Guest Post: Santa Claus and the good life

Is lying to your children about Santa Claus justified? Perhaps not!

This is a guest post from Peter R. Brookes, a PPE (philosophy, political economy, economics) tutor from the UK. Mr. Brookes writes on PPE related topics at his Substack.

---

When I was a teenager, I struggled in the search for objective purpose, meaning and right and wrong. It seemed a completely intractable problem - how do you derive what you should do from what is in the world?

However, I found a loophole of sorts. Whilst I couldn't work out how to derive any objective sense of purpose or good, I could think about what would be conditions for constructing a framework of finding the good life as social creatures.

Central to the good life is survival - the good life cannot be led without ensuring that first of all life is there! So, some regard for one's own survival is at the heart of living the good life. I think, by the by, that this is an overlooked argument for the immorality of suicide. Arguments often focus on ingratitude to the Creator or violating natural order, etc. They appeal to abstract ideas to which one has to first subscribe - one has to first believe in the Creator, or the natural order, and so on. But the central question of our lives - how do we live the good, purposeful life - can only be answered and then lived out if we survive for it.

That's a pretty incomplete answer! Sure, we should carry on living (and perhaps have some regard for health etc.) as part of ensuring our position to live the good life, but it doesn't have too much else to say. One could idolize survival, as anti ageing innovators such as Bryan Johnson sometimes do. But this just elevates one precondition for the good life into the whole picture - which seems to be straying off the goal on mind.

So, I wondered what else I could find to be a precondition of the good life - what could I find that would help provide some guidance on building up a plan for living.

And one thing that seemed central was respect for and seeking of the truth. For without high regard for the truth, what can one discover with any certainty? This struck me as pretty important. Again by the by, it's a great argument for taking epistemology seriously - and rejecting all moral encroachment theories of epistemology, and it getting the moral and the epistemic justification the wrong way round - only with epistemic justification first can we be sure of what any moral justification is.

Since we are social creatures, the good life must involve some methods for dealing with others. Pursuing the good with others is a natural inference. Now I was getting a bit more on the weak inference side, but I felt it necessary. Cooperation can only be sustained with some reciprocity. But at the very least, when one has a strong reciprocal relationship with someone else, it seems that both should strive together to live the good life.

Since the good life must place a value on truth to be sure of working out any particular moral obligations or conditions for good living, it follows (by plausible inference), that one should tell the truth to those with whom one is cultivating a reciprocal relationship with the goal of living the good life. Therefore, there is definitely good reason to pursue maximum honesty in a variety of relationships.

Arguably chief among them is parent and child. The parent is the trend setter to the child, the first informed mover in the game of nurture and nurtured. The parent can try to set the terms for ensuring they can grow with their offspring towards the good life. Central to that is a commitment to the truth [in order to be best placed to find the truths of what it takes and what to do to live the good life].

Therefore, parents should set a standard of honesty with their children. An outrageously obvious place to start is with being upfront about their beliefs towards Santa or Father Christmas. As such, contrary to what Jimmy has argued, I believe we have very good reason to discontinue the Santa tradition.

It’s been put to me that - given the social nature of our species - surely cultivating a virtue of deception and learning are also essential. This furthers Jimmy’s case - let’s raise kids in the idea of Santa to stress test them and cultivate some healthy cynicism in them. Of course, this is one way in which one can raise kids to have a healthy cynicism of the world. But it has the very particular harm that it sows a deep distrust and cynicism to even those closest to them - at the time of early childhood their parents. But the lesson of distrust to even the closest people will remain.

Having said that, do we want to create peculiarly close clans? I.e., do we want everyone only to have the closest trust to their closest relatives? This has implications for trust in wider society. Where people distrust strangers the most, the fruits of Western civilization do not get realized. But there’s the real problem - distrust. Trust does not exist in finite fixed amounts to be shared out - it can increase. Cultivating more trust within families is not exclusionary with trust between strangers in wider society. If anything, practicing trust will help us take that leap with others.

But even if we do wish to create peculiarly close families, is such a blind trust sustainable - especially when scaled up to a societal level? Sure, but if parents set a consistent precedent of truth telling, it's not blind faith in them at all! It is evidenced by their continued truth telling.

Is there a problem that children never learn to adopt a healthy scepticism of others? I do agree that this can be a problem. Raised without believing in Santa, I do think I took a long time to realize just how much many people lie. All the same, I don't think that has to be a feature of not being raised in a lie. Parents can still emphasize in their direct teaching of how much people lie and the importance of being on one's guard. And there are plenty of more practical examples on the television or in the news or in anecdotes - all of which can help drill the point home.

So, Santa sows distrust and is not necessary for children to develop a healthy cynicism of strangers’ claims.

All the same, I am struck by Jimmy's point that the Santa myth is good for developing a healthy scepticism of family members. We can tell ourselves myths of the perfectly honest family members, but I don't believe it. At some point, some fudging of the matter happens. Of course it matters how much this differs - and it differs hugely, from the chronic liar to the once in a blue moon fudger. However, having some scepticism of family members can be important (Albeit of different importance in different families). This is a difficult challenge. But again, I'm unsure we need the Santa myth to demonstrate this lesson to kids. And if parents just admitted some lies, that may cultivate the erroneous impression that people generally freely and unprompted admit their lies with genuine ramifications yet without urgent need. I believe family debate can do the trick in the educated family environment at least. In debate, lies can often by exposed by deduction and plausible inference. In so doing, children can pick up both that even those close to them will at least massage the facts at times and won't necessarily freely admit it.

Given readers can adopt different courses of action to ensure their children are world-savvy and given the harms of the Santa myth, I'd suggest we can do better.