Is all formative influence immoral?

Abstract

Is it true that all formative influence is unethical, and that we ought to avoid influencing children (and indeed anyone at all)? There are more or less defensible versions of this doctrine, and we shall follow some of the strands of argument that lead to this conclusion. It seems that in maintaining that all influence is immoral, one commits oneself to the idea that children have innate teleologies, that these may be frustrated, and that to frustrate a child’s innate teleology would be to wrong them. First we consider a strong view of innate teleology exemplified in the writing of Plato. However, even those who favour such a view can approve of those formative influences which lead people to better realise their innate teleology. Next we consider a weaker version of the doctrine, one claiming that we ought to broaden the possibilities available to those that we influence, and never to narrow them. This seems too permissive a strategy, however. Finally Foss and Griffin’s worry about a desire for control and domination being embedded in persuasion is explored together with their proposed alternative strategy of ‘invitational rhetoric’. Ultimately, this paper argues that we often have good reason to encourage certain formative outcomes and discourage others.

Keywords:

• Influence
• teleology
• innate
• control
• persuasion

Notes

1. The title of this section is taken from a celebrated monologue in Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray (2012). Lord Henry Wotton, reflects that there must be ‘something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence’ (51) and undertakes to exercise such an influence over Gray, all the while himself denouncing influence as an intrinsic evil. Arguably however, it is not influence per se that is on trial as corruptive, but instead hedonism as a form of influence. Consider for instance how Gray’s adoption of Wotton’s hedonism lead to his ultimate undoing.

2. On the other hand, and to some extant undercutting even this argument, it is hard to see what the word ‘natural’ covers (even once the words ‘unnatural’, and ‘supernatural’ are on the table since they are parasitic on the word ‘natural’), since everything seems to occur within nature. Some may want to say that cities, and pollution are unnatural, but the modern world developed by human kind’s activity on top of the pre-human world, and alongside the contemporary non-human world, and so are as much a part of nature as are the dams of beavers. We may want to say that the human world is changing the world for the worse, but that does not mean it is unnatural, it just means that nature contains conflict, and that some expressions of nature are ultimately self-destructive, as human-kind may well prove to be. I conclude that ‘the natural learning process’ is a curiously vacuous expression. ‘Unnatural learning processes’ might at best signify processes through which one doesn’t learn at all: human beings do not learn maths by eating chalk, qua eating chalk. That would be an unnatural learning process, which is just to say: not a learning process.

3. That said, often (as in the Euthyphro) Socrates shows people to be ignorant of what they had taken themselves to know about, and does more by way of demolition than discovery.

4. Michael (2006).

5. One wants to say that that anti-persuasion positions stand to pro-persuasion principles as democracy stands to autocracy. Just as Democracy is vulnerable to becoming an autocracy through democratic process in a way that autocracy is not vulnerable to becoming a democracy through autocratic process (not in practice- dictators don’t decide to relinquish power in favour of democracy unforced), so anti-persuaders are vulnerable to persuaders, as persuaders are not vulnerable to anti-persuaders (at least not to ones who are live up to their ideals).