Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
Paul Bloom
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0307886859
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone.
From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice.
Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race.
In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies.
Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.
From the Hardcover edition.
race, misattributing statements like “I need to do some stretching” or “I just want to get out and play,” but now when people got it wrong, they were most likely to do so based on jersey color, not skin color. To put this in real-world terms, a sports fan—at least when watching sports—is thinking more about team membership than about the skin color of the individual players. This way of making sense of race fits well with the work of the psychologists Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius, who argue
the death of five strangers and the death of one stranger. Yes, people care about number when forced to choose between five and one. But without this sort of explicit contrast, the numbers hardly matter. One study asked one group of subjects to donate money to develop a drug that would save the life of a single sick child and asked another group to donate money to develop a drug that would save the lives of eight sick children. The two groups offered the same amount. This insensitivity holds for
child to take the victim’s perspective, saying things like “If you throw snow on their walk they will have to clean it up all over again” or “He feels bad because he was proud of his tower and you knocked it down.” Hoffman estimates that children between the ages of two and ten receive about four thousand inductions a year. We can see these as empathetic prods, attempts to get children into the habit of taking the perspective of others. But they also serve as a repeated argument, making the point
Developmental Psychology 29 (2011): 124–30. 69 a variant of the good guy/bad guy experiments: J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, P. Bloom, and N. Mahajan, “How Infants and Toddlers React to Antisocial Others,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 19931–36. 70 an influential theory of moral development: L. Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization,” in Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. David A. Goslin (Chicago: Rand McNally,
evidence for divine intervention: Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006); Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (New York: Regnery, 2007), 237. The Wallace quote comes from his review of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and is cited in Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 7 this kindness turned into reflex: