Essay About U.S. Parents Of Children And Severe Punishment

An Argument Against Spanking
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An argument against spanking
1. Introduction
Its likely that you, like me, were sometimes spanked by your parents. A 1995
Gallup poll
found spanking to be used by 74% of U.S. parents of children aged 17 or younger. But there is
ongoing public debate over spanking. A lot of the debate concerns whether it should be legal. I
shall not address this question, but rather whether spanking is morally permissible. I shall argue
that it is not. I shall not argue that it should therefore be illegal. (Even if spanking is wrong, a law
against it might constitute an undue intrusion of the state into the private sphere.)
In public debate, spanking is often unhelpfully conflated with severe punishment such as beating
with a belt or even child abuse. By spanking (or smacking, as it is known outside North
America) I shall mean open-handed striking of the buttocks, such as to cause only moderate and
short-term pain, and causing no injury or lingering marks. Spanking is thus a mild form of corporal
punishment. I shall focus on spanking by parents, but my argument applies to any person
who might spank a child, such as school personnel. (See n. 29 for some remarks on a specific issue
relating to institutional spanking.)
Within philosophy, the usual argument against corporal punishment stems from the liberationist
view that children deserve the same rights as adults. This view implies that since adults
have a right against being struck, even mildly, then so do children. However, as Laura Purdy
says in her case against liberationism, such a policy seems not to be in the interests of children
themselves, whose immaturity requires their parents to exert far more control over them than
would be required for an adult. Even if children do have a right against severe corporal punishment,
it seems unlikely that such a right would extend so far as to rule out spanking. After all,
parents need some way to control their children, and spanking looks no more harmful than other
punishments such as being sent to ones room or going without dessert. So if those punishments
are acceptable, why not spanking? Spanking is, of course, painful; but so is a polio vaccination.
Pain is sometimes necessary. Accordingly, even writers with liberationist sympathies are often
unwilling to disallow spanking.6 Given its disciplinary effectiveness and the implausibility of the
idea that there could be a right against it, spanking appears morally acceptable.
I do not think matters are so simple. While I doubt that children have a right against spanking,
the idea that spanking is justified by its disciplinary effectiveness reflects a simplistic picture of
the harms it might cause. The picture considers only whether spanking itself causes direct harm
to the child. I agree that such harm, if it exists at all, will indeed be negligible. What is overlooked,
however, is the potential for spanking to escalate into more severe corporal punishment,
of a sort which plainly is harmful.
My argument in this paper is almost anticipated in a remark by Purdy, who notes that “if it
turned out that on the whole children do better without physical punishment, prohibiting it could
be justified by showing that its use invites abuse.”7 I would amend her suggestion to say that if
corporal punishment invites abuse, then judging it morally impermissible would require only that
we show that children do no worse without it – not necessarily that they do better. I shall argue
that analysis of the risks of spanking indeed supports its impermissibility.
My goal, then, is to sketch a non-rights-based grounding for the impermissibility of spanking.
I have already implied that I am skeptical about childrens having a right against spanking, but I
shall remain officially agnostic on the existence of such a right. I wish only to show that spanking
can be seen to be impermissible even without an appeal to such a right. My approach is primarily
consequentialist but also has affinities with virtue ethics, for it emphasizes the moral importance
of avoiding bad habits in ones behavior towards ones children.
2. Spanking and harm
First, let me say what I will not be arguing. Some say that spanked children are more likely to
be aggressive or antisocial as adults.8 Extensive research, however, has not decided whether cor
poral punishment is any more likely than non-physical punishments to cause such a long-term
outcome.9 So I shall not rely on a claim that spanking has such effects. Of course, if it does turn
out to have such effects, my argument will be strengthened.
Instead of the effect of spanking on the childs behavior, I shall focus on its effect on the behavior
of parents and other adults. Spankings wrongness, I shall argue, arises primarily (if not
exclusively) from the fact that by encouraging the corporal punishment