Children: Do babies know the difference between right and wrong?

Yes they do, according to Paul Bloom at Yale University. David Derbyshire reports:

Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has studied morality in babies for years, said: 'A growing body of evidence 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.

'Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones.'

What Dr. Bloom means to say, of course, is that morality is encoded in the genes and owes little or nothing to reason.

But other researchers are skeptical:

Dr Nadja Reissland, of Durham University, said babies started to learn the difference between good and bad from birth.

'Everything hinges on who decides what is normal,' she said. 'By saying pushing the ball up the hill is helpful, the researchers are making a moral judgement. The babies might just prefer to see things go up rather than down.

By “learn,” she means that the babies begin to apply concepts; Good vs.evil are not hardwired.

I think the most reasonable explanation of the experiments described is that babies prefer happy faces to sad or angry ones, etc., but good and evil are a bit more complex than that.

Evolutionary psychology: Moral judgement based on "rather primitive emotion"

In "Psychologists Shed Light On Origins Of Morality" (ScienceDaily Mar. 2, 2009), we read,

In everyday language, people sometimes say that immoral behaviours “leave a bad taste in your mouth”. But this may be more than a metaphor according to new scientific evidence from the University of Toronto that shows a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to poison and disease.

“Morality is often pointed to as the pinnacle of human evolution and development,” says lead author Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology. "However, disgust is an ancient and rather primitive emotion which played a key evolutionary role in survival. Our research shows the involvement of disgust in morality, suggesting that moral judgment may depend as much on simple emotional processes as on complex thought."

See also: Neuroscience: Mirror neurons - cracks appearing?


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The U of T team found that people make similar facial movements in response to both primitive forms of disgust and moral disgust.

Ah, so that proves it then!

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not just its untethered speculation but its reflexive tendency to define explicitly human activities via non-human, subhuman, or prehuman models.

Moral disgust is an explicitly intellectual activity. Consider the following situations:

- a nursing home attendant flushes an old lady's dinner down the toilet so she doesn't have to help feed her, and steals from her purse when she is asleep. The old lady is too frightened to say anything.

- a social worker pressures clients to sleep with him, in which case he will put through the paperwork for benefits (to which they are legally entitled).

What provokes disgust is the difference between the way things are and the way they ought to be

So the question is, how do we know what ought to be?

Evolutionary psychology: The very latest on the origins of morality

It turns out that you can’t help behaving badly because it is programmed into your genes. According to Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia,

"Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere -- in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place."

Well then, what is the origin of those emotions or intuitions and why should we heed them? Either they come from a reliable source or they are - as materialists are constrained to believe - the accidental firings of neurons.

This sort of things helps us understand why reasoned religion is catching on on campus.

Morality: Furry tales for conservatives?

Some argue that Christians and conservatives should embrace Darwinism:

Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin. - Michael Shermer, author of Why Darwin Matters , writing in Scientific American, October 2006

and others argue that they shouldn't:

Contrary to claims by Darwin’s conservatives, Darwinian evolution promotes relativism rather than traditional morality, it fosters utopianism rather than limited government, and it is corrosive, rather than supportive, of free will and religious belief. Finally, and most importantly, Darwinian evolution is in tension with the scientific evidence. (Discovery Institute's John West, Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest)

I haven't read either book yet, so I won't comment on them. But I must say, I was intrigued by Shermer's account of ethics. He seems to think that the only problems that sleeping around and lying cause are a "breakdown in trust." Presumably, then, if you snuck around and then lied successfully and were satisfied with yourself, you would have no real problems. He also thinks lying is a "sin" because it breaks down trust in society. (So if you could lie without breaking down the trust of your unsuspecting dupes, then it wouldn't be a sin?)

When I read comments like his, I find myself saying, "No wonder there is a controversy over the reality of the mind." Shermer's account offers no mention of the effect of ethical breaches on the mind and character of the individual who commits the offence, which have generally been regarded as by far their most serious effect.*

It is not hard to see why Shermer makes no mention of that: He traces the origin of morality to the habits of "pair-bonded primates," not to human minds who are aware of each other. Thus, he must account for morality by its alleged affect on society, with society seen as something like a troupe of chimpanzees.

For what it is worth, polygamous, monogamous, promiscuous, cannibalistic, and asocial primates have all been successful in evolutionary terms. We have no real way of knowing how our own primate ancestors behaved, if indeed there was only one successful pattern. Consciousness and the ability to make moral choices, however they happened, mark the beginning of the human race, and the search for wisdom from the apes is futile. They cannot give what they do not have.

Another curious comment from Shermer concerns the support that Darwin's theory might offer the idea, dear to a conservative's heart, of free markets:

Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.

Notice the staggering underlying assumption Shermer makes about markets: That the individual human consciousness is a sort of "bottom," like an electron or a quark.

But precisely the opposite is the case. The individual human consciousness which enters the market is far, far more complex than the simple relationships when, for example, one person is trying to buy a car and the other is trying to sell one.

Indeed, the primary effect of free markets is that they cut out a number of individuals (bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, religious leaders, environment activists) who might greatly complicate the transaction. So a free market is a simplification, not a complexification - quite the opposite of building up an object or a life form from atoms.

And that said, free markets have sometimes led to national wealth and social harmony - and sometimes to civil war, revolution, and environment destruction. I wonder whether Shermer believes his own argument here?
*Traditional Christians consider the individual immortal, and society as an institution only transient. So the effect of wrong-doing on the wrong-doer may be eternal, but the effect on the society only short-lived.
My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.