First, I would advise you to let go of the shame you feel for what you thought or said when you were younger. We can all look back and wince at such things, but this is part of growing up and (we hope) gaining some wisdom along the way.

I, for one, do not admire what you call "the child's purity." I think I understand what it is in children that you refer to here. But I do not find such "purity" (AKA innocence or ignorance) admirable--after all, it is not something they have achieved with effort, and the older they get, the less charming it will be, if they don't "lose" this "purity." It is just part of what it means to be an immature child--and we can understand how this can be spoiled, in a way that is damaging both to the child and to the adult the child will become, if this "purity" is taken from them too soon or too harshly. So we value it as an important part of what it is to be a child. But that is not the same as admiring it.

What is good for a child, then, is not the same in every case as what is good for an adult. Both phases can be good in their own ways, but these are not in every aspect the same: childish ignorance, for example, is usually a bad thing in an adult and that is why we value the education that helps us to have more mature outlooks and make more mature judgments in the adult world. Because there are endearing traits that go with being a child, why should we not take joy from seeing these traits in them? From the fact that we do so, it does not follow that the traits we cherish among adults have to be the same as those we enjoy in children, or that the way we value childish traits in children shows instability in the way we judge adult values.

I think parenthood is a huge responsibility that is not always taken seriously enough, with the result that many people who are unable or unwilling to live up to the demands of good parenting have children and don't do well by them. We require education and licensure to drive a car yet leave unregulated the far more complex and arguably more consequential task of parenting. I am not defending state regulation of parenting (though I think it is a topic worth serious discussion), but I am claiming that parenting is morally serious business and that adults don't have a right to reproduce without being willing and able to be good parents or provide good parents.

But you're not worried about cases involving bad parents. You seem to think that having children is always in principle "reprehensible," because despite the best efforts of good parents, children suffer, both as children and, later, as adults. Your position curiously seems to look at only one side of life's ledger, viz. the pain and other harms that many of us suffer. But this overlooks the positive side of the ledger, for instance, simple pleasures of the young and old, the joys of friendship, the pride of hard won accomplishments, the transporting experience of passionate creative activities. No doubt, some people are unlucky and their lives are filled with more pain and harm than pleasure and value. It's debateable how many are in this position and whether it would have been better if they had not been born. But I think that many would assume that most people lead lives worth living in which the goods of life outweigh the bads. Indeed, one of your concerns is the cost of living lives in the shadow of death. But consider the alternative. Surely, life is a condition of the universe containing value. It's true, our lives would be better still if they contained less suffering, but they are lives worth living nonetheless. That doesn't make it obligatory to have children, but it would undermine the argument that it's always wrong to have children, because of life's pains and evils.

When a human child is brought into existence, whose moral responsibility is it to see that this child’s very significant needs are met? In most human societies, this responsibility has been given to its parents. It was due to the parents’ actions that this child came into existence in the first place; and, further, parents tend to have stronger instincts than others to meet the very significant needs of their progeny. For these reasons, the allocation of primary responsibility to meet the needs of immature humans to their parents generally makes good moral sense. To what extent and under what conditions this responsibility should also be shared with others and to what extent and under what circumstances this responsibility may be relinquished to others are further complicated moral questions.

You wonder whether it is fair that fathers who have had no say in whether a fetus is brought to term should be held morally responsible for meeting the needs of their progeny. This, it seems to me, is a legitimate moral question. But I wonder whether we are looking at the situation in the right way. It seems to me that so long as fathers do not take on an equal share of the responsibility for meeting the needs of their progeny, the decision whether to abort a fetus (if such a decision is to be made available to anyone) must be given to women. For, as a matter of fact, and whether fair or not, most women bear the primary responsibility for meeting the needs of their children. It seems to me that if men wish to be granted the right to play an equal role in deciding whether a fetus for which they are responsible is brought to term, they must also be willing to play an equal role in meeting the needs of their children.

I am not sure what is the philosophical question here. Of course there is no general moral principle that guides the rules that you're evoking and you may imagine a huge cultural variation in different legal systems. There are legal systems which do not recognize the right to abort to a woman who doesn't want to have a child as well as there are legal systems (actually, most of them until recently) that do not oblige a man to support his child if, for example, the child is born outside a legal mariage.

The rights of women to decide upon the destiny of their future children seems a very recent contingency of some of the contemporary legal systems, and not an inevitable consequence of the difference between men and women. It is unclear in the question whether you complain of this state of affairs (that probably refers to contemporary United States) or you ask what is the underlying moral principle that justifies it. If it is the second one, I would say that there is no such a principle.

It partly depends on what the method is supposed to be. In reading some of the Socratic dialogues, one gets the strong impression that it was a technique for walking the person being questioned into a pre-determined and sometimes peculiar answer. (Do we really think that Meno's slave boy had learned about triangles in his life before birth?) But the goals people claim to have in mind when they use the Socratic method are good ones: to encourage critical thinking, to get students to take ownership of their ideas, and to see that easy answers are often not forthcoming. Starting with a question -- especially a provocative one -- seems like a plausible way to get people thinking. But we all know that things with the grammatical form of questions can sometimes serve the same purpose as simply making a claim; sometimes it's not hard for students to pick up on the answer they're supposed to go for.

Perhaps the real question is what methods work best for getting people to be critical thinkers. That's a question that's partly empirical, and there are psychologists (Jonathon Baron, for instance) who've written about it. Perhaps one of the best things we can do for our students, with due regard to what works at what age, is to encourage them to develop what Baron calls "active open-mindedness" (the willingness to look for alternatives to one's own preferred view and consider them openly but critically) and to avoid the corresponding vice of "myside bias." If some form of Socratic questioning serves this purpose, then it will be a useful pedagogical tool. But the goal is more important than the technique.

That parental discipline may constitute a form of abuse depends entirely on what you accept under the label of "discipline". Consider for example a family in which following some religious practices - like preying before supper, or not eating certain kinds of food - is considered as part of a discipline that children are obliged to follow, and a 10 years old child (that is, someone who is cognitively able to take at least partly autonomous decisions on her moral preferences, even is she still doesn't have reached the institutionally established "age of reason", usually 16, 18 or 21 according to the countries) who refuses to comply. In this case, I would consider a sanction of her behaviour as a form of abuse. Punishing her for not complying to a rule she doesn't want to endorse because she finds it incompatible with her ideas and moral feelings is a form of abuse.

Abusing children means prescribing them a system of rules of disciplines without taking their stance and thinking about what is reasonable to accept now and in their future and what is questionable from their point of view now and in their future. Of course it is very difficult to evaluate what are the cases in which we have the right to act in an authoritative way with our children and cases in which we haven't this right, because given the asymmetry in experience, cognition and moral development between our children and us, very often we must force them to comply with practices and norms whose interest and value they cannot immediately understand.

One may argue that paternalism - that is, restricting the freedoms of dependants in what it is claimed to be their own interest - could serve as an appropriate moral test for parental discipline. But I don't think it suffices. In many cases we have the right to decide on behalf of our children in our own interest: we may for example proscribe some of children's actions or behaviours by appealing to the respect they owe us, that is, to the regard they should have to our way of living. So paternalism doesn't suffice to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate coercion that we exerce on them.

A more plausible moral test for discipline would be the following: we can legitimately impose children to comply with some rules and practices if we consider our attitude towards the values these practices help to promote and the reasons why we endorse them. If the values these practices help to promote (hygiene, respect, instruction etc...) are values that we share and accept on a reasonable basis and not simply on authority, and furthermore we think we will be able in the future to articulate a reasonable explanation to our grown up children on why we decided to force them in such a way when we had control on their lives, then we can legitimately impose a discipline.

A different question is when punishment for not complying with parental discipline can be considered an abuse because, for example, it is too severe. Here I think we should take a long term perspective and balance the corrective effects of the punishment on education with long term effects of the punishment on the emotional and moral development of the child. For example, public humiliation, a form of punishment that was very common in schools and families, should be avoided, because its long term consequences may be extremely negative, whereas any form of punishment that involves taking the responsibility of an action (like for example learning to admit a fault), can have positive consequences on the way the child will conduct herself in the future. It will be useful also in this case to take the children's stance and try to "simulate" their understanding of the causal path which goes from their action to the punishment.

As both a parent and philosopher, the question you raise about appropriate religious upbringing is one I thought about quite a bit as my children, now 19 and 22, grew up. The heart of your four-part question is this: How, if at all, should the parents’ religious convictions influence the religious development of their children? While the influence of teachers, friends, and the general culture on a child’s religious outlook is very great, the religious (and here I include non-religious) upbringing by parents or the primary caregivers, whether intentional or not, is fundamental. It certainly warrants careful consideration by parents and prospective parents leading up to and throughout the period of their children’s formative years, and even beyond. I would argue that if there is a right answer to your question, it is the same answer for all four of the scenarios you raise.

The approach I’ve tried to follow is that one should educate one’s children about the whole range of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. That can include bringing one’s children in contact with religious practices, such as services and ceremonies, but it also includes providing children with the history of the various religions of the world, as well the culture and politics of those religions. At the same time, in order to ultimately be in a position to evaluate this information, children need to develop their thinking and reasoning skills as well. The nature and quality of one’s general education is also very important. This is clearly a tall order, and no one should expect to be able to accomplish it in anything like a complete and comprehensive manner. Still, it is an ideal worth tilting toward. One’s children should have the relevant information and reasoning skills to ultimately make their own decisions about matters of religion. It should be possible to do this while parents continue to express and act on their own convictions relating to religion, bearing in mind that parents’ actions can have a particularly profound influence on the child.

At the start of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Descartes notes that he was a child before becoming an adult, and that as a result, many of the beliefs he acquired were not the result of well-informed rational reflection, but largely the influence of his education and upbringing. He resolves to meditate on all his past beliefs and determine whether any of them can be established as certain. These beliefs include his beliefs about God. While Descartes didn’t canvass the diversity of religions in the world at his time, he did attempt to use careful reason and reflection to determine what he ought to believe. Descartes’ example suggests that determining what one ought to believe, both about religion or anything else for that matter, is a life-long pursuit, one which we can prepare children for by educating them as critical thinkers and questioners.

Another philosopher from later in the modern period of philosophy well worth reading is David Hume. Almost all of Hume’s writings relate in one way or another to religious belief, but the work most relevant is his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779. Hume treats religion as a natural phenomenon which we can study and analyze as such. What he calls “natural religion” is as much a phenomenon of the natural world as are the flora and fauna. A contemporary philosopher influenced by Hume is Daniel C. Dennett, whose recent book Breaking the Spell (2006) argues for the importance of a scientific understanding the influence of religion on human behavior. For an overview, a recent lecture by Dennett which treats the very issue you’ve raised, is available at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/94.

While I’ve suggested that parents should strive to bring it about that their children develop in such a way that they ultimately can make their own decisions about what, if any, religion to adopt, it’s clear that this is not an easy thing to do. For many parents, religious beliefs are closely intertwined with other central moral, political, and social, esthetic and even scientific beliefs. This is also true of friends, teachers, and others with whom the child comes in contact. When my daughter was in grade school, in a conversation with two other children, one child asked the second, “Where do you go to church?” The second replied: “We don’t go to church, we go to synagogue.” The first student then asked my daughter the same question. My daughter replied: “We don’t go to church.” So the first child inquired further: “Ah, so you go to synagogue!” My daughter replied: “No, we go mostly to restaurants.”

Perhaps this is the answer: Young children and philosophers can both discuss the world in unconventional ways, children because they have not yet learned to think conventionally and philosophers because they have unlearned this. Sometimes children will discuss the world in ways that also interest philosophers; philosophers, however, will address these issues in much more sophisticated ways, and the added complexity of their perspectives makes them much less likely to match a young child's confident assertiveness about the way the world is.

I would certainly like to know these questions...and the three-year-old child who has such wisdom! Surely this question is a joke...?

I am probably not the right person to answer this question, because I am not entirely comfortable with talk about moral obligations. But perhaps I can start a conversation (or dispute).

I don't think you strictly owe your parents anything at all, just on the basis of their giving birth to you or raising you. They made these decisions, in most cases, without consulting you at all (obviously, in the case of deciding to give birth to you, and often, too, in their decisions of how to raise you). So, it is not as if you agreed to some exchange: "give me these things and I will care for you in your old age." You never made any such agreement, so they can't really suppose you now owe them for decisions that they made (mostly without your consent or equal participation). I don't see how you can incur a debt without consenting to the transaction that creates the debt. But again, I am generally uncomfortable with deontological analyses of most moral issues.

As a virtue theorist, I would prefer to modify the question. What would the best sort of person do? Would a good person, understanding that he or she had no strict debt to parents, leave them to rot in their old age? Even if there is no strict obligation to return others' freely given beneficence, what kind of twerp would fail to count it as, if not creating an obligation, at least as a significant reason for reciprocating appropriately? Even if I don't actually owe you anything, I can be a pretty bad guy for not giving it to you. So, I would prefer to make the question into what a good person would do, as a good person, rather than understanding it in terms of debts, duties, or obligations.