The importance of sentiment in promoting reasonableness in children

The Importance of Sentiment in Promoting Reasonableness in Children

Michael S. Pritchard

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy

Western Michigan University

Anthem Press

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

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Copyright © Michael S. Pritchard 2022

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-627-7 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-627-1 (Pbk)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Preface

1. Reasonable Children?

2. Thomas Reid on the Seeds of Morality

3. Smith’s Impartial Spectator

4. Reason and Sentiment in Morality

5. The Premise of a Promise

6. Conversation and Critical Thinking

Concluding Thoughts

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book connects my long-standing interest in the philosophical thinking of children with the writings of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume that focus on crucial aspects of the development of children.

My work in this area has been aided by many friends, colleagues, students, and children. I want especially to thank Jacob Castlebury for helping me facilitate an online summer 2021 graduate seminar at Western Michigan University in which students, including Jacob, helpfully commented on the penultimate draft of this book. I also want especially to thank Randall Curren, James Hood, Mary Hood, Karen Mizell, Deborah Mower, Jeff Nielson, Glen Pettigrove, Linda Potter, Alan Preti, Sabine Roesser, Wade Robison, Sally Simmons, Stephen Simmons, Keith Snedegar, Phyllis Vandenberg, and John Wright.

DEDICATION

My greatest thanks go to Elaine Englehardt, who besides holding the title of Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Utah Valley University, is my loving spouse, a frequent collaborator with me, a constant supporter of my efforts on this project and so much else, and is there for me when I need convincing that what I have to say is worth saying. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

PREFACE

More than 25 years ago I argued in Reasonable Children that children, as children, can acquire qualities of reasonableness.¹ In doing so, I appealed to children’s natural philosophical curiosity. Here I offer further support for this still under-acknowledged view by discussing the writings of three celebrated eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume, as well as sermons by Bishop Joseph Butler, the English predecessor they all admired.

More than 65 years ago I read the following words in my 9th grade world history book: TIME DOES NOT MARCH ON. TIME IS. In large print, with all letters capitalized, these two sentences stood alone, surrounded by empty space. This interruption of the standard pages of historical narrative in small print with occasional pictures and special tables was simply passed over in class as we plodded through the seemingly endless text. However, I still remember silently reflecting on what it could possibly mean. Although about history, it is not a statement one would expect to find in a standard history book. Perhaps something like it could be found in a book on philosophy of history.

However, there was no discussion of this unusual statement in my class. This neglect of opportunities for philosophical discussion in pre-college classrooms was standard at the time. (Unfortunately, despite notable exceptions, this is still the case.) Alerted by friends that taking a philosophy course was best delayed until one had taken at least a year’s worth of college classes, my formal introduction to philosophy was not until my sophomore year at Alma College (Mich.). I then discovered that I had already been captivated by philosophical questions for some time on my own. This encouraged me for the first time to ignore the large clock on the wall while class was in session. It also led classmate Bob White and me to continue discussing philosophical issues on our way to our next class, Introduction to Economics, which was grounded in the questionable philosophical assumption that human motivation is, in the end, exclusively self-interested. So, these two classes marked the beginning of my long venture into the academic world of philosophy.

Nevertheless, I was not well prepared for a question a friend asked me early in my college teaching career: Do you think that philosophy is for children as well as adults? I knew, of course, that children were sometimes mentioned in philosophical discussions, but my friend was asking whether children could, or perhaps should, be encouraged to discuss philosophical issues themselves. Taken by surprise, my immediate response to this question was, I don’t know; I haven’t thought about that.

I haven’t thought about that? Why not? I later asked myself? What about my own philosophical reflections as a child? What about my two children, then ages 4 and 7? Had I not been listening to them? What about my other significant area of undergraduate concentration, psychology, including the special interest I had developed in theories of children’s learning? Admittedly, the emphasis in my psychology classes was typically on the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner, but I spent a fair amount of time reacting critically to its methodological assumptions and its puzzling attempts to avoid relying on anything with a mentalistic flavor.

Reflecting further on my friend’s question, I was embarrassed by my inability to provide even the beginning of a response at the time. But I was determined not to let matters end there. Fortunately, this incident occurred at about the same time that Matthew Lipman’s novel, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery² began receiving significant media attention because its use in middle school classrooms in Newark, New Jersey was seeming to have a positive impact on the reading and reasoning skills of students.³ This novel is one of many that Lipman wrote in which children of all ages are portrayed as engaging meaningfully in philosophical reflection. Harry, along with its accompanying, massive manual for guiding philosophical discussions with children, encouraged me to make a serious inquiry into whether philosophy could be a suitable subject for children as well as adults.

I spent the next several years visiting elementary school classes and hosting after-school programs in a small public library to discuss philosophical ideas with children. My first book, Philosophical Adventures With Children⁴ chronicles my eye-opening experiences during those first few years.

Although my second book on this topic, Reasonable Children, drew some of its support from Thomas Reid’s writings on practical ethics, I had yet to become acquainted with contemporary Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), whose several editions were composed at the same time he was writing his more celebrated Wealth of Nations. Reading TMS led me to compare and contrast Smith’s views with those of his good friend David Hume and Hume’s notable critic, Reid. The resulting set of reflections in this current book is a revisiting of several major concerns of Reasonable Children in light of some of my subsequent work on these three thinkers.

My special focus is on their views about the moral development of children. I regard each of the three, in their differing but sometimes complementary ways, as welcoming the sorts of refinements of sentiments that play a fundamental role in the moral development of children. A key question for these philosophers is how best to characterize relationships between reason and sentiment in that development. I argue that each can be regarded as supporting the general view that the moral development of children can fairly be characterized in terms of the degree to which they are becoming reasonable persons.

As in Reasonable Children, the first chapter of this book offers some basic thoughts about what features of persons might qualify them as reasonable, as well as some reflections on the extent to which children can exhibit some, if not all, of these features. Then I turn to the task of determining to what extent each of these three Scots might be called on to support the view that children, as children, should be assisted in moving in this direction.

1 Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

2 Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC), 1970.

3 See my Philosophy for Children (2022), online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a discussion of Lipman and IAPC.

4 University Press of America, 1985 (now out of print).

Chapter 1

REASONABLE CHILDREN?

Following the lead of their English predecessor Joseph Butler, ­eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Adam Smith identified key elements in the makeup of young children that support the idea that, while still children, they can acquire fundamental features of reasonableness. This book is a revisiting of their accounts, with particular attention given to how their views can support current efforts to promote the philosophical thinking of children.

In contrast to Reid and Smith, both of whom attended carefully to Butler’s earlier writings on resentment and forgiveness, David Hume did not discuss these reflections. This is so despite his admiration of Butler’s work and his familiarity