Paul Bloom designed an ingenious set of experiments on mere babes yet unable to walk or talk. He had babies ranging in age from about half a year to a year watch a series of morality plays, simple stories with classic good and evil puppets. In one, a character tries to climb a hill; a second tries to help it up; a third tries to push it down. Afterward, babies almost invariably reach for the good guy. When they see the drama at twenty-one months, the babies try to punish the bad guy. "Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones," commented Bloom.

What does it mean? Anyone who has children knows that the moral world of even the youngest is startlingly complex. But precisely because it is complex, it is open to interpretation and hence misinterpretation, and the modern world is riddled with misinterpretations of childhood.

Dr. Bloom's study was carefully designed to challenge one very persistent and pernicious modern belief about childhood, the belief that children are moral blank slates upon which anything can be written. On this view, morality is entirely unnatural—something imposed upon children by "socialization." The most famous advocate of this view was the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's view was not the result of careful observation of children, but of his own desire to overthrow the Christian notion that there is a God who defines the moral contours of human nature. Rousseau wanted natural man to be amoral, and so he taught that babies enter the world carrying no moral "baggage." The dual, contradictory result of Rousseau's philosophy was the spread of the notion that children were at once entirely innocent and it was society that made them bad, and the notion that since children were entirely morally unformed it was only society that could make them good. Rousseau's "children" are simultaneously those who are allowed to do anything they want because that is most natural, and those who are taken to be formless clay ready for molding social manipulators.

So Bloom's study comes as something of a shock to the long line of sociologists and psychologists who held dogmatically to the belief that human beings are natural non-moral, and that all morality is therefore artificially contrived by the various societies into which children are variously born.  If Bloom is right, then babies wherever they are born are innately, although inchoately, moral, and societies, however much they vary, blossom morally from this common seed.

But Professor Bloom's study is open to misinterpretation. Some might take it to prove that since babies naturally recognize the good and bad characters in moral dramas, then babies are naturally moral, and consequently, that it is only society that perverts this natural goodness. This view, popular in the Enlightenment and still so today, likewise began as a reaction to Christianity, in this instance, to the doctrine of original sin. The notion touted by the Enlightened was that we didn't need Christianity—we didn't need supernatural aid, a savior, divine help, revealed religion—because we were naturally good. We can therefore bank on this natural goodness in building a secular culture stripped of all the dismal, otherworldly elements of Christianity.

Now again, anyone who has had children knows that from the very youngest age, they exhibit not only a kind of inborn moral discernment, but also a rather vivid streak of selfishness. The same little angel that smacks the bad bunny pushing the good bunny downhill, will quite eagerly smack his sister and snatch her bunny. If there is any doctrine that seems especially well-established, it is that human beings exhibit a mixture of general moral sense and personal sin. They are fallen.  What would Professor Bloom do with experiments that the littlest children act like the bad bunny even while they condemn its evil actions?

Surely someone will point this out to him. Leaving that problem to the side, we must also note that Bloom's experiment is even open to misinterpretation by himself. He seems to approach his "discovery" as a Darwinist. A century after Rousseau, Charles Darwin argued that our moral nature is—to put it in today's parlance—"hardwired" into us by evolution. From Darwin's perspective, finding that all babies respond in a moral way to a simple morality play only means that such a response has proven in the distant past, in some common ancestor of the human species, to be of some significant benefit to survival. Consequently, the response isn't really moral in the deepest, most important sense because by "morality" an evolutionist means only "a set of beneficial social traits." These traits mean nothing more or less than other beneficial traits we find in other animals, such as camouflaging coloration or thicker fur in the winter.

From his various other statements, Bloom appears to be a secular Darwinist. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of what that means for morality.

All about me? College kids lack empathy

This week at the Association for Psychological Science in Boston, researcher, Sara Konrath, released an analysis of numerous studies conducted between 1979 and 2009 showing a drop in empathy exhibited by American college students.

"Compared with college students of the late 1970s, current students are less likely to agree with statements such as 'I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective,' and 'I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.'

'Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called 'Generation Me ' — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history,' said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry.

Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, 't's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others.' 'Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information,' Konrath said. 'In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games , and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.'

The rise in social media could also play a role.

'The ease of having friends online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,' O'Brien said."

LiveScience

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37399539/ns/health-behavior/

No Soul, No Morality

Souls Make a Moral Difference—Happily We Don’t Have Them.

Dr. Paul Bloom of Yale University realizes what is at stake in the great debate between secularism and Christianity. Bloom, a psychologist, does research in the area he calls “common sense,” the typical beliefs that people have, but which (for him) science discredits.

People once believed the earth was flat because it looked flat. Science corrects that common sense belief. We are all the better for it.

People tend to believe that a divine being created things as they are—presumably because they are astonished at the wonders of creation, and cannot explain them—and so arises the common sense belief in a creator and creationism. Darwinism disproves that. We are the better for it.

For Bloom, such corrections of common sense are good, but don’t really have any serious moral import. But for him, there is something “worse than creationism” out there that scientist must correct precisely because it has such enormous moral import—the common sense belief that we human beings are creatures of soul and body, and hence distinct from other animals.

“The second clash between common sense and reality [after the clash between common sense creationism and scientific Darwinism] concerns how we think about minds and brains. There is considerable evidence that people are natural-born dualists; we see ourselves as non-material things, separate from our brains. Common sense tells us that conscious experience and free will can exist without a brain at all, making it possible for the self to survive the destruction of the body, perhaps ascending to heaven, descending to hell, joining the spirit world, or occupying some other body, human or animal.”

This “dualism” Bloom can’t abide. Better a creationist than a dualist.

“From the standpoint of law and public policy, creationism matters less [than dualism]. If every adult became a staunch Darwinian, it would make little difference for how we live our lives. Like the origin of the universe, the origin of the species is an issue of great intellectual importance and little practical relevance. In contrast, our beliefs about mind and brain matter a lot—they bear on such issues as abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, cloning, cosmetic psychopharmacology, and the legal definition of insanity.

A dualist world-view, for example, makes it sensible to draw sharp lines with regard to abortion and animal rights, differentiating creatures on the basis of whether or not they have souls.”

Precisely. Take out souls, and you take out the notion that that we are distinct from other animals. All the moral distinctions based upon this fundamental “common sense” difference then disappear. If we are materialists, then we are free to treat ourselves as matter to be manipulated or exterminated at will. We must rid ourselves of the notion that we have souls, for “dualism is mistaken. Science tells us that the brain is the source of mental life.”

Perhaps Dr. Bloom’s notion of science is defined by his prior moral commitments. That is, he desires abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, etc., and therefore looks for scientific vindication that our minds are merely material.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1851

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