On Innate Moral Psychology

Prof Bloom's lecture on finding about babies was amusing enough. Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.

Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.

Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.

Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.

While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.

One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.

Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.

Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.