Being a caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable parent (about factual child-development science) should matter most when deciding to procreate. Therefore, parental failure seems to occur as soon as the solid decision is made to have a child even though the parent-in-waiting cannot be truly caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable.
Parents, including fathers, really need to be emotionally sound/strong AND knowledgeable about child-development science. I find there remains a naïve perception resulting in the perilous implementation of procreative ‘rights’ as though the potential parent will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture the child’s naturally developing bodies, minds and needs.
In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
Although society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children, not even the plainly incompetent and reckless procreator, it can educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those intending to remain childless. And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, such child-development science curriculum should be about understanding, not just information memorization. It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society.
If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?
Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating, especially when child abuse is involved. And some people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving children largely as obedient property.
Yet, largely owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, however, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’
“If we really know something, we should be able to explain it.”
But,“We cannot explain what we truly know, and we do not quite believe what we think we can explain.”
-- --
We Always Do the Best We Can
Why do people act the way they do? Actions are the things we do; motives are inner forces behind the actions, whether or not we really know what these forces are. Careless actions lead to careless habits, in the face of which, motives can be forgotten, ignored, or even denied.
We typically object not to the motives of others but to their actions and habits. Compared to actions, motives are private. Even if someone tells us their motives, we might not understand or believe what they say; after all, saying things is just another form of action. In any case, it is impossible to completely explain all our motives for any given action.
"Think of all individual beings as part of your world."
"Think of yourself as all life everywhere throughout all time."
What would it feel like to know that all beings ever to exist have always done the best they could? Is this difficult to imagine?
Do you often think you should have done better? This is called second-guessing, and it is a bad habit. We have all been criticized for not doing our best, and we have all criticized others and ourselves in the same way, but it is a false criticism. We are limited beings with limited ability to examine our motives for any given action. We have many bad habits, and the circumstances of life are difficult and deceptive. Our motives are complex and often contradict one another.
All children are born with the desire to do good things and to do the best they can at all times, even when they are only playing or just trying to behave badly. Beyond that, motives become complicated and contradictory. The original motive, to do good and always do the best we can, always remains; but because of other conflicting and confusing motives, our actions and habits become difficult to understand.
An example: Edward committed a crime. We caught Edward and punished him for his crime.
We all do the best we can. There are no exceptions. This defines all motivation from the deepest core of our being. We might judge our actions and other motives as good or bad, but we always do the best we can in everything we do, even if we know at the moment we act that what we are doing will cause harm.
"What if you knew and understood all of the motives behind every human action?"
You would see that everyone always does the best they can whether or not they always believe so about themselves. Even deliberately harming another person arises from the motive to do the best we can; it was the best we could do in the moment when we believed we had to do it now, even though in the minds of so many others what we did was wrong.
-- --
All beings are gifted with a wordless, thoughtless memory of limitless being, which is by its nature perfectly good, without exception.
Why do we forget, ignore, or even deny the unchanging reality of this being? Because we became addicted to pretending it isn’t so; because we learned to think that this is bad and that is good; and because we applied this addiction to everything.
Do not second-guess your motives, your thoughts, or your actions. Learn from everything that happens. Take responsibility for what you do. Reflect on your life. Know that you have always done the best you could, no matter how good or bad the result.
[This may be a bit off-topic but...] A few decades ago, I learned from two Latter Day Saints missionaries that their church’s doctrine teaches that the biblical ‘lake of fire’ meant for the ‘wicked’ actually represents an eternal spiritual burning of guilt over one’s corporeal misdeeds. Bemused, I said: “That’s it? An afterlife guilty conscience?”
During the many years since then, however, I’ve discovered just how formidable ‘burning guilt’ can be. I’ve also considered and decided that our brain's structural/chemical flaws are what we basically are while our soul is confined within our physical, bodily form. The human soul may be inherently good, on its own; but trapped within the physical body, notably the corruptible brain, oftentimes the soul’s purity may not be able to shine through.
To be clear, the more dysfunctional or physiologically flawed the brain that the soul happens to be born thus confined with (call it the luck of the draw), the worse the corporeal behavior. Once again, the soul's purity remains the same. The soul is the same before and after the corporeal existence; its purity would not diminish, regardless of what the brain has us do.
Therefore, upon the physical death of a ‘wicked’ person (Hitler being a good example), not only would he be 100 percent liberated from the monstrous thoughts and emotions that blighted his physical life and essentially resulted in his atrocious actions — his soul or post-death consciousness would also exist with an unwanted awareness of the immense amount of needless suffering he had deliberately caused. He may then be left wondering, ‘Why was I so angry, so much of the time? Oh, the horrible things I did!'
... Then again, maybe the human soul goes where it belongs or where it feels comfortable and right — be it ‘hell’, ‘heaven’, somewhere in between.
The proposal that either determinists or free will proponents are right can be called an imperfect exclusive disjunction. A perfect exclusive disjunction is a proposition of the form “p or q,” where “p” and “q” represent alternatives that can't both be true and can't both be false, e.g., “Either God exists or God doesn't exist” (assuming “God” has the same meaning in both alternatives). The exclusive alternatives aren't determinism and free will, but determinism and indeterminism Three main positions on this issue are: (1) libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism), sometimes identified with indeterminism and understood as the view that human behavior is uncaused, in violation of the law of universal causation; (2) hard determinism, the belief that prior causes and physical laws predetermine all events including human behavior; (3) compatibilism (aka soft determinism), the opinion that free will and determinism are compatible, i.e., that both can obtain. The version of libertarianism I described implies that all human behavior consists of spontaneous, random, chance events that are unpredictable in principle, like one interpretation of events in quantum mechanics. In that case, no behavior is controlled by any human. So one can't help doing whatever one does, and no humans can be responsible for behavior they can't control. I gather that you're a hard determinist, but that position has the same problem. If all human behavior is predetermined by antecedent causes, no persons can avoid doing whatever they're caused to do by forces beyond their control. Contrary to your position, hard determinism would free us from accountability.
I write an entire article to help people escape the determinism/free will false dichotomy, and you bring it up again as if you didn't read the article.
You say children can't be held accountable because they can't control themselves. If hard determinism is correct, neither can adults. Another problem: If hard determinism is correct, people can't help what they believe about the determinism/indeterminism issue. It seems odd that causal conditions in the universe would force people to unintentionally take opposing sides in the debate. Morality requires us to behave as we ought to behave. The principle “ought implies can,” widely accepted by moral philosophers, implies that if one ought to behave a certain way, one can behave that way, which further implies one must be able to control one's behavior. On that view, if one can't control one's behavior, one can't be held morally responsible for it. As you suggest, morality requires “self-accountability and control over the self.” But that requires both determinism and free will. That is, one's behavior can't be caused exclusively by prior events outside one's control, but must be self-determined. Self-determinism is possible because no antecedent event can cause anyone to do anything before he or she exists. Once a person exists, the relevant causal conditions are not merely external; they include conditions internal to the person. Indeed, the totality of internal conditions that influence one's behavior are what constitutes a person. So one's behavior is a consequence of both internal and external conditions, and the internal conditions (chiefly mental ones) are under one's control. For whatever it's worth, according to the most recent PhilPapers survey, a majority of philosophers accept compatibilism. I urge you to do the same.
You objection is addressed in the article. You didn't read it in full. Plus, I never used the term "hard determinism" which you didn't define, and which dishonestly strawmans my arguments. Let me try again: children are not accountable because they have no control over their feelings. Adults do. |You "urge" me to accept compatibilism. Isn't this what my article is about? Your essay-long comments suggest you haven't.
Your claim that I didn't read your article in full is mistaken. I read it several times to ensure that I understood your position before commenting on it. You claim I didn't define “hard determinism,” but I defined it as “the belief that all events, including human behavior, are predetermined by prior causes and physical laws.” Unlike you, I don't claim you didn't read my comment in full, because I realize one can read something that fails to register. I mentioned you said children can't be held accountable because they can't control themselves, but I didn't see “children are not accountable because they have no control over their feelings, Adults do.” In particular, I didn't see the words “Adults do.” Perhaps I missed those two words, which would have clarified your position, but I was unable to find them after several readings. Where are they? I didn't claim you used the term “hard determinism.” I said, “I gather that you're a hard determinist.” “Gather” means infer or understand. Apparently, I misunderstood your position, but I doubt that's entirely my fault, because you used the term “determinism” several times, but nowhere did I see you claim humans have free will. Nor did I see any mention of compatibilism or the words “determinism/free will false dichotomy.” I'm glad to learn from your criticism of me that you agree that determinism/free will is a false dichotomy and that you accept compatibilism. If you had said so in your article, I wouldn't have bothered with my lengthy comment. Unlike you, I won't insult you by claiming you made a strawman out of my position. I spent a lot of valuable time writing my comment in an attempt to be helpful, but apparently, all I did was annoy you. I apologize for my attempt to help. I won't make that mistake again on your website.
No, you didn't "want to help". Help with what? Strawman and misrepresent my position on something I pour my heart and soul into? Obviously you were triggered by something. I don't care enough to try to understand. Guess you're an abusive parent making excuses for yourself. You've shown disrespect and arrogance with your disingenuous comment from the start. You are wasting my time, adding nothing to the conversation other than gaslighting. Yes, please leave.
It is always easier to understand bad behavior when you are not taking the brunt of them. For example, your father's behavior to you is less understandable to you than the bad behavior of child number one's parents to him. Undoubtedly, your father was mistreated by his father. Plus, maybe, your father might have been born with a bent towards being hypercritical. The belief that all children are born pure and undefiled ignores the human condition. Everyone makes mistakes, including children.
It's not nature versus nurture; it's nature plus nurture. Otherwise, we would ALL be either good or bad. We are all good and bad. The balance between good and bad varies with each person. And, no one is perfectible. Even if we could identify every bad behavior and somehow learn to correct it, does anyone honestly think that, eventually, all bad behavior could be eliminated? Using scientific methodology, you could estimate that it would take millions or billions of years of incremental change to evolve into perfect human beings.
But, during evolutional time, some would incur injuries from accidents and illnesses that would inject opportunities for misunderstandings that could lead to bad behaviors. Feeling envious toward others who haven't experienced your bad luck could understandably produce feelings that lead to rude or vicious behavior toward others. Or, blaming fate, or God, could result in animosity toward others. We are stretching credulity coming up with "explanations" for behaviors that we try to understand. Is it possible that some behaviors might be inexplicable? Might some come from indiscoverable defects? From indiscoverable outside influences?
HINT: we don't know everything. And we probably can't know everything. And, we don't want to admit that we don't know everything. Or our capacity to know everything. We don't even like to admit how little of everything we do know. Nor how much of what we know is wrong.
Still, you can’t hold children as accountable as adults. All children are pure until they are corrupted by abusing adults. Yes, those adults were also abused as children, but as adults they have only explanations, not excuses.
Love this 👌
You are why I write
Being a caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable parent (about factual child-development science) should matter most when deciding to procreate. Therefore, parental failure seems to occur as soon as the solid decision is made to have a child even though the parent-in-waiting cannot be truly caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable.
Parents, including fathers, really need to be emotionally sound/strong AND knowledgeable about child-development science. I find there remains a naïve perception resulting in the perilous implementation of procreative ‘rights’ as though the potential parent will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture the child’s naturally developing bodies, minds and needs.
In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
Although society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children, not even the plainly incompetent and reckless procreator, it can educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those intending to remain childless. And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, such child-development science curriculum should be about understanding, not just information memorization. It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society.
If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?
Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating, especially when child abuse is involved. And some people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving children largely as obedient property.
Yet, largely owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, however, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’
A True Paradox:
“If we really know something, we should be able to explain it.”
But,“We cannot explain what we truly know, and we do not quite believe what we think we can explain.”
-- --
We Always Do the Best We Can
Why do people act the way they do? Actions are the things we do; motives are inner forces behind the actions, whether or not we really know what these forces are. Careless actions lead to careless habits, in the face of which, motives can be forgotten, ignored, or even denied.
We typically object not to the motives of others but to their actions and habits. Compared to actions, motives are private. Even if someone tells us their motives, we might not understand or believe what they say; after all, saying things is just another form of action. In any case, it is impossible to completely explain all our motives for any given action.
"Think of all individual beings as part of your world."
"Think of yourself as all life everywhere throughout all time."
What would it feel like to know that all beings ever to exist have always done the best they could? Is this difficult to imagine?
Do you often think you should have done better? This is called second-guessing, and it is a bad habit. We have all been criticized for not doing our best, and we have all criticized others and ourselves in the same way, but it is a false criticism. We are limited beings with limited ability to examine our motives for any given action. We have many bad habits, and the circumstances of life are difficult and deceptive. Our motives are complex and often contradict one another.
All children are born with the desire to do good things and to do the best they can at all times, even when they are only playing or just trying to behave badly. Beyond that, motives become complicated and contradictory. The original motive, to do good and always do the best we can, always remains; but because of other conflicting and confusing motives, our actions and habits become difficult to understand.
An example: Edward committed a crime. We caught Edward and punished him for his crime.
We all do the best we can. There are no exceptions. This defines all motivation from the deepest core of our being. We might judge our actions and other motives as good or bad, but we always do the best we can in everything we do, even if we know at the moment we act that what we are doing will cause harm.
"What if you knew and understood all of the motives behind every human action?"
You would see that everyone always does the best they can whether or not they always believe so about themselves. Even deliberately harming another person arises from the motive to do the best we can; it was the best we could do in the moment when we believed we had to do it now, even though in the minds of so many others what we did was wrong.
-- --
All beings are gifted with a wordless, thoughtless memory of limitless being, which is by its nature perfectly good, without exception.
Why do we forget, ignore, or even deny the unchanging reality of this being? Because we became addicted to pretending it isn’t so; because we learned to think that this is bad and that is good; and because we applied this addiction to everything.
Do not second-guess your motives, your thoughts, or your actions. Learn from everything that happens. Take responsibility for what you do. Reflect on your life. Know that you have always done the best you could, no matter how good or bad the result.
-- https://archive.org/details/BurntEliot/page/40/mode/2up
[This may be a bit off-topic but...] A few decades ago, I learned from two Latter Day Saints missionaries that their church’s doctrine teaches that the biblical ‘lake of fire’ meant for the ‘wicked’ actually represents an eternal spiritual burning of guilt over one’s corporeal misdeeds. Bemused, I said: “That’s it? An afterlife guilty conscience?”
During the many years since then, however, I’ve discovered just how formidable ‘burning guilt’ can be. I’ve also considered and decided that our brain's structural/chemical flaws are what we basically are while our soul is confined within our physical, bodily form. The human soul may be inherently good, on its own; but trapped within the physical body, notably the corruptible brain, oftentimes the soul’s purity may not be able to shine through.
To be clear, the more dysfunctional or physiologically flawed the brain that the soul happens to be born thus confined with (call it the luck of the draw), the worse the corporeal behavior. Once again, the soul's purity remains the same. The soul is the same before and after the corporeal existence; its purity would not diminish, regardless of what the brain has us do.
Therefore, upon the physical death of a ‘wicked’ person (Hitler being a good example), not only would he be 100 percent liberated from the monstrous thoughts and emotions that blighted his physical life and essentially resulted in his atrocious actions — his soul or post-death consciousness would also exist with an unwanted awareness of the immense amount of needless suffering he had deliberately caused. He may then be left wondering, ‘Why was I so angry, so much of the time? Oh, the horrible things I did!'
... Then again, maybe the human soul goes where it belongs or where it feels comfortable and right — be it ‘hell’, ‘heaven’, somewhere in between.
The proposal that either determinists or free will proponents are right can be called an imperfect exclusive disjunction. A perfect exclusive disjunction is a proposition of the form “p or q,” where “p” and “q” represent alternatives that can't both be true and can't both be false, e.g., “Either God exists or God doesn't exist” (assuming “God” has the same meaning in both alternatives). The exclusive alternatives aren't determinism and free will, but determinism and indeterminism Three main positions on this issue are: (1) libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism), sometimes identified with indeterminism and understood as the view that human behavior is uncaused, in violation of the law of universal causation; (2) hard determinism, the belief that prior causes and physical laws predetermine all events including human behavior; (3) compatibilism (aka soft determinism), the opinion that free will and determinism are compatible, i.e., that both can obtain. The version of libertarianism I described implies that all human behavior consists of spontaneous, random, chance events that are unpredictable in principle, like one interpretation of events in quantum mechanics. In that case, no behavior is controlled by any human. So one can't help doing whatever one does, and no humans can be responsible for behavior they can't control. I gather that you're a hard determinist, but that position has the same problem. If all human behavior is predetermined by antecedent causes, no persons can avoid doing whatever they're caused to do by forces beyond their control. Contrary to your position, hard determinism would free us from accountability.
I write an entire article to help people escape the determinism/free will false dichotomy, and you bring it up again as if you didn't read the article.
You say children can't be held accountable because they can't control themselves. If hard determinism is correct, neither can adults. Another problem: If hard determinism is correct, people can't help what they believe about the determinism/indeterminism issue. It seems odd that causal conditions in the universe would force people to unintentionally take opposing sides in the debate. Morality requires us to behave as we ought to behave. The principle “ought implies can,” widely accepted by moral philosophers, implies that if one ought to behave a certain way, one can behave that way, which further implies one must be able to control one's behavior. On that view, if one can't control one's behavior, one can't be held morally responsible for it. As you suggest, morality requires “self-accountability and control over the self.” But that requires both determinism and free will. That is, one's behavior can't be caused exclusively by prior events outside one's control, but must be self-determined. Self-determinism is possible because no antecedent event can cause anyone to do anything before he or she exists. Once a person exists, the relevant causal conditions are not merely external; they include conditions internal to the person. Indeed, the totality of internal conditions that influence one's behavior are what constitutes a person. So one's behavior is a consequence of both internal and external conditions, and the internal conditions (chiefly mental ones) are under one's control. For whatever it's worth, according to the most recent PhilPapers survey, a majority of philosophers accept compatibilism. I urge you to do the same.
You objection is addressed in the article. You didn't read it in full. Plus, I never used the term "hard determinism" which you didn't define, and which dishonestly strawmans my arguments. Let me try again: children are not accountable because they have no control over their feelings. Adults do. |You "urge" me to accept compatibilism. Isn't this what my article is about? Your essay-long comments suggest you haven't.
Your claim that I didn't read your article in full is mistaken. I read it several times to ensure that I understood your position before commenting on it. You claim I didn't define “hard determinism,” but I defined it as “the belief that all events, including human behavior, are predetermined by prior causes and physical laws.” Unlike you, I don't claim you didn't read my comment in full, because I realize one can read something that fails to register. I mentioned you said children can't be held accountable because they can't control themselves, but I didn't see “children are not accountable because they have no control over their feelings, Adults do.” In particular, I didn't see the words “Adults do.” Perhaps I missed those two words, which would have clarified your position, but I was unable to find them after several readings. Where are they? I didn't claim you used the term “hard determinism.” I said, “I gather that you're a hard determinist.” “Gather” means infer or understand. Apparently, I misunderstood your position, but I doubt that's entirely my fault, because you used the term “determinism” several times, but nowhere did I see you claim humans have free will. Nor did I see any mention of compatibilism or the words “determinism/free will false dichotomy.” I'm glad to learn from your criticism of me that you agree that determinism/free will is a false dichotomy and that you accept compatibilism. If you had said so in your article, I wouldn't have bothered with my lengthy comment. Unlike you, I won't insult you by claiming you made a strawman out of my position. I spent a lot of valuable time writing my comment in an attempt to be helpful, but apparently, all I did was annoy you. I apologize for my attempt to help. I won't make that mistake again on your website.
No, you didn't "want to help". Help with what? Strawman and misrepresent my position on something I pour my heart and soul into? Obviously you were triggered by something. I don't care enough to try to understand. Guess you're an abusive parent making excuses for yourself. You've shown disrespect and arrogance with your disingenuous comment from the start. You are wasting my time, adding nothing to the conversation other than gaslighting. Yes, please leave.
It is always easier to understand bad behavior when you are not taking the brunt of them. For example, your father's behavior to you is less understandable to you than the bad behavior of child number one's parents to him. Undoubtedly, your father was mistreated by his father. Plus, maybe, your father might have been born with a bent towards being hypercritical. The belief that all children are born pure and undefiled ignores the human condition. Everyone makes mistakes, including children.
It's not nature versus nurture; it's nature plus nurture. Otherwise, we would ALL be either good or bad. We are all good and bad. The balance between good and bad varies with each person. And, no one is perfectible. Even if we could identify every bad behavior and somehow learn to correct it, does anyone honestly think that, eventually, all bad behavior could be eliminated? Using scientific methodology, you could estimate that it would take millions or billions of years of incremental change to evolve into perfect human beings.
But, during evolutional time, some would incur injuries from accidents and illnesses that would inject opportunities for misunderstandings that could lead to bad behaviors. Feeling envious toward others who haven't experienced your bad luck could understandably produce feelings that lead to rude or vicious behavior toward others. Or, blaming fate, or God, could result in animosity toward others. We are stretching credulity coming up with "explanations" for behaviors that we try to understand. Is it possible that some behaviors might be inexplicable? Might some come from indiscoverable defects? From indiscoverable outside influences?
HINT: we don't know everything. And we probably can't know everything. And, we don't want to admit that we don't know everything. Or our capacity to know everything. We don't even like to admit how little of everything we do know. Nor how much of what we know is wrong.
Still, you can’t hold children as accountable as adults. All children are pure until they are corrupted by abusing adults. Yes, those adults were also abused as children, but as adults they have only explanations, not excuses.