Authors: Paul Bloom
And their justifications are relatively sophisticated. There is more singing than in your average philosophy seminar, and Michael does threaten Ruth at one point, but they are also appealing to impartial principles—not just stating demands or expressions of preference. Lily and Ruth both
insist (and Michael ultimately agrees) that it’s “fair” that each of the children gets at least one toy (as when Lily says, “Well, that’s not fair because I don’t have any people”). And Michael himself appeals to a principle that dictates that an individual toy gets to be shared over time (“I want it now and you had it already”).
It was not inevitable that the dispute ended where it did. Michael might have responded to Lily and Ruth by arguing that there were other reasons why he should keep all of his toys—perhaps he owned them, or perhaps he just enjoyed them so much more than everybody else. He might well have convinced the other children that one of these other considerations overrode the principle of equal division. Reasoning can take us in surprising directions.
Once we have a commitment to impartial principles, this can trump our self-interest. We sacrifice to do what we feel is right. Some examples of this include Oskar Schindler, who risked everything to save Jews from the Holocaust, and Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. But my own favorite illustration comes from Rick Blaine in
Casablanca
, played by Humphrey Bogart. The movie ends with Rick explaining to his lover Ilsa Lund why she has to go with her husband and leave him behind, and he grounds his explanation in an eloquent statement of moral impartiality:
“Look, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
We should keep this quote in mind when we consider the increasingly popular view that we are slaves of the
passions—that our moral judgments and moral actions are the product of neural mechanisms that we have no awareness of and no conscious control over. If this view of our moral natures were true, we would need to buck up and learn to live with it. But it is not true; it is refuted by everyday experience, by history, and by the science of developmental psychology.
It turns out instead that the right theory of our moral lives has two parts. It starts with what we are born with, and this is surprisingly rich: babies are moral animals, equipped by evolution with empathy and compassion, the capacity to judge the actions of others, and even some rudimentary understanding of justice and fairness. But we are more than just babies. A critical part of our morality—so much of what makes us human—emerges over the course of human history and individual development. It is the product of our compassion, our imagination, and our magnificent capacity for reason.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Morality has interested me for as long as I can remember, but the impetus for this book was a lecture series that I gave at Johns Hopkins University in 2007 and 2008. The topic was “The Cognitive Science of Religion,” and two of my lectures explored the relationship between morality and religious belief. I thank the Metanexus Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences for supporting these lectures. I am grateful as well to Steven Gross for coordinating my visits and talking with me about these issues.
After completing these lectures, I put morality aside for a while to complete a book on a quite different topic (pleasure) but then returned to it in 2010, when I wrote an article called “The Moral Life of Babies” for the
New York Times Magazine.
I am grateful to my editors Alex Star and Jaime Ryerson for their interest in this topic and for their extensive editorial guidance. At this point, my agent Katinka Matson convinced
me to take the plunge. This is my third book with Katinka. She is wise, honest, and fiercely supportive—I’m lucky to have her on my side.
In 2011, I was asked to give the DeVane Lectures at Yale, on the topic “The Moralities of Everyday Life.” These lectures served as a dry run for many of the arguments in this book. I thank the then-president of Yale, Richard Levin, and the then-provost (now president), Peter Salovey, for giving me this opportunity. I am also grateful for their work in ensuring that Yale is such a fine intellectual community. There is no better place in the world to be a teacher and a scholar.
The Yale baby studies described here were funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. I am very grateful for their support.
As this book took shape, many colleagues and friends answered questions, read passages, gave advice, and just helped me talk through the issues. I thank Catherine Alexander, John Bargh, Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, David Berreby, Peter Blake, Adam Cohen, Val Curtis, John Dovidio, Carol Dweck, Brian Earp, Deborah Fried, John Gibbs, Adam Glick, Kiley Hamlin, Edie Hofstatter, Frank Keil, Melanie Killen, Joshua Knobe, Valerie Kuhlmeier, Robert Kurzban, Marianne LaFrance, Megan Mangum, Gregory Murphy, Shaun Nichols, Kristina Olson, Wendy Phillips, David Pizarro, David Rand, Laurie Santos, Sally Satel, Richard Shweder, Luca Surian, and Karen Wynn. I owe a special debt to Tamar Gendler and Joshua Greene for many conversations about these issues, and for sharp comments on earlier drafts.
I discussed many of these ideas in an undergraduate
seminar on moral psychology, and I’m grateful to the students for discussion and debate. And I went over a first draft of this book with my lab group, composed of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. I thank the following for their wise and constructive comments: Konika Banerjee, Jennifer Barnes, Lindsey Drayton, Thalia Goldstein, Lily Guillot, Jonathan Phillips, David Pietraszewski, Alex Shaw, Mark Sheskin, Christina Starmans, and Annie Wertz.
I thank my editor at Crown, Rachel Klayman, for her faith in this project and her wise counsel throughout. Along with her wonderful editorial assistant, Stephanie Chan, she provided extensive and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts, leading me to rethink and restructure many of my arguments. I feel the book is much improved as a result—it’s certainly a lot shorter.
I thank my family—close, extended, real kin, and fictive kin, all of them—for their support. And I should include a special shout-out to my teenage sons, Max and Zachary, for their love and companionship, and for countless hours of enjoyable debate. I hope to persuade at least one of them to join the family business.
And this brings me to my biggest thank-you, which is to my wife, Karen Wynn. I am not one of these people who keep family and work separate. Karen directs the Infant Cognition Center at Yale, and all of my own research on baby morality has been as a collaborator on studies led by Karen and her students. The ideas presented in this book have been shaped by my years of discussion with Karen, and I’ve benefited throughout from her kindness, her brilliance, and her love. She also thought up the title.
N
OTES
PREFACE
1
a writer living in Dallas:
S. Satel, “Desperately Seeking a Kidney,”
New York Times Magazine
, December 16, 2007.
2
others go even further:
L. MacFarquhar, “The Kindest Cut,”
New Yorker
, July 27, 2009.
3
a moral code implanted by God:
Francis Collins,
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
(New York: Free Press, 2006).
4
“Death to Mary Bale”:
L. M. Holson, “The New Court of Shame Is Online,”
New York Times
, December 23, 2010.
5
Thomas Jefferson was right:
or full text of the letter, see “Letter to Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787),
www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_carr.html
. For discussion of Jefferson’s view on moral psychology, see John Macnamara,
Through the Rearview Mirror: Historical Reflections on Psychology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
6
Adam Smith:
For a thoughtful overview of Smith’s ideas about morality, see Michael L. Frazer,
The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
1. THE MORAL LIFE OF BABIES
1
The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands:
The anecdote is first reported in P. Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,”
New York Times Magazine
, May 9, 2010.
2
The Reverend Thomas Martin:
Quoted in Frank Keil,
Developmental Psychology
(New York: Norton, forthcoming).
3
Even moral philosophers don’t agree about what morality really is:
J. Nado, D. Kelly, and S. Stich, “Moral Judgment,” in
The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology
, ed. John Symons and Paco Calvo (New York: Routledge, 2009), 621–33.
4
it is a certain type of wrong:
These are among the criteria used by Elliot Turiel and his colleagues to distinguish moral transgressions from what they call “socio-conventional transgressions.” See Elliot Turiel, “The Development of Morality,” in
Handbook of Child Psychology
, ed. William Damon and R. M. Lerner, vol. 3, ed. N. Eisenberg (New York: Wiley, 2006), 789–857.
5
John Mikhail has suggested:
John Mikhail,
Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
6
Jeremy Strohmeyer and David Cash Jr.:
C. Booth, “The Bad Samaritan,”
Time
, September 7, 1998.
7
For other types of moral wrongs, the issue of harm is not as clear-cut:
See, for example, R. Shweder and J. Haidt, “The Future of Moral Psychology: Truth, Intuition, and the Pluralist Way,”
Psychological Science
4 (1993): 360–65; Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(New York: Pantheon, 2012).
8
a study of spontaneous helping in toddlers:
F. Warneken and M. Tomasello, “Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees,”
Science
311 (2006): 1301–3.
9
as Adam Smith put it:
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; repr., Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2011), 30.
10
Herodotus made this point:
Herodotus,
The Histories
, rev. ed., trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin, 2003).
11
My favorite summary of contemporary moral differences:
R. Shweder, “Are Moral Intuitions Self-Evident Truths?,”
Criminal Justice Ethics
13 (1994): 26. In other writings, though, Shweder is clear that moral universals exist as well; see, for example, R. Shweder, “Relativism and Universalism,” in
Companion to Moral Anthropology
, ed. Didier Fassin (New York: Wiley), 85–102.
12
the tendency of anthropologists to exaggerate how exotic other people are:
M. Bloch, “The Past and the Present in the Present,”
Man
12 (1977): 278–92, quote from 285.
13
one aspect of morality … has long been a no-brainer from an evolutionary point of view:
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
14
Adam Smith pointed this out:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 63.
15
“subversion from within”:
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 199.
16
Darwin’s theory:
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man
(1871; repr., London: Penguin, 2004), 155. See also S. Bowles, “Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism,”
Science
314 (2006): 1569–72; E. O. Wilson,
The Social Conquest of Earth
(New York: Liveright, 2012).
17
An alternative … is that the good guys might punish the bad guys:
R. L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
46 (1971): 35–57.
18
five minutes inside the head of a two-year-old:
Alison Gopnik,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
19
The psychologist Charles Fernyhough describes:
Charles Fernyhough,
A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind
(New York: Avery, 2009), 5.
20
The psychologist Alison Gopnik … The baby just
is
, trapped in the here and now:
Gopnik,
Philosophical Baby.