Essays in Philosophy

Volume 7
Issue 1 Liberalism, Feminism, Multiculturalism Article 10

January 2006

Jeffrey Morgan
University College of the Fraser Valley

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1226&context=eip

The following is an excerpt of the Jeffrey Morgan paper.

Further, whether or not a child is initiated into a specific value system, it is possible to encourage him to be reasonable regarding his values. This is part of the work of Rawls’ concept of “burdens  of judgment” (1993). The Muslim child could be raised with specific Islamic values—rejecting the  consumption of pork and alcohol, accepting the values of modesty in dress, and the importance of  Zakat and Hajj—but nevertheless be aware that other, equally reflective, people live differently.11  Supporting such reflective open-mindedness effectively puts limits on the degree to which the  parent can indoctrinate her children.

Finally, it should be noted that children develop gradually, and that it is possible to be sensitive to  the emerging identity of one’s child, while steering the child in one direction rather than others. For  example, a parent may wish for his son a career in professional ice hockey, and may scaffold his  son’s experiences to attain this end. He enrolls his son in minor hockey leagues, skating lessons,  and other physical development activities. The father may attempt to instill in his son a love for the  game, and the sense that playing hockey represents a worthwhile form of life with the potential for  fame, glory and wealth. Nevertheless, such a program need not be so heavy handed that the father  is insensitive to his son’s growing interest in other activities, such as philosophy, painting or  poetry.12

My view is that the parent who holds a specific worldview or value system is wrong to instill that  value system in her child. However, children who are raised to accept value pluralism, who are  taught the importance of reasonableness and of burdens of judgment, and whose parents are  sensitive to their child’s developing identity, are unlikely to become so close-minded as to be at risk  of losing their future autonomy. This still allows the parent ample opportunity to encourage the  child to acquire many values, both moral and otherwise, including some of the values implicit in  specific religious or cultural traditions.

Noggle may be correct that children have a right to be taught values, but they do not have a right to  be taught a doctrinaire system of values that is morally controversial and difficult to reject. Indeed,  it is plausible to suggest that children have a right not to be indoctrinated, and that children have an  interest in being protected from value systems, especially from value systems that are reinforced by  relationships of love and dependence. We must, consequently, reject the alleged rights of cultural or  religious groups to perpetuate themselves through direct initiation of children.

Conclusion

In general, Noggle’s general approach to clarifying parent-child relationships is imaginative, clever,  persuasive and promising. His argument is that parent-child relationships are a special class of  fiduciary relationships, but differ from the standard case inasmuch as the standard case has no  analogue to parental authority.

I have not challenged this assertion, nor have I challenged Noggle’s  claim that parental authority can be justified under the model of fiduciary relationships. Further, I  have not challenged Noggle’s application of Rawlsian ideas to parent-child relationships; implicitly,  I have accepted both his metaphor of a parental veil of ignorance and his development of the  hierarchy of goods based on the centrality of primary goods. Moreover, I have not even challenged  Noggle’s claim that membership in cultural or religious traditions may well be a secondary good,  although I have reservations about the generality of this claim, since it appears that many—perhaps  all—cultural or religious traditions have serious costs associated with them. However, I have  challenged Noggle’s claim that his model of parental authority supports a parental right to instill  parochial values in children.

So if cultural and religious membership is a secondary good, and thereby worth passing on to  children, and if there is no parental right to instill the values of specific religious or cultural  tradition, then we must pass on these values in less direct ways. Archard’s approach to transmitting  cultural and religious values indirectly does provide at least one possible approach to parental  authority that allows some transmission but does not permit the direct approach favored by Noggle.  However, Archard’s approach will seem rather weak to many parents who want to promote their  cultural values in their children.

Where does this leave us with respect to the question of liberalism and multiculturalism with which  we began? My view is that there are serious costs of allowing that parents have the legitimate  authority to pass on their worldviews to their child. My objections are that moral agency does not  presuppose anything as strong as the acquisition of a worldview, and that there are serious costs to  the acquisition of most traditional worldviews. Multiculturalism, then, must survive without the  parental authority to instill value systems or worldviews in their child. That said, I think that  parents can—and should—instill values in their child, but that these values: (a) ought not to  constitute a system, (b) ought to be presented in the context of a thorough value pluralism, (c)  ought to include values of reasonableness and the burdens of judgment, and (d) ought to be  presented with awareness of the child’s emerging identity. I believe that these conditions can be  met, but that they put strong limits on the degree to which the child can be subject to value systems  or worldviews constitutive of distinctive cultures.

Jeffrey Morgan

University College of the Fraser Valley

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