I'll take care of you

One of Helena's favorite Christmas presents was a book by Richard Scarry, whom I also remember loving when I was a kid.  Toward the end of the book, the Cat Family is reading nursery rhymes, of which one is the encomium on sexual assault,

"Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry.

When the boys came out to play,

Georgie Porgie ran away."

The portrait shows two girl cats by the side of a big boy cat, both of the girls crying as the boy tries to kiss them.

Yesterday, Helena began to talk to the girl cats: "Não chora,  Bebê cuida." (Don't cry, the baby (i.e., I) will care for you).  I was very excited to see empathy spring forth at such a young age.  Then, today, she began to point her finger at the boy cat: "No, no, no!"  Empathy had moved on very quickly to a sense of justice, or at least of prevention.

At the end of the 18th century, moral philosophy saw an important debate between Emmanuel Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment.  For the Scots (people like Thomas Reed, but also the young Adam Smith), moral feelings needed be be culled and trained: empathy and a sense of justice might be natural in many people, but they were like small, weak plants in the jungle, and people needed to learn how to give them food and light so they could grow.  That way, our "natural" dispositions (in fact, trained dispositions) would direct us to act for the good.  Kant, in contrast, declared that any act based on a natural disposition, or in fact on any motivation other than duty, could not be called moral.

Now, when I was a Freshman in college, I loved Kant's moral theory.  It was hard, challenging, and logically rigorous, something that would set the moral people apart from the chaff.  As I've grown up, I have to say I'm much more convinced by Thomas Reed and his friends: though they may lack the logical and moral rigor of Kant's German thought, their ideas seem to bring more good into the world.

Why does any of this matter?  Because Helena is beginning to develop those moral seeds: the care for others who suffer (even if they are crying cats in a book), a sense of empathy for children who have lost their mothers, a rejection of the abuse of power in Georgie Porgie.  Kant would insist that there is no virtue in these young sprouts of ethics: if she is to be a good person, Helena must learn to defend the girls against Georgie because it is against the moral law exposed by our reason... not because she feels sorry for them.  Honestly, I think Rita, who sits with Helena and the book and talks her through the images, is a much wiser philosopher than Kant here.  As she talks about the girls and their tears, she trains Helena's sentiments to be just.  And that training, soon to become instinct, is better than any moral law out there.