Common sense says that people no matter their age have a right to an intact body.
Given human history up to and including today, this would seem to be quite "uncommon sense". It is certainly common in many places in the world, but is historically uncommon basically everywhere and is uncommon today in many places. Part of this is because the concept of humanity, the notion that people are people (are all members of the human race) regardless of nationality, race, gender, religion, etc., is recent. The dominant paradigm was to consider one's own "people" (one's tribe, clan, nation, empire, etc.) as superior to others such that "common sense" said other "peoples" had no rights at all, not even to life. Also, even within a "people", generally "common sense" dictated that women and frequently children were more or less possessions.
However, let us grant that such views are indeed immoral, as I hope we can agree that wives and children are not "possessions" that e.g., the
paterfamilias is within his rights to kill at will.
Raising children involves constructing part of their worldview. Labels or no labels, everything from facial expressions and stated opinions to general demeanor and outlook of one or more persons raising a child will affect the way that child sees the world. As intimated (if not stated directly), one need not label one's child "republican" to instill the beliefs that go along with such a label, and this is usually what happens even when one consciously attempts not to do it.
A more extreme example may be found by considering racism & sexism: a child's guardian can instill racist and sexist beliefs not only without labels, but without believing that they have done so or that the views held (by child or guardian) are in fact either sexist or racist.
A relevant and interesting book, albeit a controversial one I find many issues with, is
Closing of the American Mind:
“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 4 = 4…The students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich…The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate…They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and
it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance…
The true believer is the real danger…The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion.
It is something with which they have been indoctrinated.”
Before returning to the ways in which this is true (and not true) I leave aside for the moment to address a much less contentious point made after the introductory chapter that is also directly relevant here:
“The Europeans got most of the culture they were going to get from their homes and their public schools, lycées, or gymnasiums, where their souls were incorporated into their specific literary traditions,
which in turn expressed, and even founded, their traditions as peoples. It was not simply or primarily that these European schoolchildren had a vastly more sophisticated knowledge of the human heart than we were accustomed to in the young or, for that matter, the old. It was that
their self-knowledge was mediated by their book learning and that their ambitions were formed as much by models first experienced in books as in everyday life. Their books had a substantial existence in everyday life and constituted much of what their society as a whole looked up to. It was commonplace for children of what they called good families to fill their imaginations with hopes of serious literary or philosophic careers, as do ours with hopes of careers in entertainment or business.
All this was given to them early on, and by the time they were in their late teens it was part of the equipment of their souls,
a lens through which they saw everything and which would affect all their later learning and experience."
“Young Americans seemed, in comparison, to be natural savages when they came to the university. They had hardly heard the names of the writers who were the daily fare of their counterparts across the Atlantic, let alone took it into their heads that they could have a relationship to them. ‘What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’... But for me, and for many better observers, this constituted a large part of the charm of American students. Very often natural curiosity and love of knowing appeared to come into their own in the first flush of maturity...European students whom I taught always knew all about Rousseau and Kant, but such writers had been drummed into them from childhood and, in the new world after the war, they had become routine, as much a part of childhood's limitations as short pants, no longer a source of inspiration...But for Americans the works of the great writers could be the bright sunlit uplands where they could find the outside, the authentic liberation for which this essay is a plea.”
The first thing to note is that in addition to being overly dramatic, too much influence is placed on literary traditions and too little on other sociocultural & familial influences. While this is partly made-up for later in the book, the author’s biases as a philosopher and classicists whose expertise in even the social sciences was so influenced by philosophical works he projected their power over him onto his subjects (i.e., in this case university students). The second is that, while over-emphasized, there was indeed an incredible influence exerted upon European children not via labels or religion but by education of all things. In particular, the philosophical works deemed most important within a particular nation yet far beyond the ability for young children to read critically or even absorb without prescribed meanings & interpretations given them shaped core aspects of their persons, including moral beliefs. The comparatively untutored American students, while relatively ignorant were exposed to the ideas within such important philosophical works when mature enough to critically evaluate and interpret them.
That American student, argues Bloom, is extinct. In part s/he was replaced when, instead of instilling a particular philosophical and literary mindset pre-college education focused more on math and science, but “presented in technical and uninspired fashion…students apparently learned what they were asked to learn…many of the best students’ dedication to science was very thing.”
More importantly (and not just in America; just most pronounced there), the ability to be exposed to the works of great philosophers with an open-mind had, ironically, been eradicated by the doctrine of “openness” or relativism. It is here important to note that Bloom is not arguing against relativism
per se, and does not describe students who reach such a position through critical thinking and study.
While much of the book reflects not only the biases of the author’s academic field but also his politics, a lot of the problems are in Bloom’s presentation. I have attached a review of Bloom and his critics so as to avoid providing one and going far-astray.
Here, the relevant points that have at least some truth are that relativism is and has been increasingly an indoctrinated belief that is assumed not questioned, as I have found over the years posing questions like an example Bloom gives:
“If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, "If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?," they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place.”
Also important is that all education is indoctrination (this is and was for the most part the central meaning until the “threat of communism”). The influence on young Italian minds of Dante and Machiavelli (at least at the time of Bloom’s writing) was part of cultural
ethos as deeply rooted and fundamental as any religious belief. In fact, while I know a contemporary of Bloom’s who was also a non-religious Jew whose knowledge of the Bible was rivaled only by appreciation for its literary influence, Bloom’s discussions on religious beliefs are often what one might mistake for a Christian’s argument if exposed to them out of context. Yet of Marx’s replacement of God with a teleological history he states one “might as well be a Christian if one is so naïve” and rather considers the “death of God” much as Nietzsche did (I say much because I don’t believe his presentation of Nietzsche to be wholly accurate).
This thread is a testament to the kind of blind acceptance as a truism that which denies itself: relativism. The idea that the penultimate believer, the religious person, is the true danger because the religious (especially believers in “traditional” religions like e.g., Christianity as opposed to e.g., Wicca) often believe not only that their religious views are true but that ideally all should believe likewise is accompanied almost always by an equally pervasive doctrine. The difference is that religious doctrines are held to be so, while too often the idea that relativism is an ideology, provided not discovered, is missed. For instance:
No one has a right to alter it, especially when it is for no legit reason.
“no legit reason” assumes a basis that is treated as fact, not belief or assumption. Likewise, the belief that labeling children as Christian, Muslim, Bahá'í, etc., is wrong because of its effect upon the development of some “correct” worldview or at least a more critical mind is defeated by its own assumptions. This is not to say that arguments can’t be marshaled for the view, nor that there are not many who hold such views yet are aware of the extent to which they are doctrines too, just that when such a doctrine is espoused as it has been here without even the suggestion that it
may be a doctrine, it means assuming a basis for what constitute “legit reasons” for action that are not recognized as assumptions because they are so ingrained, unquestioned, and thus constitute critique of dogmata while unknowingly espousing one. If dogma is to be avoided because it is uncritical, then surely dogma held unconsciously, without awareness or realization of its presence or effects, is doubly so.
