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0 pointsbaobabKoodaa22h ago0 comments

I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:

1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.

2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.

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dash221h ago

If you define absolutely anything as violence in that way, you’re completely within your rights to do that, but then you can’t claim it’s intuitively obvious that we should never use violence against children. Instead you will need actual evidence, which leads us back to where we started - the evidence base is weak.

Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.

My imprisonment analogy was meant to point out that it is not valid to take a common intuition that X is wrong, apply a very extended concept of X (even if you think that the extended concept is the only coherent one), and then expect the intuition to still command universal agreement.

baobabKoodaaOP20h ago

> If you define absolutely anything as violence

I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today.

> Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.

Just like Putin's war in Ukraine is a "special military operation" or Trump's war in Iran is "just a little skirmish", right? You can play word games all you want, but it won't change the substance of the arguments. The point I made earlier was that some things are inherently good or bad, and that "violence against children" is part of those things. If you want me to say "xzglorb" instead of "violence", sure, we can say "xzglorb", but the substance doesn't change: xzglorb against children is inherently bad.

dash28h ago

I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.

But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?

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