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May 21, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:40
1665 The Origins of Ethics in Childhood

Some explorations of the idea of the source and origins of ethics in childhood.

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Hi, it's Steph.
This is a mere speculation cast.
I'll sort of say this right up front.
I sort of try to be clear when I'm merely speculating as opposed to establishing something more permanent, but this is a definite speculation cast.
This is just following certain thoughts and seeing where they lead.
This is certainly not conclusive, but I do think that it's very, very interesting.
And the question that I've been mulling over for the past few days that I'd like to talk about is, to what degree are children morally responsible?
And I've said in the past, and this is not an official withdrawing of the position, but it's a re-examination of the question.
I've said in the past, this is before I had kids, that children are not morally responsible.
And I think sort of legally and so on, this could well be the case still, but I'm just sort of mulling and chewing over the possible objections to my position.
So... What are some potential objections?
Well, like all thoughts, it starts with an innocuous thing.
And I'll tell you what it was, and then I'll tell you why I ended up thinking what I'm thinking now.
So a couple of days ago, I was playing with Izzy in our entirely, almost completely bare living room, dining room.
And I haven't done this with her in a while, and I think there's a little video of me doing this somewhere on the boards or on the internet, where I'm carrying her and I'm flipping a ball up by curling my toe underneath and flipping up my leg.
And I'm sort of flipping the ball up, and then it bounces off the wall, and she giggles and so on.
Now, she's getting fairly good at kicking balls now.
She's 16 and a half months.
And I was doing...
I haven't done this in a long time, but I curled my two under, and I flipped the ball up, and she laughed.
And then, rather than just asking me to do it again, she wanted to do it herself.
And so I rolled the ball towards her, and...
Of course she couldn't, right?
I mean, there's so many reasons why she can't do it.
She doesn't have the dexterity to place her toe right under the ball.
I don't think she has that explosive strength to kick the ball up, and she doesn't have the balance.
Even if she did, she'd just fall over.
So there's lots and lots of reasons as to why she couldn't do it.
And I've never felt this before, and it took a long time to figure out why I felt it at this moment.
But I felt a kind of real sadness.
And a real...
Contempt is too strong a word.
But a real sense of superiority and, you know, recognizing that she's probably at least two years away from being able to do this and her attempts were so, quote, clumsy.
I mean, she's not a clumsy kid.
She's really dexterous and she's been mastering things fantastically.
So, this is not at all empirical to the situation.
Not at all empirical to the situation.
And certainly not at all...
Empirical to my mad enthusiasm for the things that she's able to master.
But seeing how far away she was from this and seeing...
It wasn't really contemporary.
It looked so pathetic. I felt a sense of it was pathetic that she was so far from being able to do it.
Now, I fully get that that's insane.
I mean, that is absolutely mental.
That feeling that it's pathetic that she can't do this very advanced thing when she's already mastered so many things for her age that...
I just... I'm thrilled and excited and she's going up and down stairs and she's running and she's just doing fantastically.
She can throw two balls in her hand and so on, right?
So I'm perfectly thrilled with how she's doing and I'm incredibly impressed with what she's doing.
And so this, this made no sense.
This feeling, it made no sense at all.
Empirically, like in the context of the situation.
So I was mulling it over, I was mulling it over, I was mulling it over.
And I thought, well... Since it's such a deep and old feeling, it has to be, I apply the principles, try to live by the principles that I suggest, so I started looking at my past and so on, right?
And I thought, well, was there anyone who made fun of my inabilities or my lack of abilities when I was, inevitable and natural lack of abilities when I was a baby and I was a toddler?
Well, I can tell you it wasn't my mom, because my mom is not cruel that way at all.
I mean, she's not sadistic.
And it wasn't my dad, because he wasn't around.
I do remember my brother making fun of my inabilities, right?
Because he's two and a half years old or so.
I mean, that's a huge gap, of course, when you're young.
Two to four and a half, one to three and a half.
It's a huge gap. And it let me down a real Matrix-style rabbit hole of thought.
And the thought was, I mean, obviously the degree to which, let's say, it doesn't matter, my brother in particular, but let's just say an elder sibling.
The degree to which an elder sibling feels...
Contempt and superiority for his abilities relative to a younger sibling's abilities, I think, is really important.
And I mulled that over a lot, and I've talked about some of this in the sibling podcast, but this is a little bit more subtle than just outright abuse, of course, right?
But to feel superior as a result of birth order is a pretty pathetic thing, of course, right?
I mean, you just happen to be born sooner, and you can run before you...
So you feel, perhaps... If you're an older sibling and you don't have good role models and blah, blah, blah, then you're going to grab for whatever self-esteem you can, if you're sort of ground down or whatever.
And one way that you can grab a hold of some self-esteem is to feel superior to your younger siblings, right?
To feel like you're stronger and better and faster, which of course you are, but...
Of course, it's nothing earned. It is just an accident of birth.
And so, it's a pretty pathetic thing to hang your hat on.
But I think it's fairly common.
I think it's fairly common. And the problem that results in that, for me, is when...
I mean, it's a gruesome example of the fallacy of sunk costs.
So... If you're an elder sibling and you have put a lot of your energy and self-esteem, so to speak, into being superior to your younger sibling Then you're heavily invested into your younger sibling being inferior.
I mean, your sense of self, of efficacy, of mastery, of competence is not entirely, but it's to a large degree dependent upon remaining superior to your younger sibling.
And I think this is one of the things that happens with siblings that's so common and so tragic, which is that the elder sibling simply won't give up the position of authority and of dominance and always has to perceive himself or herself as As superior to the younger sibling.
That certainly was the case with my relationship with my brother.
I simply...
I mean, it's like outgrowing a straitjacket, getting out of these incredibly limiting relationships.
If you have a relationship in your life, as I did with a number of people who were heavily committed to my incompetence, who were heavily committed to my inferiority, whose sense of self was dependent upon me...
Remaining smaller or weaker or dumber or whatever.
I... I mean, and it was completely heartbreaking, this process.
But I recognized, with incredibly more sorrow than anger, I recognized that I just couldn't Do anything of substance in my life were these people around because they were just so committed to me being unwise or less competent or too impulsive or unthinking or careless or whatever it was,
however it was that they had defined themselves as superior to me, which was not empirical and was entirely historical going back to a time long gone where, you know, differences in abilities were important.
From a functional standpoint, but unimportant from a superiority standpoint, and relative to a superiority standpoint.
But there were those in my life who had defined themselves, and defined themselves not just in an inconsequential or minor manner, but defined their identities in a large part as superior to me.
And it was simply not possible for me to achieve anything great or even good or powerful or anything like that with those people in my life.
Because I could not escape my susceptibility to their skepticism.
And I think that was a huge insight for me, is to recognize that I simply could not escape my susceptibility to their skepticism.
I mean, we all have this idea that, you know, we can, if we have an older brother or older sister or whoever, right?
It could be a friend who's invested in their superiority to us.
Let me enunciate.
Let me not unenunciate in my excitement.
If we have a friend or sibling or family member who's invested in our inferiority, then it's heartbreaking to realize that you simply can't become who you are with that person around because probably at an unconscious level largely, your power is an enormous threat to their self-esteem and they will Move.
The three-dimensional chess of emotional slave repression will continually be playing in your head.
I mean, I got that I simply could not do great things.
I couldn't sort of be the Zen guy, rise above it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because it was sort of incessant and very powerful.
And I avoided the topics of what I was thinking about with those who were closest to me.
Innocent or closest to me, it quotes, because it was too painful to bring up what I was thinking and have them roll their eyes and express scorn and skepticism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's not like scorn is a little rude, but skepticism is perfectly fine, of course.
I'm skeptical of what I say, and I have things that I have revised.
Ooh, reminds me, I've been meaning to post something about the psychological benefits of psychedelic drugs.
Anyway, I guess that contradicts my earlier position, which I'd like to explore more.
But I could never achieve that.
And giving up that illusion that I could achieve indifference to 35-year relationships with a particular pattern of hierarchy, I mean, I simply couldn't.
The grooves are worn too deeply.
It's like... It's like saying, well, I've spoken English and only English for 35 years.
I'm going to go to another country, and then when somebody speaks English, I'm going to will myself not to understand what they're saying.
Well, that's not possible.
You spoke English for 35 years, barring a stroke or a brain injury.
When somebody speaks to you in English, you're going to understand it, whether you like it or not.
You can't will yourself to not understand the language you've spoken for 35 years.
And it's the same thing for me with familial and even long-term friendships.
I simply could not unlearn the language of hierarchy just because I wanted to.
It was too deeply... It was too deeply ingrained within me.
So, the way that I worked it out, in my mind, and it's such a foreign feeling to me.
I'm so immensely encouraged in people's progress, and as I am encouraged, of course, I have my own progress down the path of wisdom and virtue, halting and inconsistent though it may feel and be at times.
So, it was a very foreign feeling to me, to my experience.
And, oh man, one of the greatest things that I got out of therapy was to try and avoid the narcissism of ascribing all feelings to my organic self, all feelings to myself.
No, some feelings are natural to me and some feelings are the responsibility of others.
They are infected within me.
I mean, or benevolently placed within me, but...
I think that's an important distinction, right?
So, to say, take a concrete example, if I get appendicitis, that is a feeling of pain that is endemic.
It's innate to my body.
It's not somebody else who's doing it to me.
It is my own agony.
Whereas, if somebody drops a concrete block on my toe, That is the fault of somebody else's.
The pain that I'm feeling is the fault of somebody else.
And it's the same thing with feelings. There are some feelings that are mine, that arise from my own perceptions and personality and experiences, and there are other feelings.
That are the responsibility of others, both positive and negative, who've helped or harmed me throughout my life.
And one of the things that I really learned early on in therapy was to understand that not everything that I experience is an aspect of myself alone.
I think that's really, really important to understand.
Not everything that you experience is some aspect of yourself alone, right?
So, in the realm of self-attack, it's not like you just randomly have A mean part of yourself that wails on you for doing things imperfectly, which is a setup, of course.
You never do anything perfectly. You don't just randomly have an inner critic.
You have internalized an inner critic.
And the responsibility for that lies with others.
The responsibility for dealing with it lies with you.
But one of the first things that I do when examining a feeling and say, well, what is the source?
And this feeling that I had with Isabella was such an odd, kind of creepy feeling that I'd never consciously experienced before that was so inappropriate to my values about the situation, my enthusiasm, that she could kick, not that she had shortcomings in her kicking.
And again, not shortcomings relative to where she was, but relative to what I was doing.
Like, what the hell does that mean, right?
In terms of comparison.
It's like calling her dumb because she can't pronounce the word anti-disestablishmentarianism.
So, given that it was such a foreign feeling, it had to come from somewhere else.
And the most likely person that it came from was my brother.
And also because whenever you're experiencing emotions around a toddler, it's almost always to do with your family, because the most likely thing is that you experienced those feelings or had those feelings around when you yourself were a toddler.
So it's very, very early.
I mean, Isabella, I believe, is still classified as a baby up until the age of two, at which point she becomes a junior citizen of Libertopia.
And so... If it is something that came from my brother, then there's choice in that.
I mean, I know I just leaped a whole bunch of things here, and I'll try and explain what I mean.
The feeling that I had was, I'm pretty sure, was my brother's experience of feeling superior to me because I was younger.
So feeling that he could do things that I couldn't do.
And as I've said before, my very first memory is when I was at that.
I had to be 10 or 11 months old because I knew I walked pretty early and I couldn't stand or even roll properly.
I could sit and topple over.
So to be 10 or 11 months, my earliest memory is of my brother teasing me, saying, Stefan is a baby, Stefan is a baby, and feeling that hot, angry frustration saying no, like I couldn't get away.
He was kind of dancing around me and I think he was poking at me, but I can't remember exactly.
But he had that mobility and I was stuck like a lump on a log because I was younger.
And so there was that frustration of his mobility and my defenselessness, right?
As always is the case, who knows where my mother was?
Anyway, so if I'm getting echoes of my brother's feelings of superiority for when I lacked his Physical and mental abilities due to my younger age, then it was a mixture.
It was a mixture of sadness.
It was a mixture of superiority, of almost contempt, of pity, but a kind of superiority pity, not a pity like when you pity someone who's going through a really hard time, but a sort of pity like when you are looking at some, I don't know, retarded...
No, I don't even know exactly how to describe the pity.
I'm not doing a very good job of it, but it's pity like a scornful superiority.
Like when you're watching someone who thinks they're as good as you, who's completely incompetent, and you're sort of afraid to say to them that they're that bad because you feel that they're so fragile.
It's that kind of pity. It's a very superior and contemptuous kind of pity.
You have ideas above your station.
As one of the British ambassadors said to the Turks before World War I, thus accelerating the outbreak of World War I. Yeah, yeah, I'm working on another series.
So, because the feeling was very complex and ambivalent and took a long time to unravel, the more ambivalent the feeling, the more choice there is in it.
I remember when I was a minor shoplifter when I was a kid, because I hung out with some fairly nasty people, and I was going through my potential sociopath phase, I would say.
And there was, after I'd stolen a few things, I began to feel, I'm pretty bad about it.
And at one point, I needed some sunglasses, because I was doing some sport outside.
I think I was running. I was either running or soccer.
And I really felt like I needed sunglasses because it was really bright and unpleasant on my eyes.
And, of course, I didn't have any money to buy sunglasses.
So I remember being in Eaton's at the Don Mills Mall, standing in front of a sunglasses rack, looking around for...
I can't remember if there were cameras back then.
Probably not. Maybe there were.
Anyway, looking around for cameras and feeling like I really wanted to steal these sunglasses, feeling like society was constructed so that I wouldn't get sunglasses and nobody cared, so it was a state of nature.
And also feeling that I did not want to steal these things, partly out of fear.
Fear of the immediate, of course.
But I would say even more importantly, it was fear of where that path was going to lead.
A fear of a future that I'd be making for myself if I became more than a temporary recreational thief.
That was a very complex and a desire for sunglasses, anger and frustration with society as a whole, anger and frustration with my family situation as it was, as it stood.
Loneliness, entitlement and desire for the sunglasses and fear of the consequence.
A very complex feeling and I ended up not.
I was stealing and I never stole again because I did not want to experience that feeling of stealing, of contemplating stealing.
It was a very uncomfortable and unpleasant feeling.
It's similar to what I felt with Isabella when she was trying to kick this little woolen ball.
Well, she was kicking it, but not obviously with the dexterity and balance that I was.
I'm sorry to keep repeating myself.
It seems silly even to say it because she never would be able to.
If she would, it would probably be an indication of a neurological problem.
But it was a very complex and challenging feeling that I was experiencing, and it reminded me somewhat of the desire and the revulsion of stealing, or contemplating stealing when I was younger, when I was about eleven.
Twelve, maybe. I think it was eleven.
So, where that complexity of feeling was there, then there's choice, right?
Where there's no complexity of feeling, in a sense, there's really no choice, right?
So, if you pick up something that's really hot and drop it immediately, there's no complexity of feeling.
It's not like, well, I want to, but I don't want to, and all this sort of stuff.
No, there's just, you, yuck, right?
If you step in some dog shit, you don't have a lot of, hmm, maybe that looks good on my shoe, and maybe I'm hungry.
No, it's just, you know, revulsion probably, right?
So there's not a lot of complexity of feelings in those situations.
And this is why I'm continually touting the, quote, virtue of ambivalence, because where there's ambivalence, there is choice.
And where there is choice, there is the capacity for virtue.
So, where I had that complexity of feeling when I was younger, I chose not to steal and never stole again.
When I experienced what I'm sure my brother experienced when he felt himself to be superior to me and knew that it was an unjust, cowardly, and ridiculous thing to do to feel superior to a 10-month-old baby because you can walk and the baby can't and you can run and the baby can't and you can dance and the baby can't.
I mean, that's a pretty pathetic thing to feel superior to.
That's like feeling superior to people starving in Africa because you have...
Food. Well, I guess I just planned and prepared better, didn't I? Well, that's pathetic.
I mean, it's really, really a wretched, wretched thing to base your self-esteem on.
So there is, in a sense, the ambivalence I think that I was experiencing was pride, as in, I can do things that my little brother can't, so there's pride.
But along with that pride, there is shame.
And the shame is, I'm comparing myself to a toddler.
So there is superiority and there is contempt, but there is mixed in with the contempt for the younger person who you feel superior to is an even deeper level of contempt for yourself, for comparing yourself so unjustly to somebody who is inferior through no achievement of yours, no fault of theirs. And if I'm guessing rightly, Isabella is 16 months, which means that my brother would be about four.
When I was 16 months, my brother would be about four.
And this is, and of course, I mean, it's such an enormous difference, right?
Four, you can speak in sentences, count pretty high, you can do some math, you can read.
And a toddler, you know, Isabella is stringing two words together, which I think is fantastic.
And she can sing along with maybe a third of a song sometimes, but it's a huge difference, of course, between 16 months and four years old.
And if this was occurring, then my brother, when he was four, was feeling pride and shame with his feelings of superiority towards me.
And there was a great deal of ambivalence in those feelings that he had.
Now, why am I talking about all of this?
Well, I'm talking about all this because where there's ambivalence, there is choice, there is morality.
And so I'm really re-evaluating at a very fundamental level my conception of where morality first comes to be.
Where does morality first come to be?
There are lots of studies which I was not aware of, and I'm not even sure were available five years ago when I started talking about this kind of stuff.
So, I've read The Philosophical Baby, interviewed Dr.
Gopnik, and The Moral Life of Babies was a recent I was really focusing more on the moral responsibility, legal responsibility, rather than do kids know right from wrong.
Well, yeah, I think kids do know right from wrong.
Wherever you have ambivalence, wherever you have the capacity to recognize consequences, and wherever you have the capacity to control behavior, in other words, you wait until the teacher's back is turned before you poke the other kid under the table, then, lo and behold, you have some level of moral responsibility.
So I think I was experiencing what it's like...
To have moral responsibility as a four-year-old relative to myself as a 16-month-old.
And it was a very...
I mean, the mind is just an amazing, amazing thing.
And this was a very powerful moment for me that took a lot of puzzling out to figure out what was going on with it.
Now, one thing that my brother did say when I finally sat him down to talk about our childhoods very proactively when I was about 20, was he, you know, when he was in tears about it, he said something I think it was pretty close to, as long as I could remember, I tried to stop.
I told myself I would stop, you know, teasing and bullying and humiliating, and football abusing.
He said he tried to stop, as long as I can remember, and as long as I can remember, for me, goes back to the single, almost to the single-digit months.
As long as I can remember, I've tried to stop.
I tried to stop. And he was telling me, I experienced choice from a very young age because I experienced ambivalence.
And I also opposed UPB. I mean, children are UPB monsters.
All children do is UPB themselves into maturity.
With Isabella, it's very clear.
Eye doesn't mean one eye.
It means both eyes. Eye doesn't mean just her eyes.
It means her eyes and the eyes of others.
And it also means the eyes of people in pictures.
And it also means the eyes of her teddy bears.
It also means the eyes of her Dog toy and so on, right?
Eyes of fishes, right? So, that's UPBing.
An eye is, you know, the semi-clear orb used for seeing or any representation thereof, right?
So, I can draw a little smiley face and she can put two things.
She says eyes, right? So, she knows it's the two dots in the middle of the face that, right?
So she's just continually extrapolating two concepts, from instance to concept, from entity to abstraction, all the time.
And the ambivalence that we experience fundamentally comes when we inflict a universal rule that we would hate being subjected to.
Let me just say that again, because it's really the fundamental definition of emotional ambivalence is when we inflict a universal rule that we would hate to be subjected to.
And I think that's really, really important.
So my brother was very big on humiliating me in front of people, but if I ever embarrassed him, he would be really angry at me.
It wouldn't be like, hey, you got me, fair is fair.
I dish it out, I can take it, right?
He would always be really angry, should I ever do anything to embarrass him, but he would continually work to embarrass me in front of people.
You know, a minor example I mentioned before, just so you get a sense of what it was, right?
I was talking to a girl I was interested in in a record store.
I was about maybe 14.
And my brother, who was 16 and a half, came up and said, oh, Steph, attracted, are we?
Wipe off the drool. And he ran his hand along my chin, which was, of course, a very humiliating and embarrassing thing to do.
It's tough enough to go up to a girl that you like and strike up a combo.
Without your brother coming and embarrassing you into the ground, right?
But of course, if I ever did that to him, or ever embarrassed him, then he would be really angry.
So, the ambivalence comes from having a universal rule which Which you would hate to be subjected to.
This is what short-circuits the brain and creates the mycosystem in a negative way.
It creates and exacerbates the mycosystem in a negative way, though there is a mycosystem in a positive way, as I've talked about with Izzy, who when she's approaching something, as I mentioned, I think I lost this podcast somewhere, but I saw Izzy reaching for...
A plug, which she's not supposed to reach, a wall socket, and she reached for it, and she said, no, no, no, and then her hand, cool, she was telling her hand, no, no, no, she'd internalized it, and it was a very friendly, like, no, no, no, right, she didn't do it, and she does that.
I've got it on video somewhere, make it, post it if people are interested, that she's doing something, and she says, no, no, no, and restrains herself.
In other words, she's internalizing an external voice.
The Mika system is... It occurs, as I've always suspected, to healthy and happy individuals, but it turns toxic when ambivalence creates permanent splits within the integration of the personality and within, I would strongly suspect, The very brain itself.
So, if my brother was experiencing ambivalence at the age of four, and as he said, as long as he could remember, which is way back even before, if my brother was experiencing ambivalence in his cruel and unjust treatment of me, then he had choice.
And if he had choice, then there is moral choice in the low single digits for children.
There is moral choice. Now, This, of course, raises a whole host of complicated issues, which I'm aware of.
And please remember, this is just an exploration.
This is no final proof of anything, of course, right?
But let's say that he did have some choice.
The next thing that I think of, and I'm sure is what you think of as well...
Oh, it's so nice that the gym is empty today.
Anyway, the next thing that I think of, and I'm sure you think of it as well, was that, well, did he really have choice?
Did he really have choice because all he had experienced was cruelty and violence and humiliation himself?
Well... That's true, but it's not true like a law of physics, that if you experience abuse, violence, and humiliation, that you will automatically become an abuser yourself, even at the age of four, because I certainly didn't.
I mean, it wasn't like I never did anything wrong or never did anything to hurt people, but I was not cruel and sadistic in that way at all.
In fact, I had a great deal of concern for those who were lonely or isolated or separated or weakened or whatever.
And so it's not automatic to say, well, if you experience these things, you will then dish it out.
Because I didn't. So there's more to it than just the experience of humiliation.
And every child in the world, like it's true, I didn't have a younger sibling to pick on, but there are always younger children around that you can push over or you can take their toys from and blame others.
You can always turn into that hateful little nasty thing.
And so, yeah, I could always have found, and there were around kids who were younger than me, always, right?
So it's not axiomatic to say, if you've experienced it, you will dish it out.
And I think most of the people on FDR would be proof of that.
So that's not enough.
Now, that's not to say that it's necessary but not sufficient.
Criterion for abuse, right?
To be abused is necessary, but it's not sufficient to explain abuse.
In other words, people who aren't abused, I can't imagine they become abusers, but people who are abused may become abusers.
Now, let's take another example, though, which is that I have never seen Isabella do anything mean or cruel or destructive or hurtful or harmful to anyone, to her stuffed toys, to other kids, to other adults, to herself, or anything like that. And you could say, well, she doesn't really have the choice to do that because it's not in her vocabulary.
In the same way that if you don't teach your kid Mandarin, they don't have the choice to speak Mandarin.
And cruelty, of course, is a language that is taught, though not always repeated.
The child knows it, but does not always speak it.
In other words, my brother knew cruelty and spoke it.
I knew cruelty, but did not speak it.
And... And so Isabella does not speak the language of cruelty, and so she's not going to do that.
As I said before, she's never experienced a raised voice, a harsh word, a cold look, a withdrawal of affection.
She's certainly experienced frustration, and she's even been angry, of course, but she's never experienced.
Even the vain hint of abuse or hostility or anger on the part of her parents or anyone else, right?
Because apparently there aren't that many other people.
We've got some nice neighbors who she's friendly with.
She does experience rejection.
Recently, when she sees another kid her own height, she runs forward and tries to give them a hug.
And a few kids will say, We'll hug her back one or two, but most of them will just sort of withdraw.
Even if they're a little older, I say four or five, they will withdraw and look at her funny, which is a little heartbreaking.
I think, you know, a hug from a baby is about the nicest thing in the world, so why wouldn't you want to taste some of that pie, that sugar?
But that's where they are, right?
But she's not particularly bothered by it.
The other thing that's important to...
Sorry, I forgot to mention this too, is that Izzy...
I was not at all bothered by her inability to kick the ball in the way that I did.
She gave it a shot, and then she was happy to just kick it around, and so on.
So, it wasn't coming from her, because she wasn't experiencing ambivalence or frustration or self-criticism for her inability to kick the ball.
So, that's sort of another thing to remember.
It wasn't coming from her. It wasn't coming from me.
It said it came from somewhere else. So, it certainly is true that Isabella does not have the, quote, choice to be cruel.
Which leads to another interesting question, which is that if she does not have the choice to be cruel, Does she deserve praise for being kind?
So if she's never experienced cruelty as a child and she does not have, in a sense, the capacity for cruelty to other children, can she be deemed praiseworthy for not being cruel, for being kind?
Given that she, in a sense, doesn't have a choice.
Well, I think yes. I think yes, of course.
To put it very briefly, and I may do more of a podcast on this, but to put it very briefly, the purpose of philosophy is to eliminate itself.
I would love for a world with no philosophers, in the same way that the purpose of oncology is to get rid of itself, ideally, for there to be no cancer.
It would be great if nobody ever experienced appendicitis, if there was a pill you could take.
So the purpose, in a sense, of medicine is to eliminate illness.
And if nobody ever got sick, there would be no doctors.
The purpose of medicine is to eliminate itself.
And so, the purpose of philosophy, for there to be no need for philosophy, because everybody was raised so well, that cruelty would never even cross anybody's radar.
Cruelty and violence and ugliness and abuse and betrayal and viciousness and all of that, it just would not be part of people's vocabulary, and so you would not need philosophy to guide you in the right choice, in the right course.
If everybody only ate what was best for them, you wouldn't need nutrition.
Although that's a little bit different because of course you need to change over time.
But it certainly is my goal for Isabella to have precious little need of philosophy until she joins the world as a whole.
She'll need it then because she will deal with cruel and difficult and ugly and broken and vicious people.
But I certainly don't want her to have any need of philosophy during these formative years when she's home with us and doesn't have to deal with that stuff.
Now, she also, because of how she's being raised, she will have precious little need to deal with these people, because they will give her a wide berth, and she will shy away from them and give them a wide berth, I think.
I mean, I'm guessing. I'm not sure, but that would be my guess.
Because they will see each other, and they will understand each other.
I'm not going to raise her to be ignorant of evil, but I certainly don't want to raise her to be frightened of evil, because evil is...
Fundamentally, in the absence of violence, is only as potent as you let it be.
Evil is just an attempt to poison you, but you have to drink the poison.
All they do is just hand you a cup and say, drink.
Socrates did. I don't.
So, I think that she has virtue.
She is virtuous. And she does not need to be tempted by evil in order to be virtuous.
In fact, I think it's better, because you waste less time worrying about your temptations and more time just being happy and doing the right thing.
Now, another thing that came up for me in thinking about this was what I think is the very interesting question, which is, if Isabella is incapable of displaying virtue, of being virtuous, Then, can I love her?
Love is an involuntary response to virtue.
Do I love my daughter at the age of 16 months?
Well, yeah. I love her passionately.
I think, oh man, I get all emotional when I talk about this.
I have to tell you, she is the nicest person I know.
She is the sweetest and most generous and most affectionate and most wonderful.
I mean, she is, you know, aside from her mom.
She is the nicest person I know.
And as I said, she's nicer than me.
I got my jagged edges, which I actually think are helpful and healthy for what I'm doing.
But she is, Isabella Molyneux, is the most delightful and nicest person that I know.
And I just, I love her with an extraordinary passion.
It's not the same as when she was born.
When she was born, she obviously didn't have the capacity for virtue for the early part of her life, because she was...
There was no choice. There was no self-expression, really, other than I'm hungry or not even that.
I'm upset about something or whatever.
I'm content. But now I can see her making choices.
I can see her making choices.
Like, if she needs to be changed and she's really resistant and I don't have anything to distract her, then I have to really get her changed and she will submit.
And she's fine with it and she'll be upset.
And I can see her then say, okay, well, I'm going to submit because obviously this is important and I'm not going to be able to get my way at the moment.
So I see her. Submit to what needs to happen.
I can see her make those choices, because sometimes she doesn't, and then she sometimes, more often than not now, she does make those choices to submit, which I think is good, because she needs to get changed.
I'm talking maybe five times in her whole life that's had to happen.
Or, you know, at a different level, I took her to McDonald's today.
We had a A diet muffin.
And she was enjoying getting the ketchup in those little white...
little white balls, little white paper balls, whatever they call them, paper cups.
And she had, you know, a whole bunch of ketchup and then I had to stop her from having more ketchup because I was concerned about the level of sodium and sugar.
And so... I said no more, and she wanted more, and I basically said no, and she was upset, and then she was okay.
And I try not to just distract her.
I used to, but I sort of felt a little bit bad about that, so I don't distract her now.
I just let her be upset, and we go and do something else.
And I can see her make choices to no longer be upset, and I can see her decide to focus on something else, and so on.
And I know that you may not believe that, and I can understand your skepticism, and I could be completely wrong, but that certainly is my experience of it.
And so when she was born, I had an attachment to her.
I mean, she was beautiful and ours and incredibly precious and long-awaited.
I was very passionately devoted to her and very attached to her.
But, you know, my sort of passionate love for her has grown as she has expressed a personality.
I mean, she is a complete person.
She's not even a little person. She is a complete person.
She has her likes, her dislikes, her passions, her loves and her moods and all of that.
Well, moods. Happy and frustrated.
Mostly happy. 95% happy, 5% frustrated.
She is a full personality.
She is somebody I enormously admire.
I admire her courage. I admire her caution.
She will do things that are dangerous, but if they are more than she can handle, if she will do things that are risky, but if it's more than she can handle, she will always reach out for help and she'll wait until she gets help.
I really admire her courage.
I admire her enthusiasms.
I love her affection for the world.
She says hi to everything.
She gives hugs to people.
She says hi to mailboxes, to balls on the road.
She says hi to cars, to birds.
She just loves the world.
It has reawakened my own passion for the world to be around her passion for the world, and I have found myself capable of a great deal of forgive and forget, more so than I was in the past.
And she's teaching me as much as I'm teaching her, if not more.
But I love her so passionately, but at least according to my theory of RTR, I could not love her if she were not capable of goodness.
But when she tastes something really nice, and the first thing she wants to do is turn and give me a piece, right?
So we give her some foods that she really likes.
She likes oranges.
So she'll take a bite, and then she'll offer the rest to me.
Well, I think that's really nice.
She could eat more, but she wants to share it with me.
I think that's a beautiful thing.
I think it's very generous.
I think it's very kind.
It's very sweet. And, of course, she's now running to give us hugs, and she loves a good cuddle and all that.
And her passion for Christina and myself as people is, of course, I mean, I just, oh my god, I can't weep at the gym.
Do not weep at the gym. It's not the most, it's not the least manly place in the world, I suppose.
And I don't think I could feel this love for her if I did not think she was capable of choice.
And I haven't sort of sat there and said, well, she must be capable of choice so that I can love her to prove my theory or anything like that.
And again, these are all things that could be wrong, although the science seems to indicate otherwise.
The science seems to indicate that a baby is as young as 11 months.
And even earlier, Isabella started feeding me when she was 8 months old.
That they can develop empathy and do things that are good, are pleasant, are nice, are universal.
So, I mean, I would give her the shirt off my back, and she knows that, and I will do anything to keep her happy within the bounds of safety and security, and so she wants to return that favor.
And so I really appreciate her generosity, her sharing, her affection, her reciprocity.
I think it's a beautiful thing.
She could choose to eat more, but she chooses to share.
And that's just one example. I don't want to bore everyone with too many details, but I do view her as doing nice, good, virtuous, and positive things.
The fact that she doesn't struggle with evil and cruelty to me is just great.
I mean, isn't that great? You don't want the health of your kid to be defined by a struggle with tuberculosis.
I mean, I guess you would appreciate your kids' health more if they struggle with tuberculosis and come over it, but nobody wants that.
I don't want her to struggle with cruelty and evil and more triumphant so I can love her.
I mean, any more than I want her to get a bad cold so I can appreciate her not having a cold.
I mean, I want her to not get a cold.
I want her to not struggle with...
With immorality and cruelty and so on.
I want her to just be naturally and glowingly a good in that way.
That, to me, that's the whole point.
So she doesn't need to be a philosopher in the way that I'm a philosopher.
She doesn't need the level of self-knowledge that I need, right?
I mean, if you become a diabetic, you learn a hell of a lot about blood sugar.
Yay! But nobody wants to become diabetic so they can find out about blood sugar.
Most of us would prefer to live our lives not knowing a damn bit about our blood sugar because we didn't have a problem with it.
And so her level of self-knowledge It's not going to need to be the same as mine because she's not going to struggle with having to rebuild a shattered building of the self.
Sorry, that was a very bad way to put it.
She's not going to have to raise a sunken vessel and make it seaworthy again.
She's just going to step into a ship that is seaworthy and self-repairing, right?
So I had to dredge myself up from the bottom of the ocean and work to repair.
So I knew a lot about dredging and ships and building and all that.
I don't want to have an electric ship that she can push a button and it goes, and I don't ever want to have to worry about it.
So, she's not going to need the same level of philosophy, or even close.
She may choose, you know, out of her own interest, right?
I mean, you don't have to be diabetic to study blood sugar if it's of interest to you, but she's not going to need the same level.
Does that make me more virtuous or less virtuous?
Because I've had to struggle a lot more to become virtuous than she will ever have to struggle.
Well, I don't know.
I would say that the journey is greater, but that's like saying it's somebody healthier if they've broken their leg and it's set well.
Well, no, they're still not as healthy as if they've never broken their leg.
Unless, of course, you know, you break your leg, you go to rehab, you find out you love exercise, and so you exercise forever, and blah, blah, blah.
But fundamentally, nobody breaks their legs in the hope of starting an exercise regime.
I mean, it may happen as a result, but nobody does that purposefully.
So, I do experience her as good.
I do experience her characteristics as so overwhelmingly positive and beautiful that I just love and worship her.
And it's true that she doesn't have to struggle nearly as much with cruelty as my brother did and fail, or even struggle with negatives as I've had to struggle and sometimes fail.
But to me, that's good.
That's the point. That's the point of philosophy, is to raise people to not need philosophy.
Like, the point of medicine is to raise people who never need to see a doctor, so to speak, right?
Yay! So...
There's another incident that occurred to me while I was thinking about this.
And it occurred about seven months ago.
Isabella had just... I think she was just learning how to walk.
She was around 11 months.
She was just learning how to walk. I can't remember if she was taking a few steps independently or not or was just walking while holding on to things.
She was just learning how to walk.
And there was a boy, a blonde, cold-faced...
Malfoy, kind of, from Harry Potter, Malfoy kind of looking boy.
He was a kind of cold and icy looking boy.
And Isabella was doing this thing where she wanted to play with another kid, and she still does this sometimes.
She would go, she wasn't spitting or anything, she was just making a sound out of her mouth.
And this boy looked at her with dripping contempt and said, don't spit.
You know, really curled his lips and looked with contempt at her.
And I said to him, I said, she's a baby.
It's a public space. She's a baby.
If you want to come around, I didn't say all of that.
I just said she's a baby. And I was angry.
I was angry with this boy for treating my daughter in that way.
For giving her that view of content.
Now, she didn't care at all, because it was so extraneous to her existence, she probably didn't even recognize the look, because she'd never seen it before, and it had no emotional import to her, so she didn't care.
She just kept moving on to the next toy and didn't give him another glance.
But I was angry with this boy.
And to me, that was very interesting because, again, I'm going to accept, unless evidence goes strongly to the contrary, I'm going to accept that my anger was not unjust.
I mean, it's ridiculous and embarrassing and stupid and cruel to say to a baby who's going to say, don't spit, as if she's got a concept of don't or spit or politeness or universality or rudeness or anything like that, right? So he was being exceptionally rude while complaining about her rudeness.
And I would not feel angry I would not feel angry at him were he not capable of better behavior.
I mean, I just, I can't imagine that I would feel that way because, I mean, I've spent a lot of time around kids.
I worked in a daycare. I've had nieces.
I spent a lot of time around kids in my day.
And I can't remember feeling angry at a kid for something that was involuntary.
I really can't feel angry.
At least I can't remember feeling angry at a kid for something that was involuntary.
So, I mean, if that boy had been feeling nauseous, right, let's say, and he had thrown up, right, and maybe some of it had landed on Isabella or whatever, I wouldn't feel angry.
Like, oh, what are you doing?
What the hell are you doing? I wouldn't feel angry.
I would feel, I think I would feel sympathy, of course, right?
I'd be like, oh my god, are you okay?
My baby could be cleaned up, that's no big deal, but you're obviously not well, that's not good.
But I didn't feel that.
I didn't feel that at all.
So I felt angry because I really strongly felt that that was really rude.
And of course, if I had done something to him along those lines, he probably would have been very upset.
Now I'm aware that this is a bit of a brother thing and all that, particularly the way that he looked.
I mean, both my brother and I were albino blonde family with kids.
But... That was a very different situation because I really felt that he was lording it over a 10 or 11-month-old.
That's interesting. That's very interesting.
Although he was a little older than my brother, it's the same age that I was talking about at the beginning.
That hadn't struck me, but I'm sure that that's relevant, that I was the same age as Isabella was.
And it probably reminded me of my first memory where my brother was, in a less sophisticated way, but was scorning me for being young.
And so my emotional apparatus indicated to me that this six or seven year old boy was responsible for his For his meanness to Isabella.
It wasn't involuntary. And of course, he'd had this behavior model to him before and all that.
But nonetheless, my emotions, my anger, told me that he was responsible in a way that if he had just thrown up, or even if he'd tripped and flailed and hit my daughter, I would have been, you know, are you okay?
That's a shame, and I've worked more to protect.
Like, there are some boys there, and it's usually boys, not to be overly stereotypical, but it usually is boys.
There are some boys at the library who are very rough in their play, and I don't get mad at them.
I am very conscious of the need to be the human shield between them and Isabella, but I'm not like, oh, you boys are so bad, you know?
It's like, no, they're just doing what boys, particularly boys without parents, do, which is to continually push the envelope of what is physically possible, and that does endanger other kids, and it's a shame that it's not...
But that I put more on the parents.
And so I'm not mad at that.
I find it inconvenient and so on, but I'm not mad at it.
But this I was angry at.
And I just said, but she's just a baby.
And I just kept her away from him after that because I don't want her to be exposed to those kinds of feelings at all.
I don't want those. You know how parents are so often really concerned about the germs that their children are exposed to?
Well, I feel the same way, but I don't feel it so strongly with germs, although that certainly is part of being a parent.
I feel it very strongly with personalities.
Right? That is what I'm very concerned about my daughter's exposure to.
Toxicity... She can get over a cold, but the cruelty that gets into her when she's very young will stay in her forever.
And I think we all can be...
I think we're all aware of how that works and how that occurs.
So I'm not... Neely is concerned about a couple of bacteria on a spoon, as I am about the personalities that she's exposed to.
She's got an immune system for her bugs, and in fact, you don't want to keep your kids in a bubble because they need to develop their immune system, but she doesn't have an immune system for toxic personalities, and I don't have the right To expose her to toxic personalities any more than I have the right to blow smoke in her face and watch her cough.
So I just wanted to lay these thoughts down.
I know they're not conclusive, but this idea that moral responsibility in certain areas occurs much earlier than...
And I thought it's very interesting.
I think we all accept that a 20-year-old is morally responsible, and we accept that a 1-year-old is probably not.
But it must be a rising curve.
It can't just go from 0 to 100 percent from 11.59 p.m.
when they're 19 to 12 a.m.
on their 20th birthday.
It can't just go from 0 to 100.
It has to be steadily rising.
And I do believe that is...
Something that's well worth exploring.
So I invite you to study the literature, of course.
You can read Paul Bloom, you can read Alison Gottnick, Descartes' Baby or Philosophical Baby.
There's a New York Times article, The Moral Life of Babies.
There's lots of great research, and of course I've interviewed some people about this, that there are moral choices to be made when children are young.
Very, very young children can distinguish the difference between politeness and morality, between social rules and moral rules.
I.e. it's bad to hit versus you need to hang your coat on this hook by your name.
That's a rule, but it's not a moral rule.
They understand the difference between that.
And so maybe, just maybe, morality starts a whole lot earlier.
And the last thing I'll say about this is that I think that we as a culture and we as parents have always known that morality starts so much earlier.
Why? We are always admonishing children from the standpoint of ethics, right?
I mean, it's not good parenting, but it's very common parenting to say, you know, that's selfish, you should share, don't be mean, don't be cruel, don't be this, don't be that.
Well, those are all moral terms, right?
If a cat doesn't want to share some catnip with another cat, we don't say to that cat, don't be mean, don't be selfish.
I mean, I guess you could say it, but you wouldn't really mean it, like you're morally condemning the cat, because the cat is not capable of that kind of morality.
Whereas we will say to children all the time, we will use moral terms with regards to children, right?
I mean, just look at original sin, right?
I mean, that strikes in at the age of seven, if I remember rightly, that you are sinful, that you are capable of good and evil.
I would say that, as a culture, we recognize children are sensitive to moral rules and moral criticisms from a very, very early age, and maybe we're onto something.
I mean, that doesn't mean to me that we should then use those moral terms abusively, but I think it's something really worth exploring, and I certainly look forward to your thoughts and experiences and opinions on this.
And thank you, as always, so much for listening.
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