Paternalistic Love and Reasons for Caring
What reasons can children have for coming to care about particular things so that they can develop into responsible adults? This question raises issues both about the status of such reasons as “internal” or “external” to the child’s subjective motivationa
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“It’s not fair!” my older daughter screams, as her twin brother and sister come home from a birthday party with party favors. “They have to share some with me!”
This outburst reveals the typical selfishness of a 7-year-old child, a selfishness that she needs to get over if she is to take her place as a normal member of society. But how, more precisely, are we to understand her concern here? Two possible interpretations suggest themselves. The first is to take her outburst at face value: she is concerned with fairness as she says, but her selfishness is indicative of a rather thorough misunderstanding of what fairness consists in. This may sound impossible: how can she have a concern for fairness when she does not even understand what it is? This suggests a second interpretation: what she understands and cares about is not fairness but shmairness (which we might interpret to be something like the equal distribution of goodies when this benefits me), which she mistakenly calls ‘fairness’, so that her concern is not for the same thing as that with which we mature adults are concerned. How are we to decide between these interpretations? As I shall argue, the first interpretation makes intelligible in a way the second does not how both I and my daughter can take some responsibility for her acquiring a concern for genuine fairness, and it does so by revealing the reasons she has for caring about fairness itself to be interpersonal, grounded in our loving relationship. I shall proceed by first, in Sect. 1, criticizing the account of childhood offered by Tamar Schapiro and the debate between Bernard Williams and John McDowell concerning internal and external reasons—both of which seem to presuppose the second interpretation. I shall then in Sect. 2 briefly lay out an account of the nature
B.W. Helm (*) Department of Philosophy, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] 213 M. Kühler and N. Jelinek (eds.), Autonomy and the Self, Philosophical Studies Series 118, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4789-0_10, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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of love before turning in Sect. 3 to think about paternalistic love and what this can tell us about the nature of practical reasons and their potential grounding in interpersonal emotions.
1
The Problem of Childhood
According to Tamar Schapiro (1999, 716–17), a child’s development into an adult is a transformation into what is in some sense a fundamentally different kind of thing than they were before: into full-blooded, moral persons. This requires that the child come to acquire an authoritative will in virtue of which we can recognize her actions as truly her own rather than the result of alien forces within her (cf. Frankfurt 1971), so that we are warranted in bringing the moral concepts of rights and responsibilities to bear in our dealings with her. This raises the question of how children are able to make this transition: how can a creature that starts off lacking an authoritative will ever come to acquire it? To have w
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