Treating like a child

Abstract

No one wants to be treated like a child. To be treated like a child offends our dignity-in many cases, it offends the dignity even of children. Certainly my four-year-old is not a fan of it, especially when his sister is the one doing the treating. Paternalism is often glossed as treating someone as a child, and many of the most illuminating discussions of the nature and moral significance of paternalism draw on an understanding of the distinction between children and adults and the fact that paternalism is not always wrong when directed toward children, in order to explain why paternalism is wrong, when directed toward adults.In this paper, I will be concerned to defend the flat-footed dictionary thesis that paternalism is not a matter of treating someone like a child, but rather a matter of treating someone like you are their parent. On this relational conception of paternalism, morally justifiable paternalism cannot be understood solely in terms of the status of the subject of paternalistic treatment, but rather must be accounted for in terms of the relationship between the subject and the paternalistic agent. As a result, the account requires no sharp adult/child distinction in order to make sense of the boundaries of justifiable paternalism, giving it an attractively continuous treatment of human development. In contrast to other developmental accounts, such as the influential account of Schapiro (1999), my account will also not draw any sharp lines between domains of appropriate paternalism toward children.The key ingredient in the relational account of paternalism that I will defend is my substantive explanation of why parenthood is the right kind of relationship to ground the appropriateness of some kinds of treatment that would otherwise be objectionable. On my account, this is because parenthood belongs to a class of committed, forward-looking relationships of influence. Objectionable paternalism interferes with agential autonomy, and autonomy is self-governance. But in committed, forward-looking, relationships of influence, the parties to the relationship have the power to cause and constitute one another as persons. Hence, they have the power to cause and constitute which actions comport with someone's self-and hence which turn out to have been autonomous. To the extent that a relationship is committed and forward-looking, therefore, and to the extent that it involves influence, there will be room for unobjectionable 1 paternalism-paradigmatically, but not exclusively, in the treatment of young children by their parents.