Abstract

This chapter introduces the book’s central claim: that modern moral philosophy has quietly encoded an adult-normative bias, analogous to the biases inadvertently programmed into autonomous vehicles. In the same way that cars misidentify children, women, and people with darker skin because they have been taught an arbitrarily narrow model of ‘the pedestrian’, so ethical theories risk misvaluing infants and children when they assume the adult mode of experiencing existence is the human norm. Moral anthropologies that privilege rationality, independence or futurity begin by treating adulthood as inherently superior, thereby relegating childness to a lesser or merely preparatory state. Although rarely acknowledged, that assumption shapes consequentialist theories most acutely, since their evaluation of persons depends on identifying which forms of experience ‘count’ as meaningful. A theory that recognises only adult ways of flourishing becomes self-fulfilling: infants can only ever appear deficient, and their value must be justified through exceptions, promises of future adulthood or the interests of others.The chapter proposes that avoiding such bias requires recognising all the ways humans meaningfully enjoy existence. Empirical research demonstrates that infants construct biographical narrative from birth. Their way of being human is not a lesser version of adulthood but its own form of flourishing. Age-neutral ethics must therefore ground personal value in the child’s present experience, not in her resemblance to the adult she may become.