Thursday, July 29, 2010
Good morals start at birth
Could our moral sensibility exist from the time of our very first breath? Some researchers believe so.
Work being conducted at Yale University has demonstrated that our moral reasoning may find its roots, quite simply, in our mere humanity.
Psychologists have often wondered whether ethics and morality are primarily nature or nurture based. Are we born as a clean slate, or do we bear figments of ethics in our bones? The new research being conducted by Paul Bloom and others has demonstrated that babies might actually possess some moral reasoning capabilities, more than we previously gave them credit for. As he said in his article in the New York Times back in May:
A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life.
Socialization remains important, however:
But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it's because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.
The video that accompanied the article is quite good.
Posted by Alfredo Garcia at 3:00 pm
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