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.