[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 7:56 PM +0000 4/12/07, Stefano Mori wrote:
>On 2007-Dec-04, at 19:47, LuKreme wrote:
>
>>  On 4-Dec-2007, at 12:27, Stefano Mori wrote:
>>>  On 2007-Dec-04, at 19:12, Mark Smith wrote:
>>>>  There is nothing other than crap in any of them that is unique to
>>>>  them. They are by definition then, full of useless crap. They should
>>>>  be dismissed.
>>>
>>>  OK, here's a question: how do you teach morality to a 4 year old?
>>
>>  My usual method is to point out that they are being selfish (almost
>>  all bad behavior can be traced to selfishness, from yelling at your
>>  brother to the bad drivers on the highway) and point out that they
>>  don't like it when other people are selfish.  It's worked pretty well
>>  with the two kids so far (10 and 5).
>
>
>And what I'm wondering is, do they have an inner formed cognitive 
>understanding of "selfish", or do they merely see, as a 4 year old, 
>the power figure telling them not to do something, and "selfish" is 
>just another word for "bad" and bad is another word for a possible
>punishment?

	Children know about sharing, and how they don't like it when 
others don't share, and can be taught to share themselves based on 
this observation when very young. Selfishness is a mild abstraction 
of the idea of sharing that children are quite capable of learning 
fairly early.
	Children are also capable of empathy, knowing that they don't 
like it when others are unhappy, very early on. And this is one of 
the foundations of moral behaviour.
	But also, yes, children can be selfish, and often do so based 
on mood and emotion and short term desire rather than rational 
judgement about long term outcome, and punishment is one of the ways 
we deal with this by giving them a short term reason to change 
behaviour, which is one of the ways by which we teach behaviour. 
Making clear that the short term punishment is in accordance with our 
general morality otherwise is one of the ways by which we teach 
children morality (and one of things that, if we get it wrong, can 
screw them up).
	Cheers
		David