An example is that of human rights. The modern rights movement was started by Enlightenment philosophers who all explicitly excluded children from it, on account of their supposed pre-rationality, innocence, or downright unruliness. As they took off in the twentieth century, human rights practices adopted this baked-in adultism, making their fit for children unclear and often self-defeating.<\/p>\n
For instance, the famous article 12 of the UN\u2019s Convention on the Rights of the Child purports to guarantee children freedom of expression, but only for children capable of forming their views, in matters affecting the child, and according to their maturity \u2013 all conditions that no adult would accept. The underlying assumption here is that participation rights rely on fully independent capacities for autonomy. Instead, human rights need to be reconceptualized as interdependent responsibilities: the ways that humans simultaneously participate in societies for themselves and provide for and protect one another in their otherness.<\/p>\n
Another example that I am developing in a new book is children\u2019s rights to vote. Democracies are usually considered to have achieved \u201cuniversal suffrage\u201d when voting includes all eligible adults. But the ideal of \u201crule by the people\u201d thereby leaves out the third of citizens who are children. Some argue adultistically that children are not yet competent, knowledgeable, or independent enough to vote. Others claim that children can be just as competent to vote as adults.<\/p>\n
But a childist approach would suggest that the problem lies, not in children, but rather in democracies. Just as over history for other groups, democracies need to be theorized and practiced in new and more expansive ways. Voting needs to be reimagined, not as an act of autonomous independence, but as one of deep interdependence. Specifically, I argue for a new kind of \u201cproxy-claim\u201d voting system in which every citizen from birth to death has an automatic proxy vote, assigned to a parent or next of kin, which they can claim to exercise on their own behalf at any age or point that they wish. This would make all the people equally able, regardless of age, to hold representatives accountable to their interests.<\/p>\n
Ethics is a field of study that has come up with many different ways of theorizing moral life, whether deontological, teleological, communitarian, decolonial, or relational. But, as in academia as a whole, this theorizing has assumed an invisible adult perspective. Deontologists call for respect for mature autonomy. Teleologists aim for the maximally rational good. Communitarians stress wise social virtues. In all cases, children come out as pre-moral becomings rather than equally moral beings. They can be protected and provided for but not equally included or empowered.<\/p>\n
A truly human ethics would need to take seriously the human condition\u2019s vulnerability and dependency alongside its innate capacities for empowerment and creativity. The result, I think, would be an ethics founded on the expansion of interdependent imaginations. All of us, adult and child alike, fundamentally rely upon diverse relations, cultures and politics which, in turn, we have the capacity to reshape from our own distinct experiential perspectives, whatever those may be. We have the right not only to social participation but, in a more complex way, to what may be called empowered inclusion.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>John Wall is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden, Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and Director of the Childism Institute. His work investigates theoretical ethics, political aesthetics, children\u2019s rights, and children\u2019s democratic participation. He is the author, among other things, of Children\u2019s Rights: Today\u2019s Global Challenge; Ethics in Light of Childhood; and Moral Creativity. He is currently working on a book titled Children and the Vote: How to Democratize Democracy, an argument for eliminating the voting age, to be published in 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"