![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually navigate their meaningful worlds and make sense of things and act in light of background horizons of significance and social imaginaries. Yet, conceptions of children have lagged as dominant outlooks construe young people as immature and incapable – perpetuating behavioral approaches to controlling their actions rather than hermeneutic ones that recognize them as agents. Working with Taylor’s ideas, I discuss a Childhood Ethics ontological approach to understanding children and childhood. Specifically, I: (a) draw on Taylor’s critique of naturalistic approaches to the human sciences to highlight problems that underlie universalist claims about all childhoods; (b) relate Taylor’s articulation of human agency, centered on strong evaluation and human linguistic capacity, to the Philosophy of Childhood and Childhood Studies to address current questions regarding our understanding of agency within childhood; and (c) describe a hermeneutic ontology that can inform the development of empirical research, policy-making and practices that relate to children. I close with an outline of priority questions that can orient future investigations within this area of inquiry.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Names and other details have been modified to protect confidentiality. The terms children (and childhood) refer to persons below the age of majority. Although ‘children’ may not seem to adequately include older young people or youth, this term is used here to maintain congruence with terms used in Childhood Studies and within the Convention on the Rights of the Child (The United Nations Citation1989).
2. In this article, Philosophy of Childhood is referred to as a disciplinary stream within the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies. I aim to help advance the latter by drawing on Taylor’s ideas to help advance the former.
3. To date, no other author has explicitly drawn on Taylor’s work to help advance Childhood Studies, as far as I know.
4. While Taylor has developed an expansive corpus of philosophical ideas that have significant implications for human sciences research and human services practice, investigations of how this work can be applied in practice remain under-developed.
5. Matthews (Citation2008) argued that Piagetian-type stage theories of development convey a deficit conception of childhood, which undervalues the strong capacities that children can have (e.g. ability to learn a second language). For a discussion of conceptions of children’s development that redress these concerns, see Carnevale et al. (Citation2021).
6. Adapting Taylor’s Politics of Recognition (Citation1992), recognition implies an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the agency claims of a person or a group of persons.
7. Although I understand that this section includes familiar ground for readers who know Taylor’s work, this discussion is important in order to (a) articulate my analysis of Taylor’s work that is specifically relevant for advancing the Philosophy of Childhood and (b) introduce Taylor’s ideas to readers within the Philosophy of Childhood where his work is largely unknown.
8. Below, I draw on Taylor’s critique of naturalism in the human sciences as a basis for contesting the use of universalized stage-based conceptions of childhood.
9. Agency does not imply ‘individualistic autonomy’ because the views of others are morally significant for agents.
10. Among the incomparable goods, stands the ‘hypergood’; the incomparably most important standpoint from which all other goods are judged (Taylor Citation1989, 63).
11. Adapted from Geertz (Citation1973), thick description involves a thorough analysis of the socio-cultural context.
12. Taylor refers to this designative view of language as enframing, instrumental, representational, and atomistic – focused on encoding and communicating information – drawn from the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac.
13. This further develops Taylor’s relationally-embedded conception of human agency.
14. Taylor uses ‘footings’ to describe how persons stand in relation to one another, which exist in a broader social space with common understandings and social order (Taylor Citation2016, 266).
15. Human meanings can relate to important goals, purposes, and the moral discernment of what is better or worse.
16. These linguistic distinctions can help orient and enrich communication practices with children.
17. Taylor has highlighted that linguistic capacity can be impeded if communication with others is impaired (Taylor Citation2016, 52). This has important implications for children/persons with communication differences, as these can impact their socio-cultural inclusion.
18. I adapted ‘moral imaginaries’ from Taylor’s social imaginaries.
19. For example, the term ‘shame’ cannot be understood without examining situations that can be shameful or humiliating, which also relates to other contrasting notions such as pride and honor.
20. These approaches stand in sharp contrast to currently dominant ones centered on immaturity/incapacity, where children’s voices are attributed little agential recognition, if any.
21. The term ‘due weight’ is adapted from article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child regarding children’s participation rights (The United Nations Citation1989).
22. ‘They’ is used here to replace ‘he/she’ in the original citation.
23. For a detailed discussion of these voice elicitation methods, see Carnevale (Citation2020).
24. See Carnevale (Citation2019) for a detailed discussion of how Taylor’s ‘rapprochement’ can be applied in practice.
25. For a detailed discussion of hermeneutical interpretation methods, see Carnevale (Citation2013, Citation2019).
26. In some jurisdictions, some young people who are legal minors are ‘allowed’ to make decisions for themselves depending on the risks involved (e.g. consenting to contraception or some medical treatments).
27. For further discussion of how best interests can be operationalized within a Taylor-based Childhood Ethics ontology, see Carnevale et al. (Citation2021).
28. Space constraints limit the scope and depth of analysis of these narratives that can be presented here. For a detailed examination of William’s narrative, see Carnevale et al. (Citation2021).
29. That is, although children’s expressions may sometimes draw attentive responses from adults, these are commonly framed as acts of compassionate support rather than a recognition of their voices as agential expressions that should weigh heavily in how adults relate with them (Carnevale et al. Citation2021).
30. For example, corporal punishment of children may be legitimized within some contexts where they have little say about the treatment of their bodies.
31. This can reveal associated interests that could further inform understandings of their best interests.
32. These questions also point to some of the concerns revealed within the narratives presented in this paper.
33. This question highlights a significantly neglected dimension of children’s agency, which emerged throughout the opening narratives (Noiseux et al. Citation2019).
34. Agency does not refer exclusively to self-interests. Children, as agents, have demonstrated concerns regarding the wellbeing of others.