Ethics in Light of Childhood

This is not just a book about children and ethics. This book revolutionizes the very way ethics is done. With probing insight and close attention to social practice, John Wall rescues children from their usual place as the 'most systematically excluded group on the planet' and moves them to the center of moral deliberation. This book should be required reading for ethicists and all those who care about sustaining the good life and a just society. -- Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology, Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion Could viewing moral issues from the perspective of children create a revolution in philosophical and religious ethics? This beautifully written book brilliantly argues that it will. Get ready for a new paradigm in ethics that author John Wall calls 'childism.' It may be as exciting for ethics as feminism was thirty years ago and be central to moral debates for decades to come. -- Don Browning, professor emeritus, Department of Religious Ethics, University of Chicago, and author of Reviving Religious Humanism This wonderful book takes the study of childhood and of ethics to a new and transformative level. Animating ethical theory with stories drawn from real children's lives, Wall calls for a fundamental restructuring of ethical thinking. It is essential reading for anyone who thinks deeply about children. -- Barbara Woodhouse, L. Q. C. Lamar Chair in Law and co-director, Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic, Emory University

Childhood faces humanity with its own deepest and most perplexing questions. This title reimagines ethical thought and practice in light of the experiences of the third of humanity who are children. It argues that a different childism is required that transforms moral thinking, relations, and societies in fundamental ways.Childhood faces humanity with its own deepest and most perplexing questions. An ethics that truly includes the world's childhoods would transcend pre-modern traditional communities and modern rational autonomy with a postmodern aim of growing responsibility. It would understand human relations in a poetic rather than universalistic sense as openly and interdependently creative. As a consequence, it would produce new understandings of moral being, time, and otherness, as well as of religion, rights, narrative, families, obligation, and power. "Ethics in Light of Childhood" fundamentally reimagines ethical thought and practice in light of the experiences of the third of humanity who are children. Much like humanism, feminism, womanism, and environmentalism, Wall argues, a new childism is required that transforms moral thinking, relations, and societies in fundamental ways. Wall explores childhood's varied impacts on ethical thinking throughout history, advances the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, and reexamines basic assumptions in contemporary moral theory and practice. In the process, he does not just apply ethics to childhood but applies childhood to ethics - in order to imagine a more expansive humanity.