Part of my Teaching

After I read a batch of papers, I write a summary focusing on the main general problems in the students' arguments. Thus...

Dear writers,

I have finished the music drafts and am working on the fairy tale papers now. Interesting to note that most of you argue against limiting expose to music but for limiting exposure to fairy tales. I would be interested to know what accounts for this? The fairy tale princess more dangerous than the misogynist rap song?

    Be that as it may. With respect to the music papers, many of you argue for not limiting exposure but integrating this openness with rational discussion to enlighten the young about the nature of the music. I would point out that this might beg an important question of the critical reader: the ability to think well and be influenced by sound arguments already presupposes emotional intelligence. So to take an example outside music, a person who thinks like Woodruff might argue that a person accustomed to hardcore pornography may find it difficult to see the degradation and dehumanization inherent in it. If their emotional responses have been trained to see it as a harmless pleasure rather than as a corruption of human dignity/sexuality, they will likely reject rational arguments about its moral and psychological harm. Their failure to feel appropriate shame and reverence—emotional dispositions that recognize human dignity—renders them blind to the truth that reason seeks to reveal. Thus to argue for allowing adolescents to use it with the proviso that therapists, say, enlighten them on its dangers fails to account for the necessary precondition that allows them to recognize the depictions as dangerous: an emotional disposition to see men and women as souls rather than objects. A person’s emotional meaning-blindness to this will lead to an ability to be convinced by rational argument. How can you respond to this, if you want to make the appeal to reason argument?

Also concerning the ‘people respond to music subjectively’ arguments – same point. How a person responds depends on upbringing. That a person like trump responds differently from a loving, decent person is clear – say to people who have fled civil war and poverty. But Woodruff’s point is to raise loving decent people requires training emotional responses – partly through music (and stories for the fairy tale people). How would you writers who lay stress on the subjectivity of response reply to this key point? (Not all subjective responses are equal.)

The issue is whether emotional intelligence (loving the good, true, and beautiful; responding with aversion to the vicious, ugly, distorted) is a precondition for rational understanding – or? 

Also beware of the ad populum fallacy: just because x calls certain aspects of contemporary society into question is no argument against x. If x is true, then it is contemporary society that is in the wrong. The only question is whether x is justified – assuming x is a matter of truth and not taste. 

If you think x is a matter of taste and not truth, and your reader thinks x is a matter of truth, then the burden of proof is on you. So Woodruff thinks education and music are matters of truth: that music can objectively express good or bad values, and making certain kinds of music a part of a young person’s life can move them in one direction or the other.

I have been enjoying the papers so far. Very interesting!