Pasadena city college - Essay Example

The Moral Life of Babies The thesis ment of this article is, “Although the growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life, babies and young children do not lack a sense of right and wrong. Instead, their sense of right and wrong they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be” (Bloom Web). Bloom has an articulate label of naïve physics. He deduces that the truths of physics are universal in that objects obey the same physical laws everywhere.

He equally had a well-defined label on naive psychology. He noted that the truths of psychology are universal in that people everywhere have minds, goals, desires, and beliefs. In light of this, he defined a baby’s naïve psychology by exploring what babies know about the minds of others using the looking-time methods. He equally reckons a sympathetic parent’s acceptance to the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners. However, developmental psychologists negate this popular claim by noting that the ignorance of human babies extends well into childhood (Bloom Web).

Bloom’s Support towards His Thesis about Naive MoralityBloom relates with other psychologists that the ignorance of human babies extends well into childhood and adopts the convectional view that young humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world and about people than they do to learn about morality. There are various studies, using the looking-methods to explore what babies know about the minds of others. In a study by his wife, Karen, he found that babies could do rudimentary math with objects.

In this study, babies expect the same number of items like adults and are thus surprised if the contrary happens against their expectations. In another study, babies proved to have an actual understanding of mental life where they grasp how people think and why they act as they do. Indeed, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires. Other studies show the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense where they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task.

In a study investigating what babies, think about two particular kinds of action involving helping and hindering, a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations was in application. The study found out that found that six and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. Characteristics of Adult Morality According To BloomBloom realizes that the idea that good acts should meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative response is one of the major aspects of adult morality.

Indeed, the notion of fairness is universal. In addition, their is value on loyalty and kindness, a distinction between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, and a category of people as nasty or nice in the definition of adult morality(Bloom Web). Moreover, compassionate feelings and impulses, notions of praise and blame, notions of equality, generality, universality, and freedom for all characterize adult morality.ReflectionThe article was particularly interesting to me. Specifically, I find it interesting that despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies have interest to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.

Their attitude towards bad actors mirrors adult actions whereby we are well aware of the bad people in the society. I find it problematic that the research establishes no plausible relation between adult moralities to our reproductive success. The article did not address the issue of possibilities of genetic influence on children behavior especially in morality. The big question worth asking is what would happen to morality of babies if they were left in an isolated state. Would they develop different morals or would the morals be a reflection of the general society?

Works CitedBloom, Paul. “The Moral Life of Babies.” The New York Times, 2010. Web 28, April 2012.