Alternativas de solución al problema específico 3

As a way of introducing the argument of this section, let me first say something about the texts of Aristotle’s Ethics on which Sauvé-Meyer bases her contention (i.e. feature II, p. 26) that, according to Aristotle, children are excluded from the category of moral agents for the same reasons as animals and psychopaths are: they do not have “the capacity of reason”. The first relevant passage (quoted by her) is EN 1149b31-1150a1:

We do not call beasts either temperate or intemperate, except metaphorically when one kind of animal differs from another in violence and wantonness and in being ravenous. For they do not have decision (prohairesis) or reasoning (logismos), but rather are outside of <this> nature just like the mad among human beings.36

The fact that Aristotle does not mention children in this passage seems to me of great significance. Children are not ‘outsideof rational nature’ in the way animals and madmen are. They lack reason only in the sense in which they are potentially, and not actually, fully rational creatures. Animals and madmen, on the other hand, do not even have this potentiality (EN 1149b34-1150a1). Thus, Sauvé-Meyer is not entitled to say that “the

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reason Aristotle gives here for excluding non-human animals and the insane from virtue and vice of character is also the reason for him to exclude children from these categories of moral evaluation”.37 It is, I think, very significant that she goes on to quote the following passage of the EE in support of her claim:

In a human being both <reason and desire> are present (enestin) – that is, at a certain age, the one at which we attribute action (praxis). For we do not say that a child acts, nor that a beast does, but only someone who is already such as to act due to reasoning. EE 1224a27-30

This passage, I think, must be interpreted in the light of Aristotle’s claim, just a few lines after, according to which “we possess by nature both reason and desire” (1224b28-29). His argument to the effect that we possess (echein) reason by nature is that “of the two sources of action also reason is possessed38 by nature, because if <human> development is permitted and not maimed, it will be present (enestai)” (EE 1224b29-30). Aristotle is here unambiguously claiming that children have reason (echein logon), albeit in a potential, or perhaps merely passive way (the latter being the emphasis in EN 1102b31- 32).39 By contrast, Aristotle seems to be using the verb ‘eneinai’ (‘to be present in’) to refer to the actual possession of reason as exhibited by rational adults: only in them reason is present. This distinction between ‘having’ and ‘being present’ provides a clue to interpret EE 1224a27-30 supra. As suggested by Aristotle’s use of ‘enestin’ in 1224a27, his claim that in children reason is not present does not show that there is no sense in which they have reason (e.g. potentially). The mention of animals, along with children, is merely due to the fact that we do not attribute ‘conduct’ to animals either.40 The fact remains that the reason why we do not say that that children and the reason why we do not say this of animals either, are not really the same reason: in children, reason is not present, because not actual or developed, whereas in animals, it is not present because it is

37

Ibid. p. 23.

38 _{See „echomen‟, 1224b29.}

39 _{As Aristotle says in Pol. 1260a14, the child has (echei) the deliberative part of the soul, but in an}

undeveloped form (atelês).

40

Not even the EE claim that that we do not attribute conduct (praxis) to children is as conclusive as it may seem. The EN and the MM for instance only deny conduct to animals (EN 1139a20; MM 1187b7-9).

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extraneous to their nature. In fact, the EE account of what it means to have a rational

nature suggests that children, on Aristotle’s view, are not ‘outside rational nature’ at all. That children are not, in Aristotle’s view, outside rational nature in the way non- rational animals or madmen are, is of the greatest significance for our present purposes, because for Strawson, children, psychopaths, and perhaps also beasts, are all non-moral agents for the same reason: it is as inappropriate to hold them accountable for their voluntary behaviour through holding the S-reactive attitudes towards them, as it is to deem them capable of holding others accountable. More importantly, agent-based considerations of the sort ‘he is just a child’, ‘he is a psychopath’, etc. are all, for the same reason, considerations that invite us to regard these agents in terms of an ‘objective’ attitude. This is why Strawson often merges together considerations like ‘he is only a child’ along with ‘he is a hopeless schizophrenic’, ‘his mind had been systematically perverted’, ‘he is warped or deranged’ or ‘he is neurotic’.41

Now, in parallel with, and connected to, the Strawsonian blending of these importantly different agent-based considerations, the Strawsonian tradition ignores a fundamental distinction between moral education, teaching, and the sort of attitudes towards pupils involved in the formation of their character, on the one hand, and behavioural control and conditioning, which applies to psychopaths, animals and children alike. On the Strawsonian view, both education and conditioning involve instrumentalist (i.e. ‘objective’) attitudes. Sauvé-Meyer mirrors this view precisely on this point, when she says that, for all we know, “the praise and blame for which Aristotle thinks voluntariness is necessary might simply be tools of behavioural control and character formation justified by purely prospective considerations”,42 thus merging two importantly different attitudes, namely, plain behavioural manipulation, therapy, and conditioning on the one hand, and moral education (‘character formation’) on the other. As I have already suggested, the phrase ‘prospective attitude’ or ‘prospective consideration’ fails to capture the sense in which Strawsonian ‘objective’ attitudes are non-moral, because not all prospective attitudes are ipso facto ‘objective’ or better, instrumentalist. Roberts’ prospective

41

These are all Strawson‟s own phrases. See Strawson, P. F (1962), p. 78-79.

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conditioning interpretation makes a parallel mistake, in the course of arguing that praise and blame as involving prospective conditioning can ground an account of Aristotle’s theory of voluntariness. Roberts suggests that “[o]ne ‘deserves’ punishment, for Aristotle, if there is something wrong with one’s soul of the sort that might be correctable. Thus

animals, small children, and fully mature adults will all be in need of punishment for the same reason.”43 ‘Correctable’ here is the operative word, and it covers several importantly different things. It may cover the sort of praise and blame, and the sort of punishment and reward purely justified in terms of social utility, or at least purely understood as ‘training’ or ‘conditioning’. If so, then of course animals, and perhaps even some psychopaths, in so far as they are responsive to pain and pleasure, would be included in the list of their ‘appropriate targets’. But ‘correctable’ could also mean ‘subject to moral training’.

That moral education is significantly different from the ill-regarded practices of conditioning, control and manipulation, is suggested by our refusing to identify it with these practices (or call it by the corresponding names). The most significant distinction between teaching someone and conditioning or controlling his behaviour, for our present purposes, is that teaching is for the good of the learner, whereas conditioning him is for some good, not his own.44 At the limit, conditioning and controlling S’s behaviour involves no consideration for S’s actual or potential autonomy: it is, in this sense, purely instrumental. Moral formation, on the other hand, is for S’s own sake, and is thus quite different from conditioning: it is not ‘instrumentalist’ in the sense in which treating someone instrumentally seems to us so at odds with the concerns of morality. Recall that plain behavioural manipulation, like the one used to train animals and to pacify psychopaths, is seen by Strawson himself as a way of excluding the targeted agent from one’s moral community, or as a way of failing to treat the targeted agent as a moral individual in his own right. If this is the reason why we want to withdraw the adjective ‘moral’ from this sort of attitudes (i.e. the instrumentality argument) namely, because it

43 _{Roberts, J. (1989), p. 23. Italics are mine.}

44 _{I take it that verbs like „conditioning‟, „controlling‟, „manipulating‟ have taken on the pejorative meaning of}

„regulating someone‟s behaviour in the interests of the controller, conditioner, etc. and not of the subject‟. In itself, „training‟ or „conditioning‟ could include character formation. Their pejorative meaning is clearly associated with the Pavlovian idea of „conditioned reflex‟.

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treats its targets in a merely instrumental way (as means to ends from which external agents, rather than the targets themselves, benefit) then this reason does not apply to moral education. Therefore, the instrumentality argument is a very poor reason to think that the sort of attitudes involved in moral education, and in particular the sort of praise and blame bestowed upon the pupil in the process of character formation, are not moral attitudes. If this is so, then the fact that, for Aristotle, children are not ‘outside rational nature’, at least not in the way animals and psychopaths are, is of the greatest significance. If the instrumentality argument offers no cogent reason to withhold the adjective ‘moral’ from the attitudes involved in character-formation, then it offers no cogent reason to think that the dividing line for Aristotle between the moral agent and the non-moral agent, must be set between (i) the rational, mature prohairetic agent in possession of an ethical disposition,45 and (ii) the immature agent who has not yet developed an ethical disposition; rather than between (a) what is potentially rational (both (i) and (ii)) and (b) what does not have such potentiality to begin with: for educational attitudes bear only upon the former, and not upon the latter.

I am not denying that educational attitudes can be described as ‘forward looking’ or ‘prospective’. What I am denying is that they are forward looking or prospective in the relevant sense (i.e. ‘instrumentalist’) that makes us, according to Strawson, withdraw the adjective ‘moral’ from them, namely, in the sense in which the ‘objective’ attitude is justified by mere considerations of social utility, considerations which, if applied to a moral agent, are seen as ‘offending his humanity’. A parent who scolds a child in moral terms for not having kept his promise may do it partly in order to deter him from failing to keep his promises in the future. But he is doing it for his child’s own good or, in Aristotelian terms, for the sake of his own ultimate aretê and eudaimonia. He is helping him to become an autonomous agent. Thus, from the mere fact that an attitude is forward-looking or prospective it does not follow that it is at odds with the concerns of morality; for not all forward-looking attitudes are justified merely in terms of social utility.

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Now, I suspect that the Strawsonian interpreter may retort as follows: “I grant you that I have misrepresented the peculiar, non-instrumental nature of educational attitudes. But there is still a sense in which agent-based considerations of the sort ‘he is just a child’ belong to the same category as ‘he is a psychopath’ or ‘he is deranged’, to wit, these are agent-based considerations that make us suspend the S-reactive attitudes towards these agents in a sustained way”. From this we are expected to conclude that children are not

moral agents and our attitudes to them are not moral ones. But if we have indeed educational attitudes to children that can be characterized as ‘moral’, one can arrive at a quite different conclusion. Part of what is essential about educational attitudes is that the sort of blame exemplified by the father’s scolding his child has to belong in some way to

the same category as the sort of blame that the child himself is meant to bestow upon the same type of actions – and ultimately upon their agents – when these become of his concern once he has acquired full membership into the moral community. And by ‘the same category’ I mean here that educational attitudes are more than a mere mimêsis of the genuine reactive attitude emotionally toned (i.e. imitations of the overt behaviour, face, posture, voice, etc. involved in the ‘original’).46 If the sort of blame exemplified by an educational attitude is to belong to the same category as the sort of blame that the child

himself is meant to bestow upon others once he has acquired full membership into the moral community, it must be in thesame category as the latter in a sense that is strong enough for the educational attitude to promote education, and not the mere repetition of patterns of external behaviour. It follows from this that the Strawsonian theory is very far from giving us the whole truth about our moral responses to human agents.

Moreover, it is not even clear that Strawsonian himself can consistently claim that immaturity is the sort of agent-based consideration that inhibits in a sustained way (as psychopathy does) the S-reactive attitudes, and to conclude from this that children are not moral agents and our attitudes to them are not moral ones. Strawson himself 47 pictures the treatment of children involved in their moral education and character

46 _{For instance, in the way Aristotle thinks “most children‟s games should be mimêseis of the serious}

occupations of later life” (Pol. 1336a34).

47

A similar inconsistency is evidenced in Wallace, R. J. (1994): compare his claims at p. 118, p. 114, p. 155 with his claim at p. 167.

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formation as one that gradually, though ‘insensibly’, shifts between objectivity of attitude and genuine reactive attitude. Parents, he says: “are dealing with creatures who are potentially and increasingly capable both of holding, and being objects of, the full range of human and moral attitudes, but are not yet truly capable of either. The treatment of such creatures must therefore represent a kind of compromise, constantly shifting in one direction, between objectivity of attitude and developed human attitudes. Rehearsals insensibly modulate towards true performances.”48 For the purposes of the ongoing argument, we need not push the point further, for evenon Strawsonian grounds, it is not at all clear that children and the attitudes involved in their moral education are simply not moral (because non-S-reactive).

At any rate, the Strawsonian argument is not that educational attitudes (and their targets) are not moral, because they belong to a different category from the distinctively moral S-reactive attitudes - a claim that I have argued against in the previous two paragraphs, anyway - but rather that that they are not moral because instrumentalist, and I have offered (I think) convincing arguments against this. If I am right, these arguments undermine one of the main motivations for trying to find in Aristotle an exclusive concern with those actions that originate from a constituted, mature ethical character and with a sort of praise and blame that is exclusively bestowed upon agents in possession of mature ethical dispositions and the actions issuing from them: since the sort of praise and blame that is involved in moral education is thought by the Strawsonian interpreter to be on a par with manipulation and behavioural control, it is felt necessary to establish first that Aristotle displays such an exclusive concern with mature ethical agents and their ethically significant actions, in order to show that his concern is a concern with genuine moral responsibility. Severing moral education and educational attitudes from sheer behavioural control, manipulation and therapy, and from the sort of ‘objective’, detached attitudes involved in them, undermines this assumption by Strawson’s own standards. Moreover, and this is very important, it is now not so clear what this notion of a morally responsible agent really is. I will return to this point in Section E of Chapter 2.

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In order to secure the moral status of Aristotelian praise and blame, by claiming that they are retrospective in nature, the Strawsonian interpreter, it seems to me, can still try to show that Aristotelian praise and blame are attitudes that look back (as the S- reactive attitudes do) to the agent as someone who ‘deserves’ or ‘merits’ such an attitude in virtue of an action of his that has breached or fulfilled a moral demand (e.g. Strawson’s basic moral demand of goodwill).49 This is, as we noted in Section B, the other alternative open to the Strawsonian interpreter. In the next section, I want to suggest that this alternative is also closed.