In this episode, Robyn has a question about moral development. How do biology and culture function to direct and/or constrain our development as moral persons from childhood into adulthood? Before getting into the meat of that question, we take a wild detour into the perverse world of Christian media, talking Touched By An Angel lighting decisions and the plausibility of God’s Not Dead plot points. But then we get into Robyn’s question, which she frames by discussing the debates about the status of “childhood.” Is it something that every human experiences as a biological reality, is it constructed as part of only some cultures, or somehow both? She links this question to the problem of childhood moral development specifically. Jon pitches a distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical causality between biology and culture and Robyn explains Extended Evolutionary Synthesis as intellectual tools for thinking about the question. In an effort to get a handle on the applicability of these tools, Jon adverts to Lonergan’s notion of “abstractive viewpoints.” Ryan spells out how this notion lets us distinguish lines of inquiry into single classes of data, like the data on the human being. From here, Robyn points us back to our central question about the moral development of children. Jon suggests that culture has a big role to play in providing the objects of childhood decision making, and so offers Piaget’s notion of “adaptation” as an open, dynamic model for thinking about moral development. Ryan discusses the ways in which this process of adaptation will involve a messy, but progressive realization of freedom and moral subtlety. Robyn suggests an interesting alternative analogy from language development and it reminds Jon of some articles he read once. We conclude by spending a little time talking about how adolescents become an adults and how our culture might do a better job of shepherding that transition.

Jon’s TS Article:

Jonathan Heaps and Neil Ormerod, “Statistically Ordered: Gender, Sexual Identity, and the Metaphysics of ‘Normal.’” Theological Studies, Vol. 80, No. 2 (2019): 346–369: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/CCE4TTRJ5EIP6EX747VA/full?

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