Babies possess certain moral foundations

A very interesting article in the May 3rd, 2010 New York Times, Moral Life of Babies by Paul Bloom. This is a tricky field (cognitive development of very young children) and it is easy to both misread experiments and over-extrapolate the possible implications. Tentative though the findings have to be, they are none-the-less intriguing.

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. 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. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn't start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.