, have limited insight and are not responsive to other means of persuasion including verbal), to smacking elderly people.
When care givers are caught doing this, no-one has a problem with the law coming down on them. Why the distinction?When the care-givers aren't relatives it's impersonal. And in all cases it's not system-installing. (See earlier notes)
David said:
In my household we actually did have reward pills -- we called them sweets! And, no, I don't think that this approach to parenting stinks or makes me squeamish. I understand Deborah is in favour of reward pills made of chocolate and shaped like frogs.
So I don't think the physical reward vs. physical punishment cases are parallel.
They're parallel alright. Enter spoonfuls of cod-liver oil and being sent to bed without supper! And it remains true that (a) arbitarily arcane technologies of impersonal rewarding/pleasure (e.g., pleasure-prods) like those of impersonal punishment/pain children rightly give us the creeps, and (b) If you never or rarely hug your children, and say instead "No, that's the sweets' job" or "No, we stick to the pleasure-prod" or "We leave leave that to Hugging Services" it's clear that your parental agency is seriously diminished and we are and you should be squeamish about what you are doing.
There are, however, some important differences. Rewards and punishments have different false positive costs/characteristics (over-rewarding is almost cost-less/a non-event, whereas over-punishing carries a high price/causes anguish). Hence we can be flippant about rewards in a way we can't be with punishments. And reward mechanisms themselves can, to some extent float free from any context at all for that reason.... (That creates a slight technical problem and inconvenience for my overall anti-reductive analysis...oh well.)
Final point: The "chocolate frog" technique is a classic case of emulating loss within an overall gain framework by getting someone/the child to reset its reference/status quo point so that it thinks of itself as already having all the froggies! It gets all the pain of loss within a reward/gain setting. We'd feel very differently about the case if Deborah were throwing the child's (prior) favorite toys out the window one by one as the trip progressed - so that it was real loss/pain being inflicted.
It's a good bet that most parents won't be able to stay exclusively in emulated loss la-la-land (a la Deborah) or strict bribes-ville (a la David)... Rather, real loss/pain will have to be inflicted at some point. But then whether it's worse in every case to smack rather than to dream up some elaborate exclusion/ostracization/property destruction/psycho-torture ritual (from "Kid A doesn't get to go to the movie with everyone else" to god knows what) isn't obvious to me at all.
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Peter: Run your cases with hugs/pleasure.... and the same squeamishness emerges. Hugging Services, Pleasure/reward pills/machines/hypnosis... you name it, it all stinks.... except the case in which you, the family member gives the hug. The specific agency matters to us. In some deep metaphysical sense we do all think that it's important that you, the parent are right in there in a very unmediated fashion or else it doesn't count. Your sort of view which focuses just on the quasi-bodily consequences for the child, just can't get the facts right in my view. You have to say that we must embrace arbitarily arcane technologies of impersonal rewarding/pleasuring our children, or that we have to give up personal/parental hugs. But that's nuts. And so it is in the pain case too I believe.
I do think our standards about these things could shift over time precisely because part of us is amenable to focusing on consequences very narrowly conceived. But then, again, it seems clear which way we would and should go: we'd have fast affection and fast discipline with pleasure- and pain- prods/hypnotism... much the way we have fast food etc.. Doubtless a generation raised after our standards evolved would mock our earlier squeamishness: "Jeez, a hug is a hug is an amygdyla core dump. What's your problem? Nobody touches anyone anymore. Lawsuit?"
I have no interest in seeing such standards evolve and I think drawing the line at various sorts of agency is very natural for human beings constituted roughly the way we are (e.g., with the mammalian default that we get to rear our own kids still in place. Shift that and all bets are off in my view.) I don't think it's illogical ingrained bias that leads us to reject the prod-/hypno- alternatives although I do believe that we could come to see things that way.
A final remark. I sense that lurking behind your comments is something like the following thought: that children have a right not to have even modest amounts of pain intentionally inflicted on them by anyone.
If you accept this thought then it can seem irresistible that parents not only shouldn't smack to correct/punish their children, but that in fact their intentionally inflicting pain is worse than if anyone else did it. Their violation of their child's rights is also a betrayal in a way that no one else's violations could be.Well, I hope you agree that that last bit is an odd consequence. I think it's an important clue about the original wrong step here: rights-discourse is so fundamentally objectivizing - it's about impartiality and justice - that it complete distorts the logical and moral structure of the parental-child relation, which is essentially partial and personal.
In general, then, I'm very wary of talk about child's rights in any strong piecemeal way. Does every child have a right to be raised by both a mum and a dad (preferably their bio. mum and dad)? I think that right makes at least as much sense as any alleged no-pain right. In the final analysis, however, none of this piecemeal enumeration of rights seems especially helpful in thinking about children's situations vis-a-vis their parents. Rather, to the extent that rights-discourse has a place at all in this setting it seems best left at a very general level: rights to be taken care of and to be well brought up perhaps. But this in turn is pretty awkward and artificial and certainly unconstraining.It's hard to avoid the conclusion that rights-discourse is simply the wrong moral key in which to give voice to parenting. "We want parents to be good parents to their kids (strict, but not too strict, and so on)." is much more natural. That's a way of talking that foregrounds the overall shape of a child's life, and in which, dare I say it, there's leeway left for lone parents, for parents who occasionally smack for the greater good of the child, and for much other divergence over details. Whew!
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Peter, David: You misdescribe your own views. You don't say just "here are two pain-equivalent actions, how interesting that we have slightly different initial responses to them." You further go on to insist that (i) it's the disgusted reaction that provides all the clues about what we should say about the whole class of actions and (ii) also to urge a particular theory of the divergence: that it's all culture/what you're used to. Neither of those subsequent steps follows.
If you drop (i) andf (ii) then we have no disagreement. But I don't think you're willing to do that.
Here's a less inflammatory example that you could have used that wouldn't have tempted you to make the errors you do and from which you could have learned something:
Example 1: Spanking Services
(All of the advantages of prods without the distractions of the technology!) Private companies with trained spanking specialists on call 24 hours a day will come to your house and do the deed for you in your hour of need.So, the thought experiment goes: ex hypothesi, the spanking services provided are pain-equivalent to spanking parents (like the prod, perhaps even better calibrated than parents are in the wild). How interesting that we don't do this? How interesting that no one has seen this gap in the marketplace?
Example 2: State Spanking Services
Spanking services aren't just for the rich, etc..Are you incoherent (or caught in a "contradiction") if you think home-spanking but not spanking-services is OK, or vice versa? Not necessarily. The cases are importantly different and they can help us see what's really important and distinctive about parental authority.
Spanking Services violates key dimensions of the personal-ness of parental authority (see earlier notes) and of the parent-child relationship more generally. Hugging Services would too. Your child needs a hug from you (or possibly grandma etc.)... no outside professional can do the job. No reduction of hugs to simple pleasure-equivalents is possible, and the thought that it is is a radical mistake. An even more radical mistake would be the suggestion that a preference for hugs from parents over hugs from trained outside professionals is just a matter of bare cultural norms about the proper source of pleasure/comfort units. What's true of pleasure/comfort is true of pain/displeasure/discomfort. But I leave details as an exrercise to the reader.
One can easily think of many problems with the Service model than this but this core metaphysical difference and shows why *any* example that turns on pumping intuitions about pain- or pleasure-units etc. conceived in abstraction from the sort of agency involved will mislead.
The prod case is an interesting one for all sorts of reasons. First it inherits all of Spanking Services problems, i.e., encoded in the artifact used. Second, it introduces new problems that are the ideological can then exploit (and use to confuse themselves as I believe you both have). Prior history in animal husbandry is an important factor in our response I think (thouugh you've tried to deny it!), but so ultimately are very general worries about technology: the device in a sense keeps very vivid to us its more extreme possibilities. Sure, this particular tool has been down-rated to be safe but it's the sort of thing that could easily be up-rated. In general, the logic of machines is that your personal effort is limited to pushing a button or whatever: what happens next could be x units or x^10 units and it's all the same to you. (Spanking Services overcomes/avoids this problem which is why it's a useful case to consider first.) That disconnect is inherently frightening and discombobulating when we're discussing a situation which has to be very personal and connected/intimate to be what it is. (There are also more general phobias that the prod plays into about technology intruding into intimate aspects of life, cf., historical disquiet about contraceptives, sextoys, internet dating sites, and on and on....)
OK - Hope that isn't too opaque or patronizing or poorly edited. From my perspective, you guys are making major mistakes faster than I can expose/diagnose them (at least given my self-imposed, once per day PA post rule).
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David Haywood: I didn't take a pro-prod position in my note any more than I took a pro-tissue position.... I do think that the advantages of the prod are the same as the advantages of the tissue (or of, say, IVF). I'm sorry, but your original piece is deeply question-begging: it only consitutes a reductio (or even a "putting in perspective") for those who already think the way you do. One could easily write a parallel piece challenging the non-disgust NZ-ers feel about abortion by construction of an apppropriately Swiftian use of the aborted fetuses - followed by the claims that
(a) the normal abortion case (about which we're nonchalant) and the Swifty variant (that disgusts us) are moral equivalents, and
(b) it's just that we're used to abortions that explains why we're nonchalant in that case[This was in my original email to David last year.]
But, of course you'll never do that. And you shouldn't: such an exercise is only a reductio for people who aren't pro-choice and you'd see clearly how irritating the genetic fallacy is that maintains that someone's commitment to liberty or choice or whatever it is in the case is merely a matter of how they were brought up and so on. The trade-me link would, I assume, be rather more egregious in that case. (Or do the same thing with a "butcher-an animal-with-animal-included!" set special offer.)
David, you make some good jokes, but your reasoning here is most unfair, and unbecoming of any scientist I would have thought. (I'd expect you never to use the sort of Web-Assisted Confirmation-BIas-GenerAtorS, or WACBIGAS as we call them in my household, that Slack so likes, for the same reason.) Please do feel free to run the comparable trade-me link in China for a re-usable, portable, soiled toilet-paper-like product. Reflect on what, if anything, a mildly queasy reaction to that would prove. Ditto for ads for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis with certain groups. And so on.
Colin: This is a complex issue. Much of the jabber about anti-/smacking gains whatever power it has from affiliating itself with very general points urging symmetrical treatment of adults/chiildren. I've tried to address some of those very general points, thereby, I believe, draining the jabber of much of its power. But that only works if everyone plays fair. Your remark about my still missing the point does not.
There is a point that's left over after all general questions are dismissed... but it is a mistake/equivocation to say that it's the same question that was there all along. What consititutes responsible exercise of parental authority?/What is it to bring up children well? I.e., given all of the distinctive features of the situation that makes it strictly incomparable to everything else.
I'm basically pro-choice about ordinary smacking (and would require a positive mountain of good evidence to be talked out of that). Not pro-smacking: I'm pro-choice about abortion not pro-abortion too - the coercive framing (being described as "pro-smacking" is bad enough but one regularly has to deal with being said to be "pro-beating" or whatever it is) that's gone on in this debate, on top of comprehensive muddling of topics (and if you un-muddle them you get decried as point-missing - amazing! -and it's the person who wants to change the status quo who somehow shifts the burden of proof to those who would continue it or make a smaller change to it - incredible!) is as boringly predictable on one level as it is on another level utterly astounding and depressing.
That's probably me done on this wretched issue. Nice chatting with y'all (but please try to think this through a little more, and try not to load the dice all the time...).
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Here's part of an email I sent Haywood when his slick but unconvincing "prod" piece first appeared [don't bother reading any further unless you've read Haywood's original] :
Hi, I enjoyed your piece. It was largely question-begging I believe but that's OK if the aim is just to loosen mental gears rather than establish anything.
Anyhow, I was struck by the following comparison that you didn't make:
prods are to smacking as tissues are to handkerchiefs
(they're both the expensive modern high-tech solutions to old problems)
Yet evidently you feel and think we should all feel differently about the two cases.
It isn't obvious to me what the difference is supposed to be. In the abstract tissues/disposable diapers/plastic supermarket bags etc. can sound pretty bad - they fill up landfills, waste trees, waste oil etc. - and they're on the Greens' shit-list for these sorts of reasons.
Prods sound bad in the abstract too - an abstract that is dominated by their current use with livestock etc.. But it's far from obvious that properly calibrated child-prods wouldn't be great for exactly the reasons you mention (and they of course wouldn't be torturing if they were properly calibrated). Perhaps it's simply our unfamiliarity with them that breeds our contempt. IVF and other reproductive technologies have often struck people/societies as bizarre/barbaric/brave new world-y etc. before they become commonplace - and in fact I wouldn't mind betting that there's a great example from history somewhere of people rejecting sperm banks as appropriate only for animals and as abusive in a human context.
More generally, evidently you suppose that NZ-ers current feelings of non-disgust are more simply matters of habit and thus easily revised/properly correctable than NZ-ers current feelings of disgust.
That's a very contentious supposition to say the least.
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If you wanted to get all sue-bradford-y about it you could describe my child as my prisoner: his location in physical space is mine to decide ...
Uh-huh. Just like, say, a criminal in prison, whose freedom of movement is determined by authority. But authority can have absolute power over the convict and still, in our country anyway, can't hit him for purposes of correction. You haven't really answered the question.I say that that's a sue-bradford-y way to put things to flag the absurdity that results from trying to press intra-adult categories down into a setting governed by relations of authority. That is, I don't think it makes sense to think about parents as imprisoning and kidnapping their children every day of their young lives.
I deliberately refrained from discussing smacking per se to separate out the very general point about conceptually quite different settings underwriting quite distinct treatments of adults and children. That's supposed to slow down the attempt to translate and analogize across that boundary, and alert us to the fact that similarities between cases in these different settings can deeply mislead. If you don't get that point right then nothing one goes on to say about any particular case or alleged point of similarity will be correct, and most of it will be question-begging. I'll post separately about Haywood's "prod" piece as an example of this point - it's substantially question-begging. And I invite readers to note how often people in the discussion thread back-slide and say something like "Yes, but people used to think it was OK to hit their wives..." Oy vey.
At any rate, Brown has now reformulated the alleged "moral" argument/query from
Is there a good reason to allow an act against a child (over whom one has authority), that we would not allow against an adult ?
to
Is there a good reason to allow an act against a child (over whom one has authority), that we would not allow against an adult (over whom one has authority)?
There are at least 2 reasons:
1. It's Personal.__Parents love their children (that's the default assumption that guides letting people raise their own children rather than, say, requiring everybody to re-apply for the job of raising their child shortly after birth). It's therefore a personal authority not an impersonal one. The personal-ness changes everything. Parents are in it for the long haul. They in fact have every incentive not to brutalize their children. They want their chidren to love them back, eventually look after them as they age etc.. In the impersonal case there's none of that structure and constraint and scale, hence in principle one might want to regulate much more closely what impersonal authorities may do, etc..
2. __It's system-installing. Children aren't yet the acculturated and rational agents they'll become. Parents are constantly manipulating their children, rather than addressing their reason or proto-reason (they do some of the latter too of course, but it's never the whole story or even the majority of the story). That's the very difficult job they have to do: produce a critter that by (or ideally well before) its majority has the full blown rational and emotional interface to the wider society so that it can be autonomous. Parents have to install the system the rest of us just get to run (they can push your buttons forever precisely because they installed the system!). System installation just does have a different set of tools. Whatever is going on in cases of authority over adults is much more attenuated than in the child case. It's non- or much-less- system-installing. It's like second language learning/teaching perhaps rather than the first-langauge learning/teaching that's literally and metaphorically going on in the child case.I leave drawing out the consequences of these points for treatment of prisoners, seriously-in-decline elders, seriously handicapped relatives, and so on, as exercises for the reader.
A sensible debate about smacking etc. can only occur as a question about the proper exercise of parental authority once one has abandoned Sue Bradford's (and Brown's) howler of thinking that there's an in principle problem with asymmetrical treatment of adults and children.
Should raising children, which is an utterly sui generis social construct, be allowed to contain x, y, or z?
is the fair form of the question that is before us. But you'd never know it.