A different kind of "blog," consisting of selections from my scribblings over many years. The date of each post is the date I originally wrote that piece. So, the top post is usually not the latest post, because I continually add writings from different years to the blog. If you have visited here before, you are likely to find new posts anywhere on the page. I'll continue to add "new" posts as my time allows.
15 April 2000
There
is a perception that children are more violent than they used to be. One way in which this is expressed is that
children are not really the innocent little creatures they used to be. This notion, however, is not a new one. Its older form was the idea that to realize
that children are not really innocent is to look at their cruelty to each
other. But all this is a case of
category error. When we say children are
innocent, we are not making an ethical statement, or a moral statement about
their having good or evil actions in their past. We are merely saying that they have very
little experience of the world and its ways.
Of course the problem is connected with the superimposition of the labels
or concepts of good and evil onto our actions.
Instead of calling actions what they are, for example, antisocial, etc.,
and dealing with the question of how to improve or encourage them, we abdicate
our own responsibility to deal with them, by abandoning them to labels such as
blessed or villainous.
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