Right, but if you smack your child on the wrist, is it violence? You can't really answer these things by throwing definitions around. (Imprisoning children is wrong, I'm sure we can agree. So, if you ground your child, is that imprisonment?)
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:
1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.
2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.
If you define absolutely anything as violence in that way, you’re completely within your rights to do that, but then you can’t claim it’s intuitively obvious that we should never use violence against children. Instead you will need actual evidence, which leads us back to where we started - the evidence base is weak.
Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
My imprisonment analogy was meant to point out that it is not valid to take a common intuition that X is wrong, apply a very extended concept of X (even if you think that the extended concept is the only coherent one), and then expect the intuition to still command universal agreement.
I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today.
> Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
Just like Putin's war in Ukraine is a "special military operation" or Trump's war in Iran is "just a little skirmish", right? You can play word games all you want, but it won't change the substance of the arguments. The point I made earlier was that some things are inherently good or bad, and that "violence against children" is part of those things. If you want me to say "xzglorb" instead of "violence", sure, we can say "xzglorb", but the substance doesn't change: xzglorb against children is inherently bad.
I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.
But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.
No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better.
You don’t seem to have answered my second question.
Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.
Regarding that second question:
> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.
I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.
*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.
