111–120 of 159 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly how my train my dog too.
Am I missing the sarcasm, or how do you express a distinction between actions and character that you think your dog understands?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why?
Because a child cannot give consent.
I believe that parents (/guardians) have responsibility for the children and that responsibility logically extends to giving consent for choices like this. My mother performed "experiments" on me in conjunction with her master's degree work in education; I was probably 8-10. It was clearly her call; I couldn't give fully informed consent, but there wasn't any risk of physical harm and vanishingly small risk of any possible harm, so I believe her consent by proxy was appropriate.
Act according to that maxim whereby you might
will that it should become universal law.
By Bernard Williams's standard, the amoralist cannot even conceivably have an intermittent feeling of sympathy[0]. The person is at minimum embedded within and embodied by sympathetic behavior (to self or to other), but this is not a necessary condition to morality.
At the same time, the kinds of experiments we run, and the types of questions we ask, potentially distill or deauthenticate the model with the widest representation of moral truth — however the narrative of science may belie institutional refactors at meta-ethical descriptions.
–
[0]: http://bobnoxiousthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/08/challenging-b...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this at all. At 21 months, a toddler can walk and talk, and you can play keep away with them for fun. I don't know what it means to drop a toy out of reach. Do you drop it on a high counter or something?
As the parent of a 21-month-old, I can assure you that nothing is out of reach—especially the counter.
I thought my wife was stealing all the chocolates for days until I caught the toddler doing it.
Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they wi…
That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.
Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
i had to learn the opposite message here. our society tells us so much stuff about being kind and caring, and there are very few messages about being able to stick up for yourself, being able to make reasonable requests and being able to say no to people who are not treating you fairly. i had a roommate who didn't pay rent. i couldn't bring myself to confront the roommate because i felt like i "made of lot of money"…
Don't go so far as to say "fuck being a good person", but understand that not everyone deserves unlimited trust and good faith. --which is I think what most of your comment is expressing. Your story is the topic of one of the most famous West End /Broadway songs of recent years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h1eBEmY6U Even if you find that life's not fair, it Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it If…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the original experiment -- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424094 for the abstract -- the toddlers stood on one side of a slanted table, so that anything placed on the table would roll down to the other side, where the adult actresses were. Presumably, the toddlers were not able to walk around the table. One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so th…
I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. Although they might be excellent actresses, being mean to a baby is probably going to make you feel pretty rotten, at a level it might be hard to control, and the baby could be picking up on that. Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good. I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.…
On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about experiments. Guaranteed half the posts about a social science experiment come from novices whining about some flaw only they can see in the experiment yet a hard science paper gets posted and surprisingly no one has any complaints about the experimental design.
Hi, I am not a parent, but I think I have to put across this point of the way of looking at morality being independent of "free will", because "free will" is an illusion and the illusion of "free will" is also an illusion. The non-existence of free will should not be confused with fatalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalism . Morality and love and compassion can still be quantified without free will. What goes aw…
Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they wi…
Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation.
What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the original experiment -- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424094 for the abstract -- the toddlers stood on one side of a slanted table, so that anything placed on the table would roll down to the other side, where the adult actresses were. Presumably, the toddlers were not able to walk around the table. One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so th…
I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. Although they might be excellent actresses, being mean to a baby is probably going to make you feel pretty rotten, at a level it might be hard to control, and the baby could be picking up on that. Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good. I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.…