There are many examples of adults deploring their “lost” childhood. It seems that our lives are significantly affected by how we fared during childhood. This talk aims to elucidate how the value of childhood is connected to the value of a life overall, and thus to explain why we cannot fully compensate for what is lost out on during childhood later in life. Such an explanation is not just important in its own right, as it helps us to grasp the specific significance of a good childhood. It is also morally important, as it provides a more detailed justification of why we owe more to children than to adults.
The talk begins by focusing on the most promising accounts of both lifetime well-being and theories about the allegedly intrinsic value of childhood to examine whether they have the resources to make sense of the significance of a good childhood for a good life. Finding all accounts lacking, the second part of the talk argues that there is additional value in the temporal location of when certain goods accrue, which explains why childhood as an early period in life has particular significance for a good life. To further defend this view, the talk ends by addressing various worries that might be raised against it.
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Speaker
Monika Betzler holds the Chair of Practical Philosophy and Ethics at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich. Her research centres on moral psychology and normative ethics, with a current focus on the ethics of personal relationships, the normativity of personal projects, and relational morality more broadly. Her book The Normative Significance of Personal Projects is under contract with Oxford University Press (forthcoming in 2027). Her book Grenzen der Moral (“Limits of Morality”) appeared with Mentis in 2026. She currently co-edits (with Sarah Stroud) the Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Personal Relationships (forthcoming in 2026). She is an elected member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee (IBC) and serves as the spokesperson for the Centre for Ethics and Philosophy in Practice at LMU. She is also a member of Academia Europaea and the Institut International de Philosophie. Prior to her current position at LMU Munich, she held the Chair of Practical Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She studied philosophy and German literature at LMU Munich and Université Lyon II, and also holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University.