In “The Loss of Innocence and the Things that Remain,” Michael McKenna takes up what he calls my “controversial thesis that we morally competent adults have an obligation to usher innocents from their moral condition, and this involves opening children up to the possibility of evil.” McKenna addresses questions I originally neglected in a chapter of my Responsibility Matters on “losing innocence for the sake of responsibility.” These questions are crucial to a serious consideration of the crux of my thesis that adults have a moral responsibility to facilitate the loss of innocence in children. I used that chapter in developing the first draft of the second year's PDTCs session on moral conflict issues. The topic, it turned out, troubled a number of the chaplains who had observed firsthand how innocence lost is all too often replaced with anger and brutality rather than any hoped-for moral wisdom. Some chaplains spoke with me about their worry that confronting one's loss of innocence was most likely to be postponed by Marines with whom they were deployed in favor of losing some other part of themselves in a bottle or by taking out the rage their experiences in Iraq had aggravated when they returned to CONUS and confronted their own children and spouses.

In order to avoid confusion, the type of innocence McKenna and I are talking about is a moral status, not a particular state with respect to an untoward event. The innocent, in the sense in which McKenna and I are interested, might be described as in a state, vis-à-vis the ascription of justifiable moral responsibility, comparable to that of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Innocence, in this sense, is the purity of moral virginity. It is not the purity of always acting as morality prescribes.