184 - Tamar Schapiro: What Philosophy Can(not) Tell us About Children, Adults, and the Root of All Evil

0:01Adani:Welcome back to the Stanford Psychology Podcast. I'm Adani and this week we have a special episode with what I believe is our first ever conversation with two hosts. I was really lucky to have Julie Heng join me in talking to Professor Tamar Schapiro. Julie is a student at Stanford Law School and knows a lot more about philosophy than I do. So I was especially excited to have her join me because our guest Tamar is a professor of philosophy at MIT. Tamar studies a wide range of things, from what it means to make good decisions in everyday life, to ethical theory and the history of ethics, especially Kant and the British moralists.

0:41Adani:And our conversation covered a similarly wide range of things, from Tamar's important work addressing why we treat children differently from adults, and we even chatted about whether and how reactivity might be the root of all evil. So I hope you'll have fun listening in. And without further ado, here's our conversation.

1:25Adani:really excited you're with us today, Tamora. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So in our little intro, the listeners heard a little bit about what you work on and you work on a lot of different things, right? So the history of ethics, you explore lots of different pieces of philosophy, including Kantian theories and things like that. And I actually wanted to start with a very simple question, which is also in the spirit of the paper we'll talk about later, probably, which is if you were to describe what you do to a 10-year-old child, how would you describe it? Like, what do you actually do for words?

1:59Adani:What does that look like? When it comes to philosophy, that's a hard question even to explain to an adult. So I'll try a 10-year-old child. And then so for a 10-year-old, I think, you know, you always try to start where the questioner is. So I would try to think of something the 10-year-old might be concerned about. So I might ask them, was there ever a time when you did the right thing, even though it was hard? And, you know, maybe try to get them to talk about something like that, like confessing up to having done something wrong or something. And then if they're willing to go deeper, I might say, how did you know that was the right thing?

2:44Was it because your parents said so? Do you do everything your parents tell you to do? What if what your parents said was something you thought was actually wrong? What would you do? How would you figure out what's right? And then just kind of say, I don't think about questions like that, but I think about them really hard and really long. So I'd start some way like that. But for older kids or for college freshmen, I sometimes allude to Socrates and I say, you know, Socrates was a guy who would walk around town asking people, what is justice? And they would say, I know what justice is. Justice is giving people what they're owed.

3:32And Socrates would come up with some kind of counter example, which makes that sound like a strange view or at least an ambiguous view. And eventually he would show them that they don't know what they're talking about. And then eventually people got irritated and put him to death. But philosophers are people who are interested in some fundamental concepts that we almost feel like we can't do without, like right and wrong and truth and knowledge and beauty and goodness. consciousness and we try to think really hard in a systematic way about what we could be doing and using those concepts and what ideally what role they could coherently play in our lives and why why do we need those concepts what are we like such that we need something to count as being good or right or true.

4:29And, you know, we think about that really hard. And sometimes we get somewhere.

4:38Adani:I actually really love this idea of starting with where the questioner is. I didn't quite expect that. It's really interesting. And so you mentioned these fundamental concepts and thinking hard about them. And you referenced, for example, Socrates, right? Maybe some of the listeners, if they've ever come across a piece of philosophical literature, they would see names of people who are long dead, like they're long gone. And how come we still care about the opinions of people who are not even living in the modern world? I'm also just curious how you would respond to people who are kind of confused about why it is the case that we still refer to all of these long gone opinions.

5:15Adani:How come they're still relevant? And that feels maybe somewhat unique to philosophy or is that the case for other fields too? How does that work? Yeah, I think that's a very good question. I believe in something like empirical science, I can really feel the force of that question because, you know, empirical science, presumably we are discovering more and more about the way nature works. And so presumably what you want is the cutting edge knowledge of how nature works and then you want to build on that. So looking at people who are dead and gone won't matter as much. Philosophy does not have a cutting edge in the same sense.

5:58The deep questions of philosophy are, I think, questions about these fundamental concepts and us as creatures who use and need them. And I think those questions, they don't get solved once and for all. I think of philosophy as more a conversation, and it can be a conversation across generations, across decades, across centuries. And one of the reasons I read people like Aristotle or Kant or Hume is that they provide examples of how to think very systematically and in a very sharp, analytical, rigorous way about some of these questions that are persistent in the human condition. And that we kind of have to keep answering and re-answering for ourselves.

7:00Adani:i wonder i wonder if that ever gets frustrating for you like the fact that you can't actually resolve some of these questions but it's things like oh how do we make good decisions in our lives do you have an answer i wonder what that's like for you and also actually julie has also done a bunch of philosophy i don't know if you have ever had a feeling of frustration like learning about philosophy and getting the sense of oh we actually can't arrive at a clear answer i'm curious what that is like for both of you. Yeah. Julie, you can answer. Well, I wanted to throw in a question actually and ask in the sense of conversation, both maybe it feels like there are some frustrating elements, but also are there ways that you feel like your own conceptions or thinking has evolved over time and ways in which that has been surprising?

7:47Yes. If I never felt an aha moment, if I never felt, as in the conversation, if I never felt like, oh, that person just said something that really clarifies it. If I never had that feeling, I wouldn't do this. I would just get totally frustrated. Some conversations are good and you feel like you're getting somewhere and some conversations are not that good. So you want to be meeting people and talking to people who give you a good conversation. And something I find hard to even explain to myself is I do feel like on some questions, I do get somewhere in my own thinking. And then there are other questions where I don't, but I often feel like I don't because I haven't talked to the right people long enough.

8:38So it's a funny thing. You certainly feel like you're getting somewhere. And one way to think about it is, I think there are some fundamentally different approaches and temperaments that philosophers have. So people who are more empirically minded and want to do philosophy in more of a, historically it's called an empiricist way, and then there are rationalists, and then there are people who try to combine these things. And I think in a way what philosophers do is if we think systematically, we develop maybe better over time, better versions of that temperament, like better, stronger theories and ways of critically thinking that are expressive of this sort of basic empiricist temperament or this basic rationalist temperament.

9:30And it may be that we're never going to settle divides, you know, which sort of camp or temperament is getting it right. But we can maybe get more sophisticated expressions of each one. for sure. Yeah, and I think especially trying to decouple sometimes the feeling that you fully understand something, the aha moment can feel like clarity, and we take that as some kind of signal. But I've always appreciated the spirit of philosophy to try to break down what actually are some of these assumptions, and we can take that into other empirical fields as well. Absolutely, absolutely. We are very ruthlessly analytical.

10:12Yeah.

10:14Adani:So maybe this all still sounds very abstract to people listening. And I actually think, so you mentioned that for some questions you do get somewhere. And part of the reason why I was really excited to talk today is that you have written, among other things, about the topic of how come we treat children differently from adults in many ways, like in everyday life, but also in legal contexts and so forth. And I think this will actually be a really fun way for us to hopefully illustrate how you can get somewhere on like hard questions. and I was taking a class this year on the reasonable person standard.

10:48Adani:The details don't really matter, but it's this law school class where you think about how we conceive of what it means to be a reasonable person in different situations. And I was particularly interested in this idea that in some ways we don't think of children as reasonable, at least under some definitions of the term. And for this class, I had to give a presentation. And for this presentation, I was trying to think of some instance in my own life where it felt like some of that tension came up. And so when I was a kid, when I was going to be six or seven or eight, I have a brother who's two years older than me.

11:19Adani:And he was reading Lord of the Rings. And I really wants to read it too, because my brother was so excited about it. But he was like, these are my books, get your own copy, I'm not going to lend it to you. And I was like, okay, that's kind of sad. But I guess I'll go to the library. So I went to the public library to try and borrow it. I looked for it, I found the book. I went up to the librarian, I was like, hey, I I would like to read this. Can I borrow this? And the librarian, she told me, you can't read this. You're too young. And I was really confused. I was like, what do you mean? I can read it, right?

11:47Adani:Like, why won't you let me read this book? And she's like, it's just not for you. You can try something else. And maybe when you're a little older, you can read this. And I thought that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. Like, the book doesn't say that I don't get to read it because I'm too old. Clearly, I have the confidence to read. So who are you to just impose this arbitrary rule? Obviously, I didn't have the words for it back then. But I guess it felt really frustrating, right? Like someone imposing a rule without any obvious reason other than they kind of felt like imposing it. And I think what I took away from your paper is that you actually start digging into some of the justifications for why, in different ways, adult judgment with overruled child judgment is very broadly put.

12:26Adani:But I'm curious if you can just talk a little bit about whether and how you think that example might relate to some of the things you have thought about in terms of childhood and personhood and why we treat children differently from adults in many different ways. Yeah, good. I love it. Yeah, something that might surprise you is that one of my motives for thinking about this really came from a concern to make sure we are giving children as much freedom as they're entitled to. because unless we know why we're limiting it at law, we also won't know what the limits of our authority are. You know, I just needed a story about how does this work?

13:13And I wasn't ready to give up on parents. So it was like, well, what would it look like if we gave up on adult authority completely? You know, and I kind of play that out. Well, then we could give children advice, But, you know, we wouldn't like have to raise them if they didn't want to be raised. You know, we wouldn't have to send them to school. It's not just that we couldn't send them to their rooms, but also they could waive offers of assistance, you know, if they didn't want them. But of all kinds. And I think that would sort of be madness, right? So if we start with the idea that, well, there's some things that we are entitled to do two or four children that we can't do two or four adults without their consent, you know, well, how far does that authority extend so that we don't overstep that limit, you know?

14:06And the other source of the concern in my work, it stemmed from working in classrooms. So before I started grad school, but after college, I worked with a nonprofit math program. It happened to be in the Bay Area called Project Seed. I don't think it's around anymore, but it was a fantastic program and founded by a genius who's no longer with us named Bill Johns, who was really wonderful. And I was working with kids in these classrooms, third, fourth, fifth graders, and sometimes they were kind of bouncing off the walls. And I was aware, I want to respect these human beings, but they're making it hard for me to respect them as human beings.

14:47What is going on here? I just can't treat them like adults. It's going to be insane. But why is it that I can treat them differently from adults? And what are the limits? what allows me to and what are the limits.

15:04Adani:I think there are a lot of different things in there. Maybe before we dig more into the conceptual stuff, I'm wondering, part of my experience, and I'm sure listeners can also think of their own experiences in their own lives, right? Where they felt like actually they were capable of certain things as minors that the adults around them thought they weren't capable of or they, again, overruled them in some sense. and in part it feels like there can be a valid feeling of frustration and being misjudged at the same time as you say it can have negative consequences to just treat minors in a way you might an adult if you from that other vantage point truly feel like the decision you would be making for them would be in many ways in their best interest more so than if they were to make it for themselves i wonder maybe two things for one what was it like for you to be on the receiving end of that if you had any instances of being on the receiving end of that.

15:58Adani:And on the other hand, in the paper, you lay out how this is actually like a glass half full, glass half empty kind of situation. And I wonder if you can just tell us a bit more about what the half empty part is and what the half full part is of that. Yeah. So to continue more in the biographical stuff, I had a very respectful, very respectful parents who treated us, gave us a lot of autonomy and a lot of respect. And really, I was outraged at seeing how some of my friends' parents treated them and restricted their decisions, even to the point where they had to lie to their parents just to, you know, I didn't, my parents never put us in that position where we would have to lie just to do reasonable things.

16:46And I thought that was terrible. So really, my concern really It comes more from, I want to defend children's freedom, but I don't think we can do that without having an honest discussion about adult authority. And also, I don't think the justification for making decisions for children is just that it's for their own good because adults are allowed to make their own mistakes. So the question is, why aren't children allowed to make their own mistakes? That's a harder thing to defend. And as far as the glass half full, half empty part, I just try to describe our ordinary practice of kind of dividing the world into adults and children with different kinds of treatment for each as a glass half full, glass half empty thing.

17:36The glass half full part is, I think we all recognize children aren't just property. They aren't just things. They have standing to make claims on us. They make claims for us to protect them. They have legitimate complaints against us if we don't take care of them in certain ways. The glass half empty part is that they don't have full rights to participate as equals. They can consult with us, maybe express their opinions. But ultimately, in lots of matters, the adults are the deciders, not to mention the fact that we can force them to go to school. We can force them to gain skills that we think they're going to need in growing up, even if they don't want to learn those skills.

18:24And those are just some facts. And I was trying to say, well, you know, what are, I mean, it's one thing to look at kids as biological organisms. And I think oftentimes we have a tendency when we start talking about children rather than adults, we go biological. Oh, they're organisms at this stage of development, blah, blah, blah. As adults, we don't always talk about that way. We talk about ourselves in terms of rights and responsibilities, but talk about children in terms of biological organism. And my questions start from the idea that, yes, we're all biological organisms, but that doesn't answer all the questions about how we should treat each other.

19:10And so if I'm someone who takes herself to have rights and responsibilities, what am I dealing with when I deal with a child who has sort of limited rights and also going along with it, more limited responsibilities? Limit their responsibilities in the sense that I am not going to put a five-year-old on trial. I mean, there are some crazy cases, but I'm not going to put a five-year-old on trial for doing something wrong. Or I'm not going to feel kind of indignation when a child does something wrong. I'm going to feel disappointed, but they have to be trained, right? Whereas with an adult, I might feel indignation.

19:52I expect you to take responsibility for your life. with a child, they're still in training, right? And so the question is, how do I conceive of that sort of person I'm interacting with when I'm in that standpoint of rights and responsibilities? And would it be possible for you to contextualize a bit how children have been thought of in the past and now, whether in that more biological organism-oriented mode or others, like thinkers from Kant or before to now. Yeah. So I am not a historian of actual cultures or really a historian of ideas as such. And history is really hard, and I'm not going to make any proclamations about that.

20:40But I know some people, there have been books that make claims that childhood was invented in a certain time. It's hard for me to imagine, though I invite people who know about these things to tell me otherwise, a culture or times in history of a certain culture where there wasn't some sort of distinction made between adults and children and where there wasn't some sort of idea of adults having special responsibilities to care for the children and the children having limited participation and limited responsibilities in the decision-making of the community and over their lives. That bare outline seems to me pretty constant.

21:32At the same time, where you draw the line or at what age someone is determined to have crossed the line, that may vary quite a bit. And what's expected of young people on their way to adulthood can vary quite a bit. And how adulthood is conceived can vary quite a bit. But that there is some sort of line and some sort of mitigated rights and responsibilities associated with it, that I don't think that varies a lot.

22:11Adani:For those listening who are really interested in digging deeper into this, there is actually what I thought was a pretty nice, at least high-level historical outline on this. And it so happens the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, I'm not sponsored by them. I'll link that in the description. And they were really fascinating, also just, I don't know what you would call them, like maybe ethnographic projects on what did it look like to be a child throughout history and different periods and there are lots of interesting aspects and also sad aspects of this such as like well child labor for example was pretty commonplace for a lot of history and even today is still commonplace in certain settings right so there's lots in there to think about and i'll link some of those resources i was wondering since we started with this question basically getting somewhere for some of those questions and this is an everyday question we have to ask ourselves, like children are all around us, how do we treat them?

23:01Adani:And I wonder, how do we know whether this approach is actually working, right? Maybe this goes back to this kind of temperament thing you alluded to with empiricism and so forth. Like, how can we tell? I mean, Julie works a lot in like policy. And so in policy, people care about outcomes. Like, how can we evaluate whether our current way of doing things is actually working? So what is your view on this? And I remember you actually also talking about how it's not just the case that adult role is something that is just inherently better and necessarily better. Like we have to also back that up somehow.

23:33Adani:So how do you think about all that? Okay. So the first question, if what we're talking about is how it's ethically appropriate to treat children, I'm not sure what working would be. You know, if I'm trying to produce a result, then I can test to see whether I've produced the result. But how do we know we're getting it right ethically. I'm not sure in general how we know that, but I mean, one would hope that when one gets it right ethically, everybody flourishes. It's an interesting question why one would think that, but okay. So I'm not really sure. I would like to think if children end up healthy and happy, we're probably doing something ethically right.

24:19Hope so. Adult rule over children is not inherently better. What I meant by that is lots of adults act like children in a pejorative sense. Now, they're still adults in that they are responsible for not acting like children, but they still let themselves act like children. And one of those ways is, I call it reactivity in later work. And by that, I mean, they get led around by their fears and desires instead of trying to make decisions in a deliberate way on the basis of just principles. And when adults try to raise their children in a reactive way, acting out of fear and anger, and even a kind of compassion that's unprincipled, you know, there can be overly compassionate parents who protect their children from everything because they are so afraid or they are so, They love their children so much, so to speak.

25:18And I think to that extent, they're not acting like adults. They're just letting their inclinations take the lead. And when adults parent reactively, I don't think it is giving children what they're owed. And I also don't think it's good for children.

25:43this.

25:43Adani:I think we can all relate to some extent to this feeling of, oh, sometimes it's actually kind of fun to be irresponsible and to act like a child. That's certainly in a way that would harm others. But I don't know, maybe you would go and sit on the swing on the playground instead of doing your office work or, you know, whatever it is. And so what is my question here? I think for one, I wonder if you have any view on why it might be that we still have that. Arguably, I don't know if this is actually true, whether most people feel that, but I would imagine so. We still have that inclination sometimes.

26:16Adani:And I guess maybe on the flip side, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but there are things that children get away with in quotation marks that adults don't, and that can have its benefits for children, right? And I wonder what some examples of that are that you find particularly interesting or that you would want to map out a bit more. Yeah. In response to your first remarks, it's interesting. There are wonderful things about being a kid. And I found it a little surprising. I think when this article and then a related article called What is a Child came out, there was what I think of as a romantic backlash, where the idea was I was read as if I was saying that childhood was somehow bad.