Is Morality Innate?

In this week's AP Psychology class, one of the topics we discussed was moral development. Piaget believed that children’s moral judgements build on their cognitive development. Agreeing with Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg sought to describe the development of moral reasoning, the thinking that occurs as we consider right and wrong. His findings led him to believe that as we develop intellectually, we pass through three basic levels of moral thinking: preconventional morality, conventional morality, and postconventional morality. He claimed those levels form a moral ladder. Research confirms that children in various cultures progress from Kohlberg’s preconventional level to his conventional level. The postconventional level is more controversial and appears mostly in the European and North American educated middle- class, which prizes individualism.

The mind makes moral judgements as it makes aesthetic judgements- quickly and automatically. Moral reasoning aims to convince ourselves and others of what we intuitively feel. Faced with moral choices, people across the world, with similar evolved brains, display similar moral intuitions. Moral judgement is more than thinking; it is also gut-level feeling. As our thinking matures though, our behavior also becomes less selfish and more caring. Moral action also feeds moral attitudes.

As I was browsing the world-wide interweb this past week, I stumbled across an interesting article in the New York Times, written by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, entitled "The Moral Life of Babies." He argues that contrary to the popular belief that we begin life as "amoral animals," babies do come equipped with a primitive sense of morality (primarily right and wrong). Therefore, the role of adults and parents is to help shape this morality and guide it onto the right path. 

He offers several studies to support this. New studies have shown that babies have some sort of understanding of mental life, and can understand to a certain degree how people think and why they act as they do. These studies have found that babies expect people to move rationally according to their belief system, and exhibit surprise when someone embarks on an indirect route to something he/she wants. Prior to their second birthdays, babies are keen enough to know that other people can have false beliefs. Psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon discovered that 15-month-olds assume that if a person observed an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box when the person isn’t aware, the person will later reach his hand into the box where he first saw the object, not the box where it's actually located. Therefore, toddlers have a mental model not only of the world, but of the world as comprehended by others. 

In addition, scientists are aware of specific compassionate feelings and instincts that surface early and seemingly universally in human development. These are not exactly moral concepts, but they appear to be related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others, or empathy. In his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin relates the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing sympathy at a very young age: “When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.”

Although these studies have displayed a seemingly rudimentary sense of morality in younglings, culture still plays a major role in morality. "Morality, then, is a combination of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented," Bloom says. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the ability and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, instinctive responses to altruism and unfriendliness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic "equipment," our personalities would be far from moral, interested in only our pursuits. But our capacities as babies are significantly restricted/limited. Bloom concludes by saying that, "it is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to." 

I thought this article was interesting, and in a way, corresponded to the video that we watched in Friday's class (in proving that babies do exhibit certain capabilities even at a young age). What do you think? Do you agree with Bloom? Do you believe we are all born with a certain sense of morality? If so, to what degree? Do culture and biology play the same role in cultivating morality? Does one preside over the other? 

For your reading pleasure, the link to the article is below: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0