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The Loss of Innocence and the Things that Remain[1]

Michael McKenna
Florida State University

In “Losing Innocence for the Sake of Responsibility,” Peter French begins by noting how little attention philosophers have given to the notion of moral innocence, and of its loss.[2] What French has in mind by innocence is not a matter of the relation a person might have with respect to an act or omission; it is, rather, with the moral status of those persons who, for whatever reasons, have not yet come to be morally responsible agents. The typical cases involve children, but the status of innocence need not be limited to children. Severely mentally retarded adult persons are innocents as well, and we could no doubt imagine other sorts of cases. In any event, I shall focus on normally functioning, healthy, mentally able children who have yet to enter fully (or sufficiently) the moral community as competent moral agents.

I have always admired French’s essay, and it has often struck me that, indeed, so few philosophers working on issues in the theory of moral responsibility have tended to the eminently important moral status of innocence, as well as the importance of its loss. While I suppose it is a metaphysical possibility that a person could come pre-packed as a fully functioning moral adult, on this planet, that is not how things work. Thus, a theory that explains what it is to be a morally responsible agent should, one would think, have something to say about how one becomes a morally responsible agent. This lack of attention is especially unfortunate since the moral development of children is certainly a topic worthy of philosophical effort.

In this paper, I will begin by arguing in support of French’s controversial thesis that we morally competent adults have an obligation to usher innocents from their moral condition, and this involves opening children up to the possibility of evil. I will then attempt to build upon his proposal since, in my estimation, he leaves unanswered the sorts of questions that need to be answered if we are to take seriously the claim that we should facilitate the process whereby our young come to face evil.

1. In what, according to French, does the loss of innocence consist? French entertains Kierkegaard’s thesis, as revealed in the story of Adam and Eve, that it involves the realization of the possibility of disobedience (32). But French correctly rejects this explanation since one could remain a moral child while coming to recognize the possibility of defiance, for instance, as children do when they see the power they possess in their ability to unsettle their parents. According to French, the loss of innocence involves both a loss and a gain. Furthermore, he contends, what is lost is intimately bound up with what is gained. What is gained, French proposes, involves learning how to redescribe things by the acquisition of a newfound conceptual understanding. With this discovery comes the realization that one had hitherto operated under the illusion of distorted, misinformed, and, in essence, childish descriptions of the moral world. So, in losing innocence by way of coming to grasp the deeper understanding of the moral world, French maintains, “one loses the option of seriously using the illusions of innocent description” (36).

As for what is gained, French argues that the conceptual understanding acquired must not only have a certain content, but also it must be acquired in a certain way. As for the content, French follows Aristotle’s requirement for knowledge of the universal in morality.[3] What one comes to understand is not only good and evil, but of one’s capacity to do it. Focusing on evil, French writes:

Experiencing evil in the loss of innocence is grasping for the first time the possibility that things might have gone differently, and so seeing what would have been good in the situation, and so seeing yourself as capable of evil. To do that one needs to know evil in the universal sense to which Aristotle alludes. Ignorance of the sense of evil (and therefore good) is just what characterizes innocents. (39)

This captures the content of what is learned, but not how. Making use of Bertrand Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description,[4] French maintains that the conceptual acquisition of evil, as well as one’s ability either to do it or suffer it, cannot arise exclusively from description. To lose her innocence, one must have some experience in which she, so to speak, faces the moral reality of the world herself, and in doing so comes to have a deeper conceptual understanding of the moral topography of the world and her place in it. French writes,

…we should say that a condition for a person’s knowing that such and such behavior is wrong or evil is that the person must already have had a private experience of evil. Learning the principles of morality by description—and that one is subject to them—takes one far beyond one’s personal experience. That is what Russell calls “the chief importance of knowledge by description.” The process of moral education, however, requires acquaintance in some manner or fashion. (41)

In my estimation, French overstates this last point. An innocent might be able to know at least some of the principles of morality, but yet not be able to apply them accurately or to appreciate her relationship to them. Nevertheless, the salient point here is that the loss of innocence involves an innocent’s coming to face evil directly, to come to know it by acquaintance.

French makes two further points that lead to the controversial thesis that I mentioned above. The first is that the loss of innocence is a cultural artifact, not something naturally occurring (36). For a person to grow into the state of a morally responsible agent, she must, so to speak, come to acquire a relationship to her moral world that is created by social conditions and expectations that are not of her making, nor of nature’s. As French notes, because of this, one measure of the quality of a culture or a society is the manner in which children’s innocence is protected, and the manner in which their loss of it is facilitated. The second point is that, due to the first, mature members of a moral community have a moral obligation to aid in bringing about the loss of innocence for their youth, their adolescents (42). This is required, as French observes, for the straightforward Hobbesian sorts of reasons that absent competent moral agents, moral contracts cannot be relied upon as stable social arrangements for the well being of society (41). More generally, we want our children to grow up to be morally virtuous, and, hopefully, even morally heroic. They cannot do that and remain mere innocents. Hence, the obligation is upon us. But if it is, and certainly French is correct that it is, then the disturbing implication stares us in the face. If the loss of innocence requires direct acquaintance with evil, then our obligation to our children is, at least, to create the conditions in which they face it, and as French writes, “the problem here is that such a duty could be misconstrued as a license for child abuse. Matters here are delicate” (42).

2. Most certainly, matters here are delicate! But delicate though they be, French is largely correct in his treatment of innocence, the importance of its loss, and our moral obligations in light of that. Before proceeding, I pause to elaborate and perhaps refine several of the points French makes in his characterization of the loss of innocence itself. To begin, I think that French should acknowledge something that he does not, though I do not think anything he says is in conflict with the point: The loss of innocence is not, at least not clearly, a guarantor of entry into the class of morally responsible agents. This is because what is lost need not be accompanied by the conceptual gains that French finds necessary for becoming a moral agent. A young person might lose the option of seriously using the illusion of innocent description, and yet not be able to supplant it with a stable understanding of good and evil, of morality. The young child who is the victim of sexual molestation will forever lose the possibility of discovering his or her budding sexual life through the imaginative language of a wistful teenager, nervous and hopeful about the joys of love and lust. Such a child’s sexual innocence has been stolen, and beyond the physical harm, this surely must be what constitutes the deepest and most contemptible aspect of the evil done to these children. Given this sort of harm, these children could hardly be expected to have acquired the sexual knowledge and maturity to understand relationships of intimacy in adult terms.

A related point has to do with something French mentions only briefly, which is the “illusion of innocent description.” In my estimation, innocent description is crucial to understanding innocence, and French is exactly correct to call it an illusion, something that can readily be taken for real but is not. A caricature of innocents is that they have no understanding of morality at all, or that they are utterly ignorant of the parsing of people or actions into the categories of good and evil (at least good and bad). But that is not so. Through myth and fiction, with simple training, we encourage our children to be more like some and less like others, and so we instill a fairly simplistic moral order, one in which, for example, the superhero is always pure, strong, physically superior, handsome or beautiful, and the villain always tainted, physically enfeebled, ugly, and so on. (Have a look at the old Batman or Superman cartoons.) The illusions of innocent description are largely the cultural artifacts of the simplified moral order we initially use to educate (or indoctrinate) children.

French remarks that we fear our loss of innocence and our moral maturity because this process can be an assault on our “confidence in the continuity of self” (37). As our childhood illusions are so intimately connected with our hopes, joys, fears, and so on, as one loses them, she can experience them, French speculates, as an attack on her very self. I do not dispute French’s claim that we might come to fear our loss of innocence for these reasons, but I think that there is, at least often, another very different basis for fearing this loss. Consider the following passage in the closing pages from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when Holden’s own grip on his childhood illusions are melting away:

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought of how Phoebe and all the other kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I’d smash his head on the steps till he was good and goddamn dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed. I hardly even had the guts to rub it off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and think I’d written it.[5]

While Holden is coming of age and his own moral education is getting under way, while at least some of his childhood illusions are fading, he is furious at the thought of threats to the innocence of Phoebe, whom he loves. But notice that his own moral understanding is still certainly that of a confused and enraged young boy: It must be a pervert and a bum, one who pees on school property after hours, who could execute such a horrible moral transgression as to write these filthy words! And no doubt, the justice he deserves is to have his head bashed in for it. What the case of Holden illustrates, I think, is that we might also fear the loss of innocence since, once we have come to realize the bankruptcy of our earlier simplistic childhood moral illusions, we are uncertain how to replace them with a more stable understanding of the moral world, and so we are uncertain what to do, or how to live. We are left aware that we need a far more nuanced map of our moral surroundings, but how are we to acquire it?

I offer one more qualification about French’s view on the loss of innocence, which concerns his claims about knowledge of evil. Some might object that French is too cavalier in his presumption that we morally responsible agents, we competent adults, are adequately equipped to know evil. Isn’t the very notion of evil itself culturally constructed and open to sufficiently controversial interpretation that it is a stretch to claim that losing innocence requires the acquisition of conceptual knowledge of evil? If so, it might be objected, then the whole lot of us remain innocents. I think the objection is misplaced, though French might have said more to guard against it. He does note that innocence is a scaler notion, one that admits of degrees (41). This leaves it open that all of us remain limited in our moral understanding, fallible even where we have some grip on right and wrong, and at least open to new moral discoveries. But this does not quite speak directly to the worry, for part of it is that there is no settled thing which is evil to demand that innocents come to understand that. Here, I believe, the proper reply is that the moral life, at least here on earth, does not work that way. Whatever noises about cultural relativism one might make, nowhere do we find cultural practices in which no domain of behavior is regarded as evil, or at least deeply morally wrong. What we ask of our children, as they emerge into adulthood, is to recognize for our time, for our place, where those limits are, as well as one’s (awesome) ability to violate those limits.

3. Now consider French’s disturbing contention that we competent moral adults have a moral obligation to expose innocents to the possibility of evil. To some, French’s proposal runs contrary to a fundamental tenet of parenting. A parent’s job is above all to shield his or her children from evil or any other kind of harm. However the young come to lose their innocence, it is not by our facilitating their exposure to evil. I think that this tenet is misguided, but to understand why French’s alternative to it is not, questions need to be answered. How are we to facilitate the process whereby the young face evil? Do we directly expose them to it? How do we equip them to come through it properly?

French notes that in primitive societies there are clear rights of passage orchestrated through ritual and meant to mark the point at which a young person can no longer claim moral exemption by virtue of his or her status as an innocent (42). He remarks that in our industrialized society, these rituals gave way to parental explanations of “the facts of life” (42). Here, I think French under-describes our own resources. There are, after all, such rituals as confirmation for Christians, or the bat or bar mitzvah for Jews. Even setting these sorts of examples aside, in our society we often have something similar to the rituals French has in mind: teenagers graduate and go off to college; a young person heads off to boot camp; an oldest son or daughter is brought into the family business, or expected to take on parenting duties for younger siblings or nursing duties for a sickly family member. In virtually all of these cases, the transitions involved provide the opportunity for exposure to the underbelly of the moral world: a college student can cheat, squander money, have uninhibited sex, and experiment with dangerous drugs, all without fear of the watchful eye of mom or dad; a soldier in boot camp is actually taught in exquisite detail the techniques for taking human life; a child brought into the family business might face for the first time the opportunity to exploit or cheat others for personal gain; and so on.

Of course, these observations merely report how we in fact often do facilitate the process of losing innocence. They do not tell us how we should do so. Some of the standard methods are obviously inadequate. One reason is that the sorts of experiences likely to arise through some of these processes are out of sync with the evils presented in our contemporary life. In Spartan culture, for instance, rites of passage were appropriately linked to the travails of Spartan life. The evils a Spartan might face informed the ways that the young would be introduced into adult moral life. Packing up and going off to college, by contrast, has become largely a way of deferring the experiences of adult life rather than learning to cope with them. Part of the difficulty, however, for our pluralistic society is precisely that we have no unified set of cultural values and goals, and so what should count as “appropriate innocence-ending experiences” (to use French’s words, 42) is hard to discern. Nevertheless, there are clearly strategies that fail. In my estimation, regrettably, the typical transition to college life is one that has become, by and large, a failure in this regard. (Though, naturally, there are exceptions.)

Given the above reflections, what does seem clear is that the moral obligation of adults is to foster innocence-ending experiences that are naturally suited for the moral life young adults are liable to face. Perhaps, then, the obligation is to create the possibility for multifarious moral experiences, ones in which the young are exposed to the travails of life on the economic edge, life in the interstices of racial conflict, life at the front of environmental destruction, life as an outsider or foreigner on the global scene, as well as, of course, the typical experiences any person must face while emerging into adulthood, such as learning to cope with one’s sexual urges, or resist the temptation to act from anger or hatred. If so, this indicates that one common style of parenting in our time is especially ill-suited for helping our children become competent moral agents, and this is the style of the “helicopter parent.” The helicopter parent is the one who embraces the tenet I mentioned above—the one holding that a parent’s job is above all to shield his or her child from evil or any other harms. This parent pulls her child from a school because there is a slight increase in violence, or will not let his children run about the neighborhood because so many of the other children come from broken homes where lots of poor language is used and the mother entertains too many men. The helicopter parent is inclined to home schooling, and conceives of parenting as largely a matter of creating a protected environment complete with a set of prohibitions his or her child should follow so as to protect the child from the evils of an encroaching morally corrupt world.

Of course, French’s proposal, and the one I have elaborated on, is not that our obligation is to directly do evil to our children or even, so to speak, throw them directly into it. Human nature and the contingencies of life will provide sufficient opportunities for encounter with evil. What we should do is provide chances to face these opportunities, more or less controlled environments for first encounters where others are on the scene to lend a hand, and hopefully even intervene when things go wrong. This, I take it, is what French means when he writes of “guiding children through the passage into adulthood” (42).

Even supposing that we do have some sense of how to facilitate the process of losing innocence, there is the further question of how we prepare our children for the transition. Of course, there are the obvious considerations. Intelligence, a solid education, health, and physical fortitude will all play a role. But in closing I will offer one further element, which brings me back to French’s mention of the illusions of innocent description. Those illusions, I contend, must be of a certain sort. They must, I believe, contain the seeds of basic, true moral insights. In this way, our preparation for the loss of innocence begins with the moral myths we first give to our children, the ones they use to build their own childish, illusory sense of the moral order. If those myths we first give to our children—with the stories we read to them, the simple explanations that we give, and the like—are not grounded in some sound moral convictions, we will leave them with no anchor when the illusion is shattered. Indeed, most fables and fairytales offer the seeds of deeper moral understanding. Snow White, beautiful though she was, had no vanity, and Cinderella’s charm had nothing to do with the rags she wore or her lot in life. The big bad wolf might at first appear no different than your loving grandmother, and so on. And when in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Max made mischief and was sent off to bed without his super, he went on his wonderful adventure where he tamed terrible beasts (of course his own emotions) only to discover that he wanted “to be with someone who loved him most of all.”[6]

In his analysis of morally responsible agency, Ishtiyaque Haji speaks of the initial instilment of an evaluative scheme in children, one that is a necessary condition for a young person’s coming to have an authentic set of values that are her own.[7] One requirement Haji identifies is the absence of attitudes that are authenticity-destructive, and he proposes that one sort that is destructive involves beliefs that are morally wrong (1998, 131). Haji also requires some subset of basic beliefs that are morally right. Though he does not identify any, one example might be the simple truth that a person’s moral quality cannot be discerned based upon nothing more than her physical appearance or what part of the world she comes from. Haji’s thesis is a straightforward endorsement of the point I am making here, that even in the illusions of innocent moral description, which we expect our children to outgrow, there must be the seeds of basic moral truth.

To the above considerations, I would also add another point Haji develops (126-35), and bases on Joel Feinberg’s discussion of the moral emergence of children. Feinberg contends that the self we create for ourselves over time “will not be an authentic self unless the habit of critical self-revision was implanted in us early by parents, educators, peers, and strengthened by our own constant exercise of it.”[8] As regards the illusions of innocent description that French has in mind, the salient point is that there are different ways that an innocent can stand in relation to her childish moral understanding. She can accept it uncritically, or she can adopt towards it a critical eye, a degree of scrutiny fostered by those charged with her moral development. The child who is left unequipped for the loss of innocence is the one who never thought to question the simple myths of her moral illusions, who was never encouraged to wonder why Snow White had to be so beautiful in order to tell the story, or why she had to be white, for that matter, or what was so terribly wrong with Max’s rumpus in the jungle with the wild things.

French closes his essay by noting that all of us retain some of our illusions. Stripping away all of them, French remarks, would result in psychic annihilation (43). As regards aiding our young in losing their innocence, we need only hope to strip away as much as needed to help bring children into the moral community. I agree. I would add that the moral illusions we begin with as children, and the critical stance toward them we are encouraged to adopt even in our early youth will play a large role in the stability of the transition of losing innocence. Although concerned to make a very different point, in “When you gonna wake up?” Bob Dylan scolds his peers for living in moral blindness, and he tells them that they had best wake up and strengthen the things that remain. The loss of innocence, I think, is best encouraged with similar advice. While bringing innocents into the moral community, and so causing the loss of their innocence, what we want, after they lose the illusion of innocent moral description, is for them to come to the sort of mature moral understanding whereby they can strengthen the illusions that remain. Hopefully, then, they can still take joy in life, even as adults who know the moral world.

Endnotes

1. I would like to thank Christopher Griffin and Steven Scalet for inviting me to contribute to this volume on the work of Peter French. I also would like to thank John Fischer and Ish Haji for comments on this paper. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Peter French for the opportunity to have studied with him in years past. Peter arranged an excellent NEH Summer Seminar in 1995 on the topic of moral responsibility. I continue to profit from the thoughtful supervision he offered me that summer, and I remain in his debt.

2. Peter French. “Losing Innocence for the Sake of Responsibility.” In Responsibility Matters (Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1992), Chapter 3, 29-43.

3. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross (Oxford, 1925), Book 3, p. 51.

4. Bertrand Russell. The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1912), Chapter 5.

5. J.D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye (Little, Brown and Company, Inc., 1948), 201.

6. Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are (Harper and Row Publishers, 1963).

7. Ishtiyaque Haji. Moral Appraisability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 7.

8. Joel Feinberg. Harm to Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 35.

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