Aaron Tracy

My worry is that when you take morally difficult content out of an artist's work, not only are you messing with their work in a way that feels artistically illegitimate, but you're also depriving kids of the opportunity to wrestle with challenging moral questions.

Sometimes they're going to need help in wrestling with those questions.

And that's why we often engage in practices of reading with our kids or talking with our kids about the books that they're reading.

But I think that if you take away that content, you're also taking away the opportunity for moral growth and discussion and development.

And that's not a great way of raising our kids.

I guess just to push back for a second or to Billy Devil's advocate, some of the censorship they did, like removing the descriptors fat and ugly, they feel like the kind of thing, like if my kid was reading a book that had those words in them,

I probably, and maybe this is my own moral failing, I probably wouldn't stop reading and explain to them why those words are problematic the way I would if there was something incredibly bigoted or anti-Semitic.

Those words probably do just get incepted by the child as normal.

If the great majority of us are not going to turn those kinds of things into a lesson, is it still okay?

I mean, when it comes to terms like fat and gross, it's not as if taking these terms out of kids' books are going to prevent kids from hearing these words as they go about their lives.

While I grant that not everybody who's reading with their kids or talking with their kids about books is going to take the opportunity to think with them about the language being used,

at least the opportunity is there on the table.

And there are ways in which we can promote it.

So clearly the publisher in this case is taking action to address an issue.

So they're committed.

A different way they could take action would be to provide some guidance for kids or for adults on how to engage with that content.

Throw a preface in the book, put it in an appendix, right?

There are different ways in which we can take these issues

you seriously without engaging in cutting or obscuring.

This comes up also in the context of art and museums, especially when we know things about the moral life of the artist and aspects of their moral life sort of come up in their work in really explicit ways.