Online research in philosophy

For many people the idea that children are autonomous agents whose autonomy the parents should respect and the state should protect is laughable. For them, such an idea is the offspring of idle academics who never had, or at least never seriously interacted with, children. Autonomy is the province of full fledged rational adults, not immature children. It is easy to see why many people embrace this view. Very young children do not have the experience or knowledge to make informed decisions about matters of momentous significance. However, from this fact many people infer (or talk as if they infer) that all children are helpless moppets, wholly incapable of making any informed decisions.

propose that these deficits, along with more subtle limithis fact, and insist that they themselves had always tations in adults’ social-cognitive reasoning, are all known this fact [1]. Young children also have problems manifestations of the same cognitive bias. This is the..

Children are young human beings. Some children are very young human beings. As human beings children evidently have a certain moral status. There are things that should not be done to them for the simple reason that they are human. At the same time children are different from adult human beings and it seems reasonable to think that there are things children may not do that adults are permitted to do. In the majority of jurisdictions, for instance, children are not allowed to vote, to marry, to buy alcohol, to have sex, or to engage in paid employment. What makes children a special case for philosophical consideration is this combination of their humanity and their youth, or, more exactly, what is thought to be associated with their youth. One very obvious way in which the question of what children are entitled to do or to be or to have is raised is by asking, Do children have rights? If so, do they have all the rights that adults have and do they have rights that adults do not have? If they do not have rights how do we ensure that they are treated in the morally right way? Most jurisdictions accord children legal rights. Most countries—though not the United States of America—have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which was first adopted in 1989. The Convention accords to children a wide range of rights including, most centrally, the right to have their ‘best interests’ be ‘a primary consideration’ in all actions concerning them (Article 3), the ‘inherent right to life’ (Article 6), and the right of a child “who is capable of forming his or her own views … to express these views freely in all matters affecting the child” (Article 12) (United Nations 1989). However it is normal to distinguish between ‘positive’ rights, those that are recognised in law, and ‘moral’ rights, those that are recognised by some moral..

Generic sentences (such as ‘‘Birds lay eggs’’) are important in that they refer to kinds (e.g., birds as a group) rather than individuals (e.g., the birds in the henhouse). The present set of studies examined aspects of how generic nouns are understood by English speakers. Adults and children (4- and 5-year-olds) were presented with scenarios about novel animals and questioned about their properties, using generic and non-generic questions. Three primary findings emerged. First, both children and adults distinguished generic from non-generic reference, interpreting generics as referring to kinds. Thus, under certain contexts children and adults accepted that ‘‘Dobles have claws’’ even when all the dobles in the available context were clawless. Second, adults further distinguished properties that are inborn from those that are acquired. Inborn properties were judged to be predicated of a generic kind, even when all available instances have lost the property, but this was not the case for acquired properties. Third, children did not distinguish inborn from acquired properties. These data suggest the existence of developmental changes in conceptual or semantic understanding, and are interpreted in light of recent theories of psychological essentialism. Ó 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

As a parent, you know how much less stressful your life would be if you could count on your children to be more responsible -for their toys, their homework, their household chores, and their choice of friends. You know you want your children to grow up to be responsible adults. In Teaching Your Children Responsibility , bestselling authors Linda and Richard Eyre show you how to make sure your elementary-school-aged children learn this invaluable lesson. The Eyres identify twelve simple kinds of responsibility-from responsibility for things to responsibility for actions, from responsibility for choices to responsibility for younger siblings-that children can relate to. They provide a simple, practical program-with enjoyable exercises, games, and activities-that you can use to teach your children these important concepts. Written by parents for parents, Teaching Your Children Responsibility will help you give your children the tools they need to thrive in today's challenging world-and help them grow up to be happy, fulfilled adults.

Adults value certain unique individuals—such as artwork, sentimental possessions, and memorabilia—more than perfect duplicates. Here we explore the origins of this bias in young children, by using a conjurer’s illusion where we appear to produce identical copies of realworld objects. In Study 1, young children were less likely to accept an identical replacement for an attachment object than for a favorite toy. In Study 2, children often valued a personal possession of Queen Elizabeth II more than an identical copy, but showed no such bias for another sort of valuable object. These findings suggest that young children develop attachments to individuals that are independent of any perceptible properties that the individuals possess. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In The Classrooms All Young Children Need, Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley’s many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley’s ...

For both Batman and the Joker, violence overthrew a coherent picture of the world without installing a replacement; they share this realisation and arebound together in an effort to make sense of it. Like violators of the tabernacle or visitors in Oz, each has glimpsed behind the curtain of appearances.

Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so.