Larisa Svirsky, "Responsibility and the Prospect of Punishing Children"
Forthcoming in Pedagogies of Punishment, eds. Winston Thompson and John Tillson, Bloomsbury
Children do all sorts of things for which those close to them think it’s appropriate to hold them responsible – for example, biting their siblings, not picking up their toys, or distracting their classmates. For parents, teachers, and other caregivers, the reasons for holding children responsible are ordinary and not mysterious: holding responsible is an essential part of moral education, and there are many things we can reasonably expect children to do.
Despite the ordinariness of these expectations, philosophers working on responsibility have rarely addressed the question of whether children are responsible. For most responsibility theorists, the paradigm example of a responsible agent is a rational, self-controlled, and otherwise psychologically typical adult, and capacities like rationality and self-control are what make a person responsible. Those who have written on the possibility of holding children responsible either have said we merely pretend to hold children responsible to teach them things, or children are responsible but to a lesser degree. I have argued elsewhere that these approaches miss one crucial feature of our social practices of holding children responsible, namely that our relationships to children are essential to determining whether or not we should hold them responsible. While a parent should hold their child responsible for not biting his sister (e.g., by giving the child a time-out), it seems odd and perhaps morally inappropriate for a stranger to offer a similar intervention.
In order to explain this, I argue that our close relationships are one important source of the norms we expect others to uphold – things for which they are responsible. Parents create norms in their relationships with their children, and then have a special authority to hold their children to those relationship-based norms. And this isn’t unique to parents and children: close relationships in general are sources of norms, and all of us are subject to relationship-based norms. As I understand responsibility, not all norms are relationship-based (i.e., not all norms are created in particular close relationships), but responsibility is fundamentally relational. Responsibility is always responsibility to someone for something.
With this understanding of responsibility in mind, how should we think about the ethics of punishing children? Answering this question requires thinking about what’s distinctive about punishment as opposed to other forms of holding responsible. My view is that punishment essentially aims to communicate to the person in question that they’ve done something wrong. (And you can impose negative consequences or disincentivize behavior without thinking or expressing that it’s wrong. For example, a teacher might suggest to a student who raises their hand immediately in response to every question that they hold back on occasion to encourage other students to speak.) To be clear that a child has done something wrong, you’d have to know that the norms they are being held to are reasonable given how mature they are, and that the people holding them to those norms have the appropriate authority to do so. In interacting with children, it is often uncertain whether one or both of these things are true. This suggests that we should be substantially more cautious about punishing children than holding them responsible more generally.
Children are especially vulnerable, and the plasticity of children’s minds makes the risks of punishment higher, but it may also make children more susceptible to the potential positive moral effects of punishment. The risk involved doesn’t mean that punishing children should always be the last possible resort. Where the stakes are high enough, and the norm violation is clear enough, punishment can be a vital way of steering children in the right direction. Punishment can also communicate to third parties, such as the children’s peers, that this sort of wrongdoing is taken seriously. If, for example, a child is bullying a classmate, it can be valuable for all parties involved to acknowledge this as wrongdoing, an achievement beyond merely disincentivizing the bullying behavior. But, if I have correctly described the uncertainties involved in child punishment, the cases where it’s clear that a child has engaged in wrongdoing, and that a potential punisher has the appropriate authority to punish, will be few and far between.