Summary Of Paul Bloom's Novel 'Just Babies'

Paul Bloom’s novel Just Babies: The origins of Good and Evil explores human morality, and more importantly, why it exists and where it came from in the first place. The ultimate goal of the novel is to convince the reader that humans are, due to natural selection, born with a brain that is hardwired for moral reasoning. That isn’t to say that all moral actions and emotions we partake in are a direct result of evolution, but rather that moral rules across different cultures originated from basic evolutionary benefits to our ancestors and have since been manipulated to conform to abstract cultural customs that don’t necessarily assist in reproduction or survival. Bloom begins his argument by analyzing babies; he says that if babies exhibit …show more content…
Even babies at the young age of sixteen-months old show that they, when not involved in the division, prefer to interact with a person who was an equal divider of resources. Young children will also often opt to destroy an extra prize if it cannot be divided equally between individuals. It may be true, then, that everyone has an innate desire for equality, but there is catch; individuals only want fairness when they are not affected by the outcome of the division. The desire for fairness is a result of our natural tendency to seek “relative advantage” over others; in other words, we only want things to be divided equally to prevent another individual from gaining an advantage over us, but when an unfair division acts in our favor, it is welcomed. This rule-of-thumb, according to Bloom, developed because humans, before the emergence of large scale societies, used to only interact with a small and specific group of people. It is how small societies, like tribes, survived and flourished; individuals ended up relatively equal in status and wealth because each member of the society took action to ensure that nobody else possessed a greater amount of power relative to him or