At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right” (Proverbs 20:11).
Moral agency is not something that is suddenly flipped on in a person’s soul when they turn twelve, or turn eighteen. We can often tell what sort of plant something will be in the seedling. But there are layers.
Our common sense understanding that moral agency is on a dimmer switch does have some scriptural backing. When God spares Nineveh, one of the things He says to Jonah is that He will willing to be merciful in that the city had scores of thousands of people who did not yet know their right hand from their left (Jon. 4:11). When Solomon, using hyperbole, compares himself to a “little child,” he says that he did not know how to go out or come in (1 Kings 3:7).
So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a tree of moral understanding—if it were, then Adam and Eve could not have sinned by eating from it . . . as they had not yet eaten from it. Rather, the tree was one of maturity in judgment. Our parents grasped for rule before they were ready for it. When David seeks to reward Barzillai by giving him a position in Jerusalem, he refuses because he is too old to “discern between good and evil” (2 Sanm. 19:34)—i.e. too old to be a good judge. The judgment of little children, in a similar way, is not yet mature, and so they are not as responsible. But as per our proverb, this does not mean there is no responsibility.
And Paul says that at one point in his life he was alive apart from the law, but when the law came, sin revived and he died (Rom. 7: 9). So moral agency exists in children, and a time comes when full moral responsibility arrives. But it is not true that there is no responsibility before that. Even a child is known by his actions.
