Innate Moral Values In Paul Bloom's Just Babies

In Paul Bloom’s Just Babies he makes the claim: The capacity for reason takes time to emerge, so the moral life of a baby is necessarily limited. A baby will possess inclinations and sentiments; he or she might be motivated to soothe another in pain or to feel angry at a cruel act or to favor someone who punishes a wrongdoer. But a lot is absent; most of all, the baby lacks a grasp of impartial moral principles – prohibitions or requirements that apply equally to everyone within a community. (Bloom 211). This quote is stating that babies do have initial moral values but lacks the ability to use these values equally on everyone around them. I do side with Bloom’s initial statement that a baby does possess some moral sentiments and I do agree …show more content…
One example is where a child was to be placed in front of a puppet show in which one puppet steals a ball from anther puppet. At the end of the show both puppets were placed in front of the child with a treat beside each puppet. The child took the treat from the puppet that stole the ball (Bloom 7). These are just one of the few examples within the book that try to justify babies having an innate moral sense. However, there are others who support the claim that babies have an innate moral sense such as psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg claimed children did have some sort of moral inclination according to his stages of moral development. However, both Bloom and Kohlberg differ in how children have a moral sense because in the first stage of development according to Kohlberg children would only do the right thing to avoid punishment. Another example is child psychologist Jean Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development. Within this stage children can have some sort of reasoning and would think only about themselves which is termed egocentrism. Paul Bloom uses egocentrism to show that children can feel empathy for others because children will see a person in pain and feel that pain as well, which causes the child to soothe the person in pain (Bloom …show more content…
Paul Bloom states that children are somewhat limited when it comes to enforcing these moral values on everyone equally. This is true for all children. In most studies, children will try to imitate an adult’s behavior depending on what the adult does regardless if the action is good or bad. One such example is Albert Bandura’s experiment. In Bandura’s experiment children were placed in a room with an adult. The adult would then play with the doll or beat the doll. The children after watching the adult’s behavior were placed in a separate room with toys. The child depending on which adult they had witnessed would imitate what the adult did in the previous room. Also, Jean Piaget’s egocentrism proves that children will have trouble seeing in another person’s perspective. Thomas Hobbes an English philosopher stated humans were selfish creatures that did actions for our own self- interest this tends to true for children. These examples prove that children can be biased when it comes to moral decisions. However, Paul Bloom shows in one experiment that children who were asked to divide a portion of money to give to each person. When asked how they should divide the money the children said to give each person an equal amount regardless if one person worked harder than another (Bloom 60-61). This shows that children are more biased to being fair than being realistic. Also as Kohlberg has stated in his stages of development