"What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?" I would say that is made up hysterical Fox news bullshit.
I sympathise with the writer of this 2015 NYT article. I'm not sure I follow what he says about truth and proof but the gist of the piece seems right. Neat summary: But at the same time, the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave. The designers of the Common Core seem to want children to learn the distinction between the objectivity of fact and the subjectivity of mere opinion, that is judgement or belief arrived at without due justification. This is very closely related to the standard philosophical distinction between belief, which may be true or false, and knowledge, seen as true, justified, belief. So knowledge is a kind of refined belief. Sadly the designers have chosen to present opinion and fact as exclusive, so children learn that opinions are unjustified beliefs. If they are then told that moral claims are to be classified as opinions they will see them as unjustified beliefs and ripe for dismissal. Not a happy outcome when one of the purposes of education is to imbue children with a common moral compass to hold society together.
I have always taken 'facts' to be synonymous with 'truths' as in it's a fact that Trump is president. The entry (by Jonathan Lowe) in my Oxford Companion to Philosophy for 'fact' says, A fact is, traditionally, the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes the proposition true. However my Collins dictionary gives usage 5 of 9, (philosophy) a proposition that may be either true or false, as contrasted with an evaluative statement, so there is room for confusion. It looks as if CC is using 'fact' as an abbreviation for 'factual statement', and 'opinion' for 'non-factual statement', the difference being objective verifiability (in principle, at least), corresponding to the objective/subjective distinction. I still support McBrayer's objection to classifying moral statements as subjective. 'Homework plagiarism is wrong' is verifiably true---you get punished (I hope!) for it---and an explanation for why it's wrong can be given.
Am I right in thinking this stuff is taught to US kids before they are 11 years old? We've seen already that there are some subtleties here that such young kids can't, I suspect, handle. So there is simplification and loss of distinction. The status of moral statements is not exactly a settled issue in contemporary philosophy. That, in my opinion(!), should make us wary of teaching impressionable children, in effect, subjectivism. But it will sit well, I suppose, with the postmodernism they will be subjected to later.
Hal, if kids are taught that moral claims are opinions (McBrayer) and opinions are personalstatements of belief (Hal quoting CC) it rather looks as if moral claims have no greater force than statements of personal taste. This looks like ethical subjectivism to me. From Ox Comp Phil: There is a range of views about moral judgements. At the subjectivist pole, they are taken to be discrete feeling-responses of individuals to situations actual or imagined. To move towards the objectivist pole is to argue that moral judgements can be rationally defensible, true or false, that there are rational procedural tests for identifying morally impermissible actions, or that moral values exist independently of the feeling-states of individuals at particular times.
Thanks for the link, Hal. Good piece by Peter Hacker. I liked his setting of morality in history. Also this para:
It is noteworthy that respect for persons, for human beings with intellect and will, and knowledge of good and evil, is a far deeper and more fundamental notion than the recognition of human rights. To suggest that what was evil about the Armenian genocide, the Jewish holocaust, the Soviet gulags, the Cambodian terrors of Pol Pot, was that human rights or natural rights were being violated is, as Simone Weil wrote in a different context, ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Nor can one decently say that the millions of victims were treated unjustly. Rather, they were not treated as human beings should be treated. They were tortured, subjected to unimaginable physical and mental suffering. They were humiliated and degraded, subjected to unlimited terror. What was being violated was not human rights, but the very humanity of people – their moral agency and autonomy.
6 comments:
"What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?"
I would say that is made up hysterical Fox news bullshit.
Otherwise known as a lie.
I sympathise with the writer of this 2015 NYT article. I'm not sure I follow what he says about truth and proof but the gist of the piece seems right. Neat summary:
But at the same time, the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave.
The designers of the Common Core seem to want children to learn the distinction between the objectivity of fact and the subjectivity of mere opinion, that is judgement or belief arrived at without due justification. This is very closely related to the standard philosophical distinction between belief, which may be true or false, and knowledge, seen as true, justified, belief. So knowledge is a kind of refined belief. Sadly the designers have chosen to present opinion and fact as exclusive, so children learn that opinions are unjustified beliefs. If they are then told that moral claims are to be classified as opinions they will see them as unjustified beliefs and ripe for dismissal. Not a happy outcome when one of the purposes of education is to imbue children with a common moral compass to hold society together.
I have always taken 'facts' to be synonymous with 'truths' as in it's a fact that Trump is president. The entry (by Jonathan Lowe) in my Oxford Companion to Philosophy for 'fact' says,
A fact is, traditionally, the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes the proposition true.
However my Collins dictionary gives usage 5 of 9,
(philosophy) a proposition that may be either true or false, as contrasted with an evaluative statement,
so there is room for confusion. It looks as if CC is using 'fact' as an abbreviation for 'factual statement', and 'opinion' for 'non-factual statement', the difference being objective verifiability (in principle, at least), corresponding to the objective/subjective distinction. I still support McBrayer's objection to classifying moral statements as subjective. 'Homework plagiarism is wrong' is verifiably true---you get punished (I hope!) for it---and an explanation for why it's wrong can be given.
Am I right in thinking this stuff is taught to US kids before they are 11 years old? We've seen already that there are some subtleties here that such young kids can't, I suspect, handle. So there is simplification and loss of distinction. The status of moral statements is not exactly a settled issue in contemporary philosophy. That, in my opinion(!), should make us wary of teaching impressionable children, in effect, subjectivism. But it will sit well, I suppose, with the postmodernism they will be subjected to later.
Hal, if kids are taught that moral claims are opinions (McBrayer) and opinions are personalstatements of belief (Hal quoting CC) it rather looks as if moral claims have no greater force than statements of personal taste. This looks like ethical subjectivism to me. From Ox Comp Phil:
There is a range of views about moral judgements. At the subjectivist pole, they are taken to be discrete feeling-responses of individuals to situations actual or imagined. To move towards the objectivist pole is to argue that moral judgements can be rationally defensible, true or false, that there are rational procedural tests for identifying morally impermissible actions, or that moral values exist independently of the feeling-states of individuals at particular times.
Thanks for the link, Hal. Good piece by Peter Hacker. I liked his setting of morality in history. Also this para:
It is noteworthy that respect for persons, for human beings with intellect and will, and knowledge of good and evil, is a far deeper and more fundamental notion than the recognition of human rights. To suggest that what was evil about the Armenian genocide, the Jewish holocaust, the Soviet gulags, the Cambodian terrors of Pol Pot, was that human rights or natural rights were being violated is, as Simone Weil wrote in a different context, ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Nor can one decently say that the millions of victims were treated unjustly. Rather, they were not treated as human beings should be treated. They were tortured, subjected to unimaginable physical and mental suffering. They were humiliated and degraded, subjected to unlimited terror. What was being violated was not human rights, but the very humanity of people – their moral agency and autonomy.
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