Innocence and Agency: The ethics of child protests
In this post, Tim Fowler (University of Bristol) discusses his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which he explores whether children can be deemed as competent to engage in political activism.
The Fridays for Future or ‘Climate Strikes’ have been a striking feature of political action on climate change. Most associated with Greta Thunberg, these actions reveal the power of children to intervene effectively in political spaces. In doing so, they raise ethical, political, and sociological questions. In my paper I focus on two: first, whether recognizing children’s right to protest should affect the age thresholds for other activities, especially voting; and second, the impact on the child protesters themselves.
I’ve long been interested in questions about children and childhood, partly because children don’t always ‘fit’ within liberal frameworks. Liberalism, as the ideology of the Enlightenment and modern world, emphasizes autonomous, independent agents. Our democratic practices presume people who can make and bear the consequences of their choices. Children are excluded from voting, driving, drinking, etc., on the grounds that they lack such capacities. Yet Greta Thunberg and others challenge this through the commitment, agency, and skill the strikes demand. It’s inappropriate to dismiss their actions as merely ‘childish’ or of no value.
For those committed to consistency in how we distinguish adults from children, two options seem to follow: either deny the competence of child protesters and ignore them, or recognize their competence and lower the voting age. But if we accept the latter, consistency might also suggest lowering the drinking or sexual consent age. Instead, I propose a more piecemeal approach, recognizing different kinds of competence. Voting should involve weighing complex national issues — something children, on the whole, may lack capacity for — even if they can express thoughtful views on specific topics.
The second question is whether striking is good for children. While this depends on individual cases, we can ask more broadly whether political engagement benefits children. I argue that there is a cost, as it takes away a period of life when one might be innocent of the world’s burdens — a quality long seen, though sometimes controversially, as central to childhood. The philosophical concept of the intrinsic goods of childhood — those things good in themselves about being a child — is useful here. Thinkers like Samantha Brennan, Anca Gheaus, and Colin McLeod have emphasized childhood’s value in its own right, with McLeod highlighting innocence as part of what makes childhood special.
From this perspective, the rise of eco-anxiety — children’s deep worry about climate change, and now, wars like Ukraine and Gaza — is profoundly regrettable. Political anxiety is troubling for anyone, but especially for children, as it undermines goods of childhood that cannot be reclaimed. Yet while innocence is important, insisting on it too strongly ignores that many children are already exposed to politics. Given this, preventing them from acting on their concerns is unfair, and activism may be a psychologically healthy response to their anxieties. As I argue in the paper, the worst situation is one where children are exposed to politics but forbidden to act.
This leads to an ambivalent conclusion. On one hand, I argue that society can grant children the right to protest without granting them the right to vote; the issue of consistency is overstated. Different institutions and practices have good reasons for drawing the child/adult line differently. For many children, protesting is a positive act — both as a means of pursuing political change and as a way to feel agency. Yet we should also regret that children feel the need to protest at all, since it signals that we, as adults, have let them down and that they have lost something of real significance.
