PEA Soup: The Ethics of Santa Monday, Dec 21 2009
ethics and philosophy 10:49 am
From PEA Soup, a blog devoted to policy, ethics, and academia:
Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus: that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve. Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that you can communicate with Santa about your preferences. Not only parents, but retail establishments and (I have recently discovered) public schools collude in perpetuating this myth among children of a certain age.
Perpetuating the Santa myth has at least these moral reasons against it:
1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.It seems to me that these reasons are sufficient to show that perpetuating the Santa myth is immoral. Most of America strongly disagrees with me on this point. I would be interested to know what the professionals at PEA Soup think.
Lying to children about Santa is just one of the many ways in which parents feel no compunctions about manipulating their children rather than treating them as persons. The only “good” thing about this manipulation is that it is supposedly for the benefit of the child, though that is debatable. One problem with the Santa myth not mentioned above is that the associated manipulation and lies is indicative of a broader pattern of manipulation and lies.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I got in loads of trouble as a child for telling my little brother that Santa is not real, but I plan to do the same service for my children… while letting them know not to blurt out the big secret in front of their classmates!
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:38 am
The reality is that children in most cultures are going to be confronted with *a lot* of myths. Some parts of my family insist on believing in a zombie who will grant them ever-lasting life as long as they strictly follow a bunch of nonsensical rules laid down by the zombie and his followers.
Santa is a relatively innocuous myth whose inevitable debunking is also a very good opportunity to teach children about why myths exist in the first place and how even large collectives of seemingly intelligent adults can nonetheless be in error.
Personally, in my case my daughter and son had long-ranging pseudo-theological debates for years on the likelihood that Santa and the Easter Bunny were “real” rather than mythological and overall I’d say the effect of exposure to those myths has been positive (as opposed to exposure to more pervasive and negative myths like the prevailing zombie myth).
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:29 am
Humans are not very bright and not very sane, and because of that not very good at being good to each other.
The world is mad and the only solution is ultratechnology.
Just one more reason to be a singularity advocate. Singularity = No more BS.
It’s all bullshit and it’s bad for ya.
-George Carlin, visionary rationalist
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:10 pm
like psychiatry? thomas szasz… the science of lies… oops.
December 24th, 2009 at 12:13 am
You say “parents feel no compunctions about manipulating their children rather than treating them as persons”. I have children, who “believe in Santa”. Lying to them is much more difficult than you may believe and I certainly have compunctions. It’s not something one does easily and happily. I know from speaking to many parents I know that they feel similarly. I also know how much my children enjoy Christmas, and the concept of Santa. I don’t know if that justifies the lie - I find moral certainty difficult to come by - but it certainly does help.
We are brought up to think of lying as a very bad thing, and it’s actually quite difficult to lie intentionally for most people. Certainly lying about Santa has felt really quite uncomfortable to me.
So why not tell them The Truth About Santa? Well:
First, children (and frankly a lot of adults) just don’t have a cut-and-dried attitude to either belief or existence. If I were to tell my kids (aged 3 & 5) that Santa did not exist they would not understand it in the way you or I would. Clearly Santa exists, they went to his grotto yesterday and spoke to him! That every Santa they see is a different person in a Santa suit has no bearing on their understanding of his “existence”.
So, point number 2, by the time they are old enough to start understand the difference between existing-as-a-concept and existing-as-an-actual-physical-thing-in-the-objective-universe they start to figure it out for themselves. This is often reasonably young - I think I was 7. It’s not like we’re lying to them right up until we suddenly unleash them on the world to make decisions for themselves, as a lot of people do to their kids about sex, death, religion and many other things. This is not a lie to influence their actions, this is a lie purely and simply to improve their enjoyment of Christmas.
Finally, Santa’s non-existence is a *secret*. If I persuade my kids that Santa does not exist, they will tell everyone else’s kids and there will be much sadness and strife. You would also have to tell them that everyone else’s parents are lying, which could be extremely harmful. Kids take lies very seriously and have a real fear of the world being different to how they think it is. They don’t understand differences of opinion, even, so would find the idea that a lot of adults are barefaced liars extremely difficult to process.
I suspect you will still think it’s wrong to lie to kids for any reason, and that’s a principled position I can entirely understand - but parenting is a much more nuanced business than I ever imagined before I had children, and you often tread a very fine line between various fuzzy wrongs rather then being able to execute on clear principles at all times.