The Philosopher's Stone

NYTimes.com has launched a feature focused entirely on philosophy. It's in their "Opinionator" section along with Stanley Fish, Olivia Judson, and Robert Wright. Simon Critchley is to be the editor of The Stone.

Baby Justice

Paul Bloom writes about the moral judgments babies make.

A growing body of evidence, though, 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 bone.

But the morality babies have is, according to Bloom, shot through with in-group preferences.

... 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions...

And, as Blooms says:

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology.

So:

The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Nixon for The New York Times