Rationality and Paternalism

The answers are known in advance; only the questions and arguments remain to be found.¹

If philosophers know anything, it would seem that they know that the way adults treat children is justified. This is not perhaps so surprising: the nature of human society makes the relations in question pervasive and all but inescapable. And if one were to begin seriously to doubt that adults can justly regiment children one might well find the justice of the conditions of most people's lives in any known polity hard to discern. Far simpler to 'develop the notion, which has much commonsense backing, that a person's rationality or lack of it is a relevant factor in determining whether he is a suitable subject for paternalist intervention'. So Mr. Scarre in response to Mr. Schrag,² finding some more bad reasons for what he believes upon instinct.

'Rationality' and its cognates are contemporary shibboleths, promissory notes on a bank that has most probably failed. My impression is that despite widespread dissatisfaction with it the only reasonably clear account we have of rationality is the economists', means-end, model (and its analogues for beliefs and subordinate values) which I shall label Zweckrationalität in deference to Weber. Such a notion is at any rate not far behind Scarre's remark that 'rational actions are those which are directed to maximizing the expected utility of the agent' (p. 123). For anyone concerned, as both Schrag and Scarre are, with a person's liberty and right to non-interference, rationality so construed is a fairly good example of what I call a minimal educational value: if A promotes B's Zweckrationalität then A is not at the same time foisting any other values upon B. In the real world I doubt that any teaching encounter could be so purely minimal, but I hope that the idea of a minimal educational value, and its relevance to a liberal approach to teaching, can be grasped without more ado.

But, notoriously, there is a danger in using the Zweckrationalität model of insinuating values, of A's regarding B as irrational because B fails to pursue some end, not because B fails to adopt B's maximal means to whatever ends B happens to have. Weber is reproached for ascribing a desire for increasing production to peasants who clearly preferred increasing leisure; Scarre seems to avoid such a blatant endorsement of substantive capitalist values, but the appearances are misleading; and, as required to 'justify' paternalism, it is the adults if not the entrepreneurs who turn out to be rational and the kids irrational.

'Children are inexperienced in the ways of the world and are incapable of forming "life plans" or systematic purposes; indeed, the capacity to form coherent purposes and the development of the will-power to stick by them are part of what distinguishes adults from children' (pp. 119-120). How convenient then that the only other feature of rational action that Scarre lights upon, over and above the bare skeleton of Zweckrationalität, is that 'actions backed by rational decisions typically manifest themselves as elements of a systematic approach adopted by an agent for maximizing his good' (p. 123). This is prima facie as formal, aseptically logical, a requirement as the consistency that Zweckrationalität focuses on, but its apparent consequences should give us pause. Where is the 'systematic approach' or 'comprehensive system of purpose' of 'carpe diem!', or 'consider the lilies of the field!', or, as some members of my present culture-circle say, 'Jah Rastafari/the IMF will provide'? Or again Marx's ideal man who hunts, fishes, criticizes.... seems not himself to be over-concerned with his own long-term purposes. Speaking as a would-be Parfit-type person, I can only testify to my marked reluctance to adopt any systematic approach to the good of my future selves, apart from laying down the odd case of wine. Perhaps we should all be condemned as irrational (or at least condemned under some perhaps more perspicuous concept); my present point is only that what may look like a formal constraint on rationality, what may therefore seem not to allow for the imposition of one substantive value for another one, is by no means so harmless, does in fact carry damning implications for positions that might be unassailably zweckrational.

If I am right, either Scarre must defend the addition to Zweckrationalität of this preference for sober deferred gratification as yielding an acceptable liberal principle for deciding on paternalist intervention, or he should admit that adult paternalism remains to be justified. With respect to the first option, while it might be true that because most people (most of whom may be adult) have a conception of their future, a sense of responsibility will urge some kind of systematic planning upon them in some respects, this does not seem likely to me to be sufficient for generating the exclusions Scarre needs, even with his qualifications on liberty as an end in itself. Liberty may be curtailed, he thinks, if it will fail to lead to happiness, but immediate gratifications are cases, indeed for many people paradigm cases, of achieving happiness. One might object that there may well be an element of parasitism in considering lilies or wandering in drug-crazed ecstasy around Strawberry Fields, but again parasitic happiness is still happiness, and the outcome of a Millian experiment in life-styles might be that we should attempt to institutionalize the possibility of being that kind of parasite: everyone can be a parasite some of the time. Rather than rebut defences yet to be made it is this last point that I would stress: Scarre, like Schrag, is very unwilling to consider possibilities that fall between present regimentation and an impossibly extreme libertarian position in which one treats infants like adult aristocrats; thus he argues ‘it is right to curtail liberty. . . , for allowed complete freedom from adults' coercion it is hardly credible that they should achieve happiness (or even, in many cases, survive at all)' (p. 122). Comparative anthropology, let alone philosophical science fiction, is enough to show that our alternatives are not as bleak as that.

If, however, no defence is offered for planning for retirement then the treatment of children reverts to the pattern of an unacceptable infringement of rights such as Scarre concedes in the case of an adult akratic alcoholic. We may not forcibly cure such a person because 'by doing so we should insult him by imposing our plans for his life on him when, as an adult, he has plans and policies of his own' (p. 123). The effect of my criticism is to disallow the escape phrase 'as an adult', but then, of course, since children do have plans and purposes of their own, who are we to change them? We may continue to grant, for the sake of the argument, Scarre's contention that children lack 'systems of purpose', but we now see that to insist on having them is after all to insist on certain kinds of life rather than others, to go far beyond a minimal educational value, and is not just a matter of getting more efficiently what you want already. So, as the argument now stands, we cannot agree that such a lack is sufficient to ground paternalistic intervention.³

It seems to me that rather than hope for a moral whitewashing of our relations with children we should acknowledge the secondary place occupied by moral thought in our relationships with each other.⁴ Because moral thought is forced from us by the need, in real situations, to decide between the possibilities realism requires it to take certain things for granted; principles can be formulated that have to be applied within an area the principles do not themselves pick out. If we want an explanation of why the area is shaped as it is we can perhaps begin to sketch one: in a note in this journal, Professor Young indicated some of the biological reasons for the structure of adult-child relations 'This long period of childhood serves to allow us to use our large brains to acquire wisdom of all sorts including social conventions and language.... But in order to learn, the individual must be obedient, that is to say he must remain small and subservient to his elders. He would not behave properly if he was large and in sexual rivalry with his teachers.'⁵ For a sociological gloss on the same power relations I would refer you to the stimulating, if all but unreadable, work of Bourdieu and Passeron.⁶ Of course, explaining why there are differences between adults and children is not justifying those differences, nor are all the factors alluded to in such explanations unalterable, but drawing attention to them does at least give one a realistic view of the setting of moral thought about children, it indicates the boundaries within which most moral reflection goes on but which the principles such thought invokes cannot themselves underwrite; it thereby also draws our attention to what we may want to change in such relations. The salutary point for moral reflection of Scarre's sort is that this is the field morality finds itself in, not one it defines for itself, so there is no reason to expect (and some reason to expect the opposite) that morally acceptable principles will be able to justify the field's being this way rather than that. This is not to despair of change—many of the factors are changeable, in particular social arrangements are highly elastic, at least when considered divorced from a social totality—but neither is it to expect the millennium.

Footnotes

1 Trevor Pateman, 'Class, Consciousness, Control, Communication', Radical Philosophy 5 (Summer 1973), 27.

2 Geoffrey Scarre, 'Children and Paternalism', Philosophy 55 (1980), 123. Scarre is replying to Francis Schrag, 'The Child in the Moral Order', Philosophy 52 (1977), 167-177, who likewise desperately wishes to bolster up the moral significance of the adult/child distinction, at the cost even of a type of 'noble lie'. For my comments on this, and for a slightly different development of other points made by Schrag, see 'The Key of the Door', Educational Philosophy and Theory 11 (1979), 23-34.

3 Scarre's phrase 'when their irrationality threatens their well-being' (p. 124) is crucially ambiguous between unproblematic cases of legitimate interference where ignorance or insouciance is going to lead to unforeseen and definitely unwanted disaster and cases where the person interfering decides for himself what is to count as well-being. Scarre needs a justification for a general regimentation such as, it seems, the justification of the former type of interference will never yield.

4 I have attempted to say a little about this conception of morality in the article cited above and to argue for its consonance with Mackie's version of subjectivism in 'Subjectivism and Seriousness', Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980), 97-1O7.

5 J.Z. Young, 'The Pineal Gland', Philosophy 48 (1973), 72.

6 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by Richard Nice (London: Sage Publications, 1977).

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