Book Review Preview: Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney

See also the review.

In my review of X-Risk, I mentioned that I wanted to read a book called Teaching Children to Care by Ruth Sidney Charney.

It looks like it's about teaching children to behave, but maybe also to care. Apparently, we are taught to be moral and don't have an inherent desire to do the right thing. Or maybe we do and that inherent desire has to be elicited from us through discipline or other education.

It's interesting to think of morality as something that can be learned, that is taught. When we see evildoers, maybe they are just untaught? (Maybe sometimes that is a point of leverage.) What kind of teaching actually works? Or maybe adults are too old to learn morality?

This book might give some clues as to how teachers approach ethics and metaethics. They need ethics to make the classroom function, but how do they ground those ethics? Do they try? I assume that elementary students (which from the cover picture appear to be the people who are to be taught to care using methods like this book) are not taught explicit ethical and metaethical reflection, or at least not in a very developed way. So then maybe the moral values, instincts, intuitions, that develop in the students through a sort of mechanical process (an "ethicogenesis" (word I just made up), about which one could write a genealogy of morality, perhaps) "mellows" into this "time immemorial Right and Wrong", unconnected to any metaphysical source or legitimacy. Morality can be treated as software rather than truth, and it is installed by parents and teachers. (Maybe one could say that the software, down the line, programs teachers to install it on new "systems").

So this might help explain why people can be so ethical in how they react to things or view the world, and yet be uninterested in the grounding of ethics.

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Later: it occurs to me to be interested in how it is that children are trained to be moral -- to be aligned with the teacher's / society's values. Is there a connection to AI alignment (maybe not something that would help AI safety researchers, but interesting nonetheless)? Both children and neural nets are trained, rather than programmed.

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Also later: a classroom is a family (for a broad definition of "family"), and in a family, what other people want is inherently right or wrong. The rules are constructed, by someone who cares for you and knows better than you. The rules are also constructed in the sense that they are up for human revision and are binding within the group as a group. They are supposed to be fair because that's how humans are supposed to make rules. Children desire to be treated fairly, so that's how the rules are supposed to be. Rules are endemic to groups of people who relate to each other, and are not free-floating moral things (moral "particles" or "force fields").

So a more "reality" or "truth" approach to rules, as opposed to a "family" one, is foreign to the classroom and to most people's lives.