From here sixteen days, an old jovial and paunchy gentleman, endowed with a long white beard, will sneak into our homes to bury us with gifts – less, that’s what children think. However, one could question the moral aspect of such a bobard. Why want our offspring at all costs to tell the truth, while happily perpetuating this funny myth every year?
According to Emmanuel Kant, in the Doctrine of virtue,, “Lie is the greatest attack on man’s duty to himself considered only as moral”. If the Prussian philosopher was uncompromising on the subject, Tom Whyman, a philosopher at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, is of a completely different opinion. As he explains for The Conversation, he is for him morally acceptable, if not highly recommended, that parents participate in the great lie of Santa Claus.
First of all, let’s be frank: what a sweet pleasure, when you are a child, to write your letter to Santa Claus, to leave milk and cakes, all while impatiently waiting for your arrival. Aren’t these activities the essence of Christmas? But, more generally, this universal lie also raises a good question: that of honesty with its children.
After all, what it means to be “Totally honest”? “If I felt forced to tell my children everything, I would not hesitate to tell them the pitiful state of the world, of existence, my concerns of money, my concerns of health, my concerns about them …”says Tom Whyman. However, not sure that it is highly recommended, as it specifies. Therefore, why not be tempted by a vision of the world a bit sweetened?
Lying, a development tool
Besides, lie should not always be negatively connoted. Indeed, toddlers are more likely to tell small lies when they have a high emotional understanding and are able to grasp the nature, the causes and the consequences of the emotions that affect or concern others.
Furthermore, the philosopher mentions an argument of Friedrich Nietzsche, from his essay Truth and lie in the extra-moral senseaccording to which we must be at least somewhat deceived on reality to be able to bear it. Indeed, for Tom Whyman, “Growing up, we probably need, at a certain level, to believe that the world is good and just: the kind of place where a joyful man directs a workshop run by elves, rewarding kind and punishing children (slightly) the bad guys”.
What about when children will see clear in your lie? According to a study carried out on fifty-two children, most of them discovered the truth by themselves at the age of seven, and a majority of them reacted positively. Contrary to what one might think, it is even the parents of the concerned who proved to be mainly sad in reaction to the discovery of their child. Thus, the philosopher advises parents to maintain the myth as long as their children are small, but above all to respond honestly when they are later confronted with their suspicions.
In the end, when we educate our children, we must always worry about their well-being. “If we want to raise critical citizens, endowed with the acute sense of the possibility of improving the world, the myth of Santa Claus is certainly one of the mechanisms that will allow us to achieve it”concludes Tom Whyman.
