This is perhaps the most tempting/tragic contradiction embedded in the human condition: "you are not a person until you can appreciate the intrinsic value of children, who are by this definition not persons." This absolute scission of value from respect infects everything.
https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1364332620365103113
Compare: "Women do not have the (ethical) value of men, because they cannot appreciate their own (aesthetic) value as expressed in the practical consequences of protecting it."
Which translated means something like: "Men must control control women (as resources) because they are the only ones who appreciate what resources would have be sacrificed to conserve them." This is basically Veblen's point about women as the original site of property.
If you add a little Firestone it's easy to see how one can derive this position from the initial one: women are resources for reproduction, whose products are intrinsically valuable in a way that is disconnected from respect, which thereby suspends respect for the producers.
There are various ways in which this tragic compact gets sealed, depending on how the value of children is conceived: everything from unblemished innocence and untapped potential to genetic immortality and symbolic futurity can be encapsulated in the figure of the child.
The hyperbolic elaboration of the abstract moral virtue of children can be used to justify every concrete political vice. The problem is that this temptation can never be completely eradicated. It is the 'fallenness' of humanity as articulated by Augustine and Heidegger alike.
What do I mean by this? The only way to rule out every scission between intrinsic value and respect would be to identify the two, which would mean restricting such value to only those autonomous agents we can respect, which in the limit excludes every autonomy in process.
Children do not start out as autonomous agents. The immortal soul is less a guarantee of life beyond death than the guarantee of a life before birth, a convenient origin rather than a convenient end. To suspend this means grappling with the genesis of autonomy.
The alternative is to treat everything less than an adult, whatever that is supposed to be, as lacking any value beyond (implicit) aesthetics or (explicit) property. Many find this even more horrifying than the authoritarian suspension of respect in the name of childish virtue.
How do we steer a course between the Scylla of hyperbolic paternalism and the Charybdis of eating our young? The question of reproduction is neither a matter of resources nor personal immortality, but of the intergenerational renewal of the promise of freedom (and thereby value).
How do we construct this diachronic chain of mutual recognition capable of passing our commitments from past to future, without binding those commitments to our own inevitable limitations and mistakes. How do we forge our own destinies without bequeathing binding fates?
To see this problem for what it is we must admit the kernel of truth in the attitude from which we began. The fallen logic that tempts us into paternal error. If the value of children qua moral patients exceeds/precedes their status as moral agents, it is because it is aesthetic.
We often, with good reason, subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical in a manner that renders it trivial. It names those optional pleasures of life that, no matter how intrinsically interesting, must always be sacrificed in the name of its moral necessities.
To use my preferred slogan: Beauty is to Right as contingency is to necessity. Beauty is the contingency of the ideal, in the same way that existence is the contingency of the real. It names that which should be, but without (ultimate) ground: (relatively) unconditional value.
The crux of the problem of childhood is the interface between the ethical and the aesthetic: the moment where that which is most unconditionally valuable implies conditions that make its existence possible. Beauty is subordinated to Right, even though it gives Right its force.
To use another slogan: beauty is freedom, and freedom is beautiful.
If you want my most articulated but extremely conceptually dense thoughts on this matter, check out this thread unravelling the concept of divinity:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1358902140807299073?s=20
To cut to the chase, if we are to take childhood seriously, refusing either to crudely naturalise it or reduce it to a case of either individual or collective property, then there are basically two things we need to confront: deferred respect and generative contingency.
Reducing children to either the property of their parents or the property of the community means developing some concrete form of anticipatory respect for their choices, which means not fixing those choices in advance: there must be concrete autonomy qua self-legislation.
This requires forms of contingency that foreclose the possibility of control through prediction. This may be a condition of respect between autonomous agents in the present, but it goes double for respect toward those still in genesis:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1357463896412606466?s=20
But respect also means taking responsibility, and this means exerting some control, because sheer randomness will undermine the conditions of the possibility of autonomy as such. The question is then, what type of contingency, and how much?
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1364382993830334464?s=20
We are approaching a series of Promethean thresholds in which our sudden increase in capacity will completely outstrip our current understanding of our responsibilities. We're about to discover a vast new range of parental failure modes. There is no escaping controversy here.
There is going to be a conflict between (bio)conservatism and (techno)radicalism that will break the essentially tacit conception of freedom at the heart of liberalism. It's coming whether we like it or not, and you can already feel the turbulence as we approach the crisis.
I'm not trying to say that one side or the other will be right on every issue, because the only progress that will be made here will be made in the same way as all progress throughout the course of human history, through interacting and compounded failures.
But it's pretty obvious that I'm on the side of the radicals here, not simply because I'm an egalitarian idealist and a technological opportunist, a rationalist inhumanist and left accelerationist, but because radicalism is rebellion against the abuse of every paternal authority.
(Cf. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Thomas Spence's 'The Rights of Infants': thomas-spence-society.co.uk/rights-of-infa…)
Beyond this seemingly paradox appeal to tradition against tradition itself, the nub of the issue is this: do we want those who come after us, who we ask to carry on our commitments, to have more freedom than we do ourselves? Do we want more Beauty in the world?
I'm a Platonist. I believe that the attitude appropriate to Beauty is Love. Do we love that which is in us enough to let it become more than we are? Do we respect future generations enough to let them surpass and forgive our failures? Will we have solidarity with the unborn?
The concrete refusal of negative solidarity is the active attempt to make our children more than we are. To experiment with what we think is best in us, in ways that overcome our own flaws and open up new vistas of possibilities for living and loving anew.
If you think this means 'eugenics' then you haven't been paying attention. Don't think optimisation for 'intelligence'. Think cultivation of wisdom. Don't think face tentacles. Think beautiful souls. 🖖
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