The Morality of Babies

In the article “The Moral Life of Babies” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?ref=homepage&src=me&pagewanted=all) , written by Yale professor Paul Bloom, he discusses the innate foundation of morality that babies seemingly have. As seen by previous blog posts, my infatuation with moralities’ origin in the human mind has been the subject of several postings, but I feel so compelled by the subject that I can not stop poking and prodding the subject in hopes of a satisfying answer . The article discusses how several tests were conducted on babies to better understand the cognitive skills of a babies’ mind. With the help of the several experiments carried out in this article, it has been concluded by Bloom 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. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.” When I first read this, I felt quite comforted by this notion of a basic moral sense that all babies have. It has been quite common to assume that babies were sheer bundles of ignorance, failing to harbor an understanding on the basic rules of the universe, but Bloom insist that babies have expectations rooted in intellect, which can be used to learn and comprehend information at an alarmingly fast rate. Although morality is relative to the culture one functions in, there seems to be very bare-bones morality recognition by babies. In several experiments, babies understood when actions considered wrong were committed, and identified the negative occurrences as anomalies to what was expected and accepted. The article focuses heavily on compassion, which seems to be a key factor in shaping morality as babies get older. Our empathy towards others can be amplified as we get older, resulting in the virtues associated with excellence. While babies do not have the higher moral order that adults develop as they develop their intellect, they do have a distinct temperament in regards to morals that serves as the groundwork for the future. “As David Hume argued, mere rationality can’t be the foundation of morality, since our most basic desires are neither rational nor irrational. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason,” he wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To have a genuinely moral system, in other words, some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.”Babies fail to make decisions of morality due to some rationalization in the mind, but based on pure emotion of instincts. Decisions for babies boil down to the simplicity of natural desires. What a baby deems as important will be the foundation of how they harvest their moral reason. A person’s way of thinking is a direct product of his/her inclination towards morality. “Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness.” These initial reactions are then acted upon by society to continuously shape our thought process. Then when our ethical guidelines are set in place based on our recognitions, we can transcend our minds by implementing the intellectual virtues that we must learn.