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AGAINST SPANKING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2022

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Abstract

In a recent article in this journal (THINK 54), Timothy Hsiao argues that spanking a misbehaving child is morally permissible on the grounds that it's what the child deserves. However, in this short article, I argue that Hsiao's argument in this connection is either obviously unsound or invalid.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Sege, Robert D. and Siegel, Benjamin S., ‘Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children’, Pediatrics 142.6 (2018): e20183112CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Hsiao, Timothy, ‘In Defence of Spanking’, Think 19.54 (2020): 4954CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 By ‘typical misbehaving child’ I simply mean that there's nothing importantly unusual, in the relevant moral sense, about the misbehaving child. The misbehaving child isn't, for example, severely cognitively disabled or a nine-year-old that is as mentally, physically and socially developed as an average adult.