Ethics in Light of Childhood

by John Wall

Childhood faces humanity with its own deepest and most perplexing questions. An ethics that truly includes the world's childhoods would transcend pre-modern traditional communities and modern rational autonomy with a postmodern aim of growing responsibility. It would understand human relations in a poetic rather than universalistic sense as openly and interdependently creative. As a consequence, it would produce new understandings of moral being, time, and otherness, as well as of religion, rights, narrative, families, obligation, and power.

Ethics in Light of Childhood fundamentally reimagines ethical thought and practice in light of the experiences of the third of humanity who are children. Much like humanism, feminism, womanism, and environmentalism, Wall argues, a new childism is required that transforms moral thinking, relations, and societies in fundamental ways. Wall explores childhood's varied impacts on ethical thinking throughout history, advances the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, and reexamines basic assumptions in contemporary moral theory and practice.

In the process, he does not just apply ethics to childhood but applies childhood to ethics―in order to imagine a more expansive humanity.

Genres: Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 12, 2010

Reviews

[Jesper · Rating 4 out of 5]

"History has often denied full moral thinking capabilities in women, minorities, the poor, the colonized, and most other human groups. Today, however, those most likely to be thought incapable of moral thought are children. What if, however, childhood taught us to think about ethical thinking in a more expansively human way?"

I picked up this book after reading an article about how big moral issues (like slavery in the past) are often invisible until they are pointed out. This got me to think about animal rights, but also about children, who often have very little say or control over their lives and lack many rights that are granted to adults. But on the other hand, children are not yet fully developed and need to be protected, so doesn't the way we treat them make sense? Seeking to sort out this confusion, I stumbled upon "Ethics in the Light of Childhood" by John Wall.

In a nutshell, the book provides the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of Childism, a movement -similar in some ways to Feminism- that advocates in favor of granting more civil rights to children and creating a more child-inclusive society. It claims moreover that there are important ethical lessons that we can learn only by looking at children as full human and moral beings, not merely incomplete adults.

The book starts by looking at historical perspectives on childhood, which it divides into top-down (children need to be controlled and disciplined), bottom-up (children should be given freedom and protection) and developmental (children need proper instruction to develop into full humans). The second part of the book develops the main framework by looking at three big philosophical questions through the lens of childhood: what does it mean to be human, what is the purpose of being human, and what do we owe to each other. In answering these questions, it veers strongly against the commonplace but adult-centric view of morality as requiring autonomy, independence, and rationality, and replaces those with interdependence, vulnerability, and creativity. According to these chapters, our purpose is to create and recreate shared worlds of meaning, to continuously expand our narrative of ourselves outward, and finally to decenter ourselves in response to others we encounter. Finally, in the third part of the book, he applies his framework to the concepts of human rights, family life, and ethical thought itself.

If you hadn't already gathered from the summary above, this is a philosophical book by an academic author and thus not a light read. It is full of complex ideas and terminology being used in very particular (and often unconventional) ways. In fact, at times the language becomes so abstract and convoluted that I had great difficulty to discern any meaning at all from it. Luckily, these very abstract bits are balanced out by very concrete - and often heartbreaking - stories of real children from around the world who in one way or another demonstrate their capacity for moral thinking and making moral claims. Overall, I'm coming away from this book with a definite sense that I gained some important new insights on what it means to be human. It's not a book for everyone, but if you are interested in moral philosophy and big ideas - and are not scared of some difficult and abstract writing - then I recommend giving it a read.

[Sue Lyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. It views moral issues from the perspective of children and argues for Childism as akin to feminism in its capacity to change our relationship to children. John Wall reminds us that children are a third of humanities and the most marginalised and excluded. I love the way he weaves stories from the real lives of children to create his argument. Has had a profound effect on the way I view children and people. He shows how our current understanding is constructed around experiences of adulthood and argues we must add age to gender, class and culture. He presents us with children as equally capable of responding creatively to the world with the capacity for producing new meaning as adults. He calls on us to deconstruct adult-centrism and reconstruct it in the light of childish. Even the youngest child under the most difficult of circumstances interprets their own worlds and relations, however much they are also constructed by them. In the book he undertakes a childist reworking or moral thinking and practices that he calls ethical poetics. Poetic in the sense that it reimagines moral life as based, not on individual autonomy or on the authority of traditions, but on expanding interdependent creativity. He claims that children teach us that selves belong to already constructed social worlds which they are in turn responsible for reconstructing over time in response to each other. It is children who reveal human beings' socially creative dynamism. Children can teach us about moral life to imagine a more expansively shared humanity. His chapters on human rights and the family put the theory into practical terms and has the potential to really shift the lens we use to view the world away from children and adults to human beings. I love it!

[Jana Lone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Original, clear and provocative, this book examines the ways in which the consideration of childhood can transform ethics and ethical thinking. The author suggests that a responsiveness to the experiences of children can illuminate profoundly new ways of thinking about some of the most fundamental questions of the human condition, such as what it means to be a human being.

Wall points out that the capacity for moral thinking has historically been one of the markers to define what it means to leave childhood - adults are considered capable of moral reasoning whereas children are not. He proposes a model of ethical relationships that is based not on conventional ideas of individual rationality, autonomy and agency, but on the interplay between agency and vulnerability (described as an "openness and relationality to the world"). Children teach us, Wall asserts, that agency and vulnerability exist in a fundamental tension, and it is this tension that allows us to engage in the expansion of our moral horizons. The experience of childhood, then, becomes the starting point for our understanding of who we are and what we owe one another.

I highly recommend this marvelous book!

[University of Chicago Magazine]

John Wall, AB’88, AM’91, PhD’99
Author

From our pages (Nov–Dec/10): "Wall, a Rutgers University associate professor of religion and childhood studies, examines ethical thought and practice from the perspective of children. Although often excluded from ethical discussion, children are one-third of the world’s people. The author argues for 'a new childism'—similar to humanism, feminism, and environmentalism—to transform moral thinking and social relations."

[Wesley Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books on childhood ever written. John Wall has discovered an incredible symmetry of logical precision and poetically open-ended dynamism in ethical thought. And, most significantly, he has constructed this symmetry with children and childhood as the moral center of reflection. This is an important read for practitioners working with young people and for philosophical ethicists alike.

[Pat Gordon-smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a glimpse of what our society might be like if we placed our instinctive care for others at the heart of the way we run things. A readable philosophical text (though it is philosophy, so not exactly a page-turner).