The Moral Environment of the Child*
What is the ‘moral environment’ of a child? - Everything in its environment that speaks to it and to which it itself reacts with intelligence and feeling.
When I say ‘everything that speaks to it’ I don’t mean only everything that addresses the child, but rather whatever tells it anything. Whatever the child gets purely from existing with its senses and its human intelligence in nature, we cannot estimate it. In any case what it gets from nature is modified by its human culture. Largely by talking to it the surrounding humans teach it human speech. The rest of their behaviour also tells the child a great deal and this, first and foremost, in the same way as speech does, by showing it forms of behaviour which it will understand and some of which it will imitate. Just as a child has an innate capacity to learn whatever language it hears regularly, so also it is able to learn the inwardness of all sorts of ways of going on. Of feeding animals, for example, of greeting people, of giving gifts, of cleaning things; of hiding, storing, throwing away; of dancing; of many gestures; of hurrying or delaying. The list is endless; and all of these descriptions are interpretations of behaviour, or rather of the elementary movements and happenings that constitute behaviour.
All this is natural history. We can say: it belongs to the natural history of man that he has a moral environment. No one could decide that in a particular case of a human infant this was not to be so. Not, at any rate, if he proposes that the infant shall be brought up. I suppose an infant, once weaned, might be kept on chicken litter in a box, with food and water put within its reach, but no human communication; the litter being changed and the food and water appearing automatically. But this would not be bringing the child up and it would surely die. This is at least present opinion; for so evil an experiment is not tried.
Now the ‘telling’ that is inescapably done in bringing a child up so that it has language and can move around in its own society - so that roughly speaking it knows its way about - this minimal telling is not what anyone would call moral training. So it might be asked why I call it part of the child’s moral environment. The reason is that it supplies the raw material, the matter of which the ethical is the form. Look for example at the ten commandments, at the concepts that are involved in them. All of them refer to activities or to facts which are not just natural events or states of affairs; to covet what belongs to someone else; to bear witness against someone; to commit adultery; to murder; to steal; to honour someone; to take a name in vain; to keep holy; to make idols and bow down to them; to have a god. Every italicised phrase here signifies, not as do words for physical processes, characteristics and relations, or immediate experiences or feelings. The descriptions are all high-level interpretations of what goes on. It will be seen that I have referred to the commandment against murder not in the form in which it is so often cited: ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but in the more correct form ‘Thou shalt do no murder’. The Hebrew word means murder, not killing. Otherwise that commandment would be a counter example to what I have been saying; killing need not even be a human act, since a lion or a rock may kill. ‘Killing’ is a relatively low-level description of an action, without much specifically human reference about it.
No one could have the concepts corresponding to the words used in the commandments, if he had not lived in an environment in which he learns the inwardness of all sorts of ways of going on: he must live a specifically human life with human practices.
Moral action descriptions are not natural event descriptions. But it is part of the natural history of mankind that the human young acquire concepts corresponding to them, or in some cases, at least concepts in which they are rooted, as adultery is in that of marriage, or stealing in that of property. Some notion of property will be picked up by anyone in the course of his upbringing, and almost certainly some notion of stealing in its train. Quite generally: to grow up as a child of normal intelligence in a human society is eo ipso to be equipped with a range of concepts which form the raw material for moral action descriptions, and in many cases to acquire these as well, at least in a rough inchoate form.
To say this is not to say that to grow up in a human way is to acquire moral convictions and sentiments. That is something else. We can easily imagine someone with a full grasp of human language, yet not participating in many moral notions, even not participating in any of a certain range: the ones, I mean, connected with condemnation.
This is no doubt unusual. As St Paul says, people reveal what is written in their hearts by their way of making accusations and excuses. I am imagining someone who does not seek to be justified or ask others to justify themselves. He is not defective in his grasp of language. He functions mentally as a juryman, who can say what has been done; never as a judge, who condemns or discharges the accused person.
In short a human being of normal intelligence can’t grow up without being able to use a host of descriptions which are either already moral descriptions or the basis for moral descriptions. But he can do so without acquiring the habit of either condemning or exonerating, accusing or excusing either himself or anyone else. Usually he learns to do these things; but he need not. His subjectivity need not be called into play except as that of a being with feelings and objectives.
This division is important. It means that a human subjectivity is trained or formed ethically in two different ways. One way is the formation of the will and the education of the emotions. The other is the training in justification, in judgement of good and evil in human action, and in what is called ‘conscience’. The separability of these is the source of many philosophical problems, which are not my concern here. But it, and partly those problems themselves, are also the source of the widespread conviction nowadays, that a man’s ethics is purely subjective, in the sense that it is up to him to determine what he is to call right and wrong. This is even the basis of some educational theory in England.
The development of the will and the schooling of the emotions are largely effected without any definite intention on the part of the adults who are responsible for a child’s upbringing. The child is born with a will which is at first fixed on necessities and on comfort and attention. Later, as individual differences appear, they seem not to be of our making. Still later, a child can be encouraged to have certain ends and concerns by the attitudes of its adults, and sometimes by being associated with the adults in promoting and pursuing them. This may be done with intent; as is a training in manners, which at least suggest certain attitudes.
But there is an important sense in which velle non discitur: willing is not taught. Suppose, for example, that the adult would like to train the child to help people who are poor and wretched. He can do quite a lot. He can teach it, give it information, including forms of thought on the subject. I am referring to the sort of thing that is said about the people to be helped, the style which shows attitudes. He can give the child relevant moral teaching, rising up from minimal teaching on the duty of almsgiving. He can get the child to join with him in some of the things that he does. He can direct the child to do certain things which are means to his objectives; as King Wenceslas told the page in the carol: ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, Bring me pine logs hither, Thou and I shall see him dine’. No doubt all of this will sometimes be effective and the child then becomes an adult who has that sort of concern at heart, has such objectives quite often in the course of his life. But it is not something that can be guaranteed, as you can guarantee that a normal ten year old will learn a foreign language if placed only among speakers of it for a few months. The only sort of moral action that can be pretty well guaranteed by training, by upbringing, is such as is counted absolutely obligatory in a society and whose performance or non performance is quite open and visible: like the prayers at fixed times in a strict Muslim town or the supply of small coins for beggars in their shops.
It is much like the following case: you can teach a child to pray in the sense that you teach it its prayers, have it say the prayers with you and make a regular habit of this. But if the child does not then pray by itself and off its own bat, this is not necessarily a failure on your part in the teaching of anything that can be taught. The most that can be said is that if you clearly pray yourself with some sincerity and clearly mean the expressions of the pertinent beliefs in which you embed the training, the child will probably pray on its own. But its own will is a spontaneous new source of action, and cannot itself be taught to operate. (What can be taught are capacities, knowledge of how to do things.) The nearest thing to a training of the will itself is a training in supervised habits. But there comes the time when the child is autonomous and may not maintain the former habits. Again, though it is of value to teach a child its prayers, there is a sense in which it is already autonomous: your teaching does not secure that it really prays, as opposed to joining in those compulsory recitations. Or again, take going to confession. Here the child is already autonomous, already on its own and responsible. No one can give it a piece to say, saying which it will have managed to do what is in question. A child’s first going to confession is a spiritual weaning of a very explicit sort.
Thus the training of the will, so far as such a thing is possible, is a training by causing the child habitually to do certain things, and for the rest it occurs by circumstances which inform it and call attention to the possibilities - the possible objects of its will. When St Hugh of Lincoln was seven years old his mother died and his father divided his estate between his two grown-up sons and withdrew with Hugh to a monastery. There no doubt certain possibilities were made apparent to the boy, which in the world would have been more remotely heard of. The story has an alarming character. Was not Hugh’s father betting on a response of the will of the boy, which could by no means be predicted? But then, don’t we all do that? No: we don’t take such worldly risks.
The training of the will - so far as such a thing is possible - is likely to be most effective where the child is following practices which its adults also follow. This is the training by example of which so much is always made. It is mostly implicit and inevitable. Here also is found the training of the emotions; it is difficult to see how this can be much more than implicit. The expression of attitudes for the sake of inculcating them, which one manifestly does not have in practice, had better be accompanied by an admission. Otherwise the training is likely to be a training in hypocrisy. It is very difficult to avoid this, in any case.
Here it is worth saying that it is of enormous value in demanding the obedience of children, to be manifestly oneself under obedience. And it is necessary to require obedience from children in bringing them up. The scope of this reduces gradually; but not to demand obedience is to inflict a great wrong on the child. Everybody can see that when what is in question is the avoidance of gross physical dangers. But it ought to be clear too in connection with the performance of those tasks in which the child’s capacities are trained and developed. Here there has been some deleterious educational opinion rife in my country and elsewhere: as if a child would develop algebra, grammar and a knowledge of history, or at least an effective appetite for these things, if left to itself with no teaching forced upon it. Of course the word ‘forced’ sounds like a situation of stress and tension; that the children have to do their exercises is something which should be taken for granted without any tension. This requires that obedience be the assumption.
In moral matters there has been an even greater loss of nerve. Now I think one of the sources, perhaps even the main source, of this is the feeling that adults are just laying their own arbitrary requirements on children: and what right have they, really, to do that? This is why no difficulty is felt about the requirement of obedience to avoid manifest physical danger; it is not a question, here, of the child’s having to obey the arbitrary inclination of the parent and it doesn’t look like that to anyone. But otherwise, in ways of spending time, in choice of companions, in taking and using things - if the adult feels uncertain in giving any moral teaching, it becomes more and more like a mere imposition when he demands obedience.
I have spoken so far of the training of the will and of the emotions. The other area of ethical training is the training of ideas of obligation and guilt and justification. Praise and blame of behaviour, moral approval and disapproval, accusation; excuses and justifications and beliefs of the form ‘It is right to ...’, and ‘It is wrong to ...’ are what come in here.
There is in the names of virtues and vices, as also of wrongful acts, a bridge between the two divisions I have made of my subject. The will can be inclined against (or, indeed towards) wicked acts like murder, theft or adultery; it can be inclined towards or against virtues and vices. Thus courage excites admiration and someone may very well want to be brave and therefore not want to have it told of him that he ran away in a certain situation. ‘Running away’, unlike mere ‘running’, is one of those high-level descriptions which is a basis for a moral action description and hence provides, as I described at the beginning, the raw material of the ethical.
There are indeed other forms for courage to take besides not running away from dangers and pains that one needs to face and endure. But such not running away is one of the most intelligible forms of courage. To bring up a child without a training in courage is to do it a great wrong; for it cannot live without getting into situations in which it needs courage. A training which includes training in courage comes as near as possible to direct training of the will - for the child who has got to do what is difficult, to pick himself up after set-backs, is actually performing acts of fortitude.
The bridge of which I just spoke is like this: virtues and vices are acquired in the pursuit of the objects of the will, and with the help of the development of the emotions. But virtues and vices are also praised and condemned. In a training in virtues, then, the two things - pursuit of worthy objects of the will, and the ideas of justification and condemnation - will be combined. When we condemn something, we name the vice that it seems to be an act of; we say: that’s unjust, untruthful, cowardly, indecent, greedy.
Virtues, however, may be means rather than ends. Indeed Christians must regard them as such, for we have an end proposed to us, namely the vision of God, and participation in the life of God, which is not a state or practice of moral virtue. And we don’t even think it is attained by the practice of the moral virtues - only that the failure to practise them greatly endangers its attainment.
Nevertheless there is in human minds this strong theme of right and wrong, obligation and guilt, accusation and justification. We must notice that they are in themselves contentless, however compelling. It is indeed the notions of the virtues, of good and bad types of action, such as feeding the hungry or killing the innocent, that give them any content. A strong sense of duty, uncombined with a true moral code, is alas, a real possibility. But it is likely to be extremely harmful: to ‘justify’ the commission of many wrongs.
Think of a man such as a Nazi with a strong sense of duty, or a soldier under Nazi command. A saving lack or failure of such a sense of duty preserved the city of Paris at the end of the Second World War. Or, again, think of the common conviction that you must ‘act for the best’, act to secure the best possible consequences. These are two different ways of giving a sense of duty some content. For a sense of duty must of course be accompanied by some way of conceiving something as your duty. Thus it can be filled out with a notion of party loyalty, military obligation to obedience, or of acting for the best consequences, and in all these cases leads to very evil actions. Only if it is combined with truth in the moral code can it be trusted to lead to good actions. Similarly, someone who ‘always tries to do what is right’, but has not such truth, will not succeed in acting well.
In practice, in education, the contentless notion of wrong is given content by ‘It is wrong because it is a lie’, ‘because it is stealing’, ‘because it is dishonouring your parents’, and a lot of explicit moral teaching consists in telling children what kinds of action are wrong.
A child who is taught truth in a moral code by its own adults, will of course have them - these adults - only as part of its human moral environment. Others will tend to teach it contrary things. If you have truth to communicate to your child here, it is good to prepare it also to hear lies, telling it: ‘People do these things and think it right to do them; don’t be surprised’. Then when the child encounters it he is forewarned.
For a Christian, the training in ideas of justification and accusation ought to be first and foremost a training of the conscience, that is, a training in self-examination before God. The questions asked in the self-examination concern one’s past actions, and whether they have been wrong, and also one’s proposed actions. In this enquiry, one cannot leave out the spirit in which one has acted or proposes to act; but that is not the first question. The first question concerns objective conformity to the standards of the commandments.
Catholic Christianity teaches a strict moral code. (The time is past, I think, when many thought it rather lax!) One form of strictness lies in the exactness and absoluteness of its prohibitions of actions, prohibitions of idolatry, murder, adultery and false witness. It has, by the way, been a long time since it was necessary to stress the prohibition on idolatry, except for occasional curbing of superstition relating to particular statues or shrines. It is becoming rather more relevant now: with present fashions, some of our young people are being drawn into spiritual cults which include the worship of Shiva and Krishna and other deities of the Hindu pantheon, including image worship; but in any case it is clear that these are (false) gods. The other prohibitions are extremely familiar. We are known as ‘absolutists’ and described as thinking that these absolute rules tell you what to do. This is peculiarly thoughtless, as it is evident that a prohibition only tells you not to do something. A morality which consisted solely of absolute prohibitions on fairly definitely described actions would leave you free to do anything else whatever. Such in fact is not our morality; we have absolute prohibitions indeed, but you would not be guaranteed to do no wrong purely by abstaining from what they positively prohibited. Take lying. If you are not to lie, that doesn’t tell you what you are to do in a particular situation: tell the truth? Mislead in some other way? Turn the subject? Make a joke? Say nothing? Lose your temper? Or whatever else might be a good course of action.
Nor is it always clear what committing the offending action is. In England there is a line that children have got to work out their own ethics. This is a mere fraud. I have seen a television programme in which this comes out clearly. Four children acted out the part of someone in a factory who had just received a letter telling him that a fellow-employee had been found guilty of theft as a young teenager. He is then asked his opinion of the proposed promotion of this person. Does he ‘know anything against him?’ Two of the children told of the letter, two said they didn’t know anything against the person. In discussing this later it was called a lie without further investigation, and the case was used to illustrate the difference between absolutists who think you may not lie and others who ‘go by the situation’. This was card-forcing on the part of the producers and commentators. Was it a lie? The case is not at all clearly made out.
Even when we are concerned with absolute rules, the question ‘Is this a case of the prohibited action?’ is one to be approached with judgement; and here something really can be taught. In the past, we would perhaps have been likely to ask a priest, assuming him to be trained in casuistry; nowadays we would feel much less confident, though it would still be a sensible thing to try. Lay people plunge bald-headed towards the opinion that strikes them as plausible; very many priests still have at least the appearance of having learned some principles and methods of consideration which make them more judicious and cautious.
Suppose, however, that it is clear what the application of an absolute rule is in the particular case. When the rule is a prohibition that still doesn’t tell you what actually to do. And it may be that it matters a good deal what you actually do; and you need wisdom to know. Here is a case: a young man is reconverted to the Catholic religion and is full of enthusiasm. He says to his wife: ‘Right! No more contraception!’ It is easy to imagine how the marriage gets smashed up. Clearly it mattered a great deal how he approached the thing. A cunning wisdom might have made him extremely cautious about revealing his new attitude. ‘Darling, let’s have another baby! - the one we have is so wonderful’ might be a successful line, and that would give an interval in which much could be done. I tell such a story to illustrate how the absolute prohibitory rules, with their application to the particular case clearly ascertained, do not exhaust morality: one may do wrong in one important way of handling a situation and good instincts and practical wisdom are necessary.
Fairly young children often steal and it is fortunate for them if this is discovered by a sensible parent and not by any other authority, for another authority may have to take very stringent measures against such a child and yet this is a fault which it may very well grow out of - an infantile fault, even in a twelve year old. It is important not to make too great a disgrace of it, but, if it is possible, to insist on restitution. (Maybe without making any admissions: often money can be conveyed to the victim of a theft without the culprit having to disgrace himself.) If direct restitution is impossible, there should be insistence on a substitute restitution. But it is important not to call theft anything that is mere disobedience and greed within a family; I fear this mistake is often made.
Articulateness and willingness to talk with one’s children is of enormous importance. It is often said that parents tend to leave the teaching of religion to schools. This is deplored, but not enough. The school to which this has been left cannot do anything, ordinarily, but an inadequate repair job. If children don’t pray with their families for example, it’s luck if prayer can be instilled at school. But schools are often faced with the following problem: how to impart the truth without inciting the children to a condemnation of their parents? Now that is not allowed: not because they are parents - for in this regard they are to be looked on as neighbours - but because we are not allowed to judge - i.e. condemn - others. The state of mind that is right for a child of unconscientious and irreligious parents who nevertheless want it to be brought up a Christian, must be one that is very difficult to achieve. But the matter is already notorious. It is not to be solved, however, by sliding along in silence. What is needed is much clear and explicit teaching and the encouragement of reflection. The Christian ethical tradition is extremely rich, powerful and subtle and the mind of a child that has been impregnated with it is more likely to resist the alluring and facile judgements which are so common in the world. Clear and true teaching on these matters - teaching concerning the moral code and justification and the end of man - is intrinsically interesting, appealing and enriching. It is an important component of any good moral environment for a child as it grows up. As I said at the beginning, no child who grows in a human environment can fail to have some moral environment, even if it is a bad one. But even if it is a bad one, it will be full of matter which provides the raw material for the ethical.