Tamar Schapiro
Class 6.1 Schapiro - Growing Up
We have finished our unit of the course on Bernard Williams’ arguments inspired by the Makropulos Case. In the last unit the texts that we were reading were arguing directly about what an immortal life would be like. But for the rest of the semester we are going to think about that question only indirectly. We turn, in this unit of the course, to consider some of the features of different stages of life, in order to try to think about how those stages of life might be affected by the prospect of living forever.
Childhood, Parenting, and Growing Up
We start with childhood. The question that I think should interest us this week is whether living longer would mean that we live longer as adults, or instead because the amount of time that we have lived is always just a miniscule fraction of an infinite life, it takes much longer to outgrow the relationship that we have to our parents as we are growing up. The two authors who we are going to read this week offer contrasting answers to this question.
Tamar Schapiro
Tamar Schapiro is a professor of philosophy at MIT, after teaching at Stanford for fifteen years. Her philosophical research is largely concerned with agency and choice, and the paper that we will be reading, which is one of her most influential papers, fits into that pattern. In her paper, she argues that the answer to what it is to be a child explains why it is okay for parents to treat children in ways that it is often thought not to be permissible to treat other adults - ways that would be described as forms of paternalism. Her answer is that parents need to help their children develop certain capacities to be able to make decisions for themselves, and that as children develop those capacities, it becomes wrong to treat their decisions in those domains paternalistically, but so long as someone still lacks the full capacity to make certain kinds of choices on their own, there is nothing wrong with treating their choices in that domain in a paternalistic way.
Kant
You will find as you read Schapiro’s article that she talks a lot about Kant and about “Kantian” ideas. Kant is an important historical philosopher who was writing and teaching philosophy in Prussia in the late 18th century and is by most accounts one of the leading candidates for having had one of the largest impacts in the history of philosophical ideas. Fortunately, you do not need to know very much about Kant in order to understand what Schapiro is saying - in any case, she would not want you to accept anything on authority that it is what Kant would say. I can answer any questions that you have about Kant that get in the way of your engaging with the article in class.
Reading
As you read Schapiro’s article, “What Is a Child?”, ask yourself, “What does Schapiro’s view suggest about whether people might grow up faster or slower under different cultural conditions?” “Is there really an adult/child distinction?” “Am I what Schapiro would call ‘normatively immature’?” “Do my parents ever treat me in paternalistic ways?” and “How long do I think it will be appropriate for my parents to treat my decisions paternalistically?”