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The Moral Life of Babies

By PAUL BLOOM; Published May 5, 2010 in The New York Times

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands.

The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting

with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who

would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who

would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and

set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was

asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it

from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over

and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the

Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen

Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the

studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of

babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and

inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting

topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of

philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire

to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later

moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand

the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and

misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?

From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that

we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn

babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame;

who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with

outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants

and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children

Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why

is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense

from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of

moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of

good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern

themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of

time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack

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a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess

diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

Smart Babies Babies seem spastic in their actions, undisciplined in their attention. In 1762, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot,” and in 1890 William James famously described a

baby’s mental life as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” A sympathetic parent might see

the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that

babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as

bread loaves. Many developmental psychologists will tell you that the ignorance of human

babies extends well into childhood. For many years the conventional view was that young

humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world (like that

objects continue to exist once they are out of sight) and basic facts about people (like that they

have beliefs and desires and goals) — let alone how long it takes them to learn about morality.

I am admittedly biased, but I think one of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this

view of babies is mistaken.

A reason this view has persisted is that, for many years, scientists weren’t sure how to go about

studying the mental life of babies. It’s a challenge to study the cognitive abilities of any creature

that lacks language, but human babies present an additional difficulty, because, even compared

to rats or birds, they are behaviorally limited: they can’t run mazes or peck at levers. In the

1980s, however, psychologists interested in exploring how much babies know began making use

of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes. The eyes

are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find

interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find

uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies

usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing. You can use “looking time,” then, as a rough but

reliable proxy for what captures babies’ attention: what babies are surprised by or what babies

like.

The studies in the 1980s that made use of this methodology were able to discover surprising

things about what babies know about the nature and workings of physical objects — a baby’s

“naïve physics.” Psychologists — most notably Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon —

conducted studies that essentially involved showing babies magic tricks, events that seemed to

violate some law of the universe: you remove the supports from beneath a block and it floats in

midair, unsupported; an object disappears and then reappears in another location; a box is placed

behind a screen, the screen falls backward into empty space. Like adults, babies tend to linger on

such scenes — they look longer at them than at scenes that are identical in all regards except that

they don’t violate physical laws. This suggests that babies have expectations about how objects

should behave. A vast body of research now suggests that — contrary to what was taught for

decades to legions of psychology undergraduates — babies think of objects largely as adults do,

as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in

continuous paths through space and time.

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Other studies, starting with a 1992 paper by my wife, Karen, have found that babies can do

rudimentary math with objects. The demonstration is simple. Show a baby an empty stage. Raise

a screen to obscure part of the stage. In view of the baby, put a Mickey Mouse doll behind the

screen. Then put another Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Now drop the screen. Adults

expect two dolls — and so do 5-month-olds: if the screen drops to reveal one or three dolls, the

babies look longer, in surprise, than they do if the screen drops to reveal two.

A second wave of studies used looking-time methods to explore what babies know about the

minds of others — a baby’s “naïve psychology.” Psychologists had known for a while that even

the youngest of babies treat people different from inanimate objects. Babies like to look at faces;

they mimic them, they smile at them. They expect engagement: if a moving object becomes still,

they merely lose interest; if a person’s face becomes still, however, they become distressed.

But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have

some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though

babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect

people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: babies show surprise

when someone takes a roundabout path to something he wants. They expect someone who

reaches for an object to reach for the same object later, even if its location has changed. And well

before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false

beliefs. The psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon have found that 15-month-olds

expect that if a person sees an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box

when the person isn’t looking, the person will later reach into the box where he first saw the

object, not the box where it actually is. That is, toddlers have a mental model not merely of the

world but of the world as understood by someone else.

These discoveries inevitably raise a question: If babies have such a rich understanding of objects

and people so early in life, why do they seem so ignorant and helpless? Why don’t they put their

knowledge to more active use? One possible answer is that these capacities are the psychological

equivalent of physical traits like testicles or ovaries, which are formed in infancy and then sit

around, useless, for years and years. Another possibility is that babies do, in fact, use their

knowledge from Day 1, not for action but for learning. One lesson from the study of artificial

intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a

system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired

understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make. Babies might start

off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter.

Nice Babies Psychologists like myself who are interested in the cognitive capacities of babies and toddlers are

now turning our attention to whether babies have a “naïve morality.” But there is reason to

proceed with caution. Morality, after all, is a different sort of affair than physics or psychology.

The truths of physics and psychology are universal: objects obey the same physical laws

everywhere; and people everywhere have minds, goals, desires and beliefs. But the existence of a

universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide

variation from society to society.

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In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of

his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s

propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale

communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning

of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is

a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t

find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty

and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize

people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works,

at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose

survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for

humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to

evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the

innateness of at least basic moral concepts.

In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and

apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they

seem closely related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others. In his book “The

Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin, a keen observer of human

nature, tells the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing

sympathy at a very young age: “When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry,

and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth

strongly depressed.”

There seems to be something evolutionarily ancient to this empathetic response. If you want to

cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry

more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they

are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound.

Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical

competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching

or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of

response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems

common to all. (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports

that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her

back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)

Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an

even stronger sense — like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger

accomplish a difficult task. The psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have put

toddlers in situations in which an adult is struggling to get something done, like opening a

cabinet door with his hands full or trying to get to an object out of reach. The toddlers tend to

spontaneously help, even without any prompting, encouragement or reward.

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Is any of the above behavior recognizable as moral conduct? Not obviously so. Moral ideas seem

to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions

of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad.

Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality — if it’s immoral for you to do

something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In

addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for

instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. (Even a 4-year-old knows not only that

unprovoked hitting is wrong but also that it would continue to be wrong even if a teacher said

that it was O.K.) And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational

choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we

believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.

Babies and toddlers might not know or exhibit any of these moral subtleties. Their sympathetic

reactions and motivations — including their desire to alleviate the pain of others — may not be

much different in kind from purely nonmoral reactions and motivations like growing hungry or

wanting to void a full bladder. Even if that is true, though, it is hard to conceive of a moral

system that didn’t have, as a starting point, these empathetic capacities. As David Hume argued,

mere rationality can’t be the foundation of morality, since our most basic desires are neither

rational nor irrational. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason,” he wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the

whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To have a genuinely moral system, in other words,

some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.

Moral-Baby Experiments So what do babies really understand about morality? Our first experiments exploring this

question were done in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher named Valerie Kuhlmeier

(who is now an associate professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Ontario). Building on

previous work by the psychologists David and Ann Premack, we began by investigating what

babies think about two particular kinds of action: helping and hindering.

Our experiments involved having children watch animated movies of geometrical characters

with faces. In one, a red ball would try to go up a hill. On some attempts, a yellow square got

behind the ball and gently nudged it upward; in others, a green triangle got in front of it and

pushed it down. We were interested in babies’ expectations about the ball’s attitudes — what

would the baby expect the ball to make of the character who helped it and the one who hindered

it? To find out, we then showed the babies additional movies in which the ball either approached

the square or the triangle. When the ball approached the triangle (the hinderer), both 9- and 12-

month-olds looked longer than they did when the ball approached the square (the helper). This

was consistent with the interpretation that the former action surprised them; they expected the

ball to approach the helper. A later study, using somewhat different stimuli, replicated the

finding with 10-month-olds, but found that 6-month-olds seem to have no expectations at all.

(This effect is robust only when the animated characters have faces; when they are simple

faceless figures, it is apparently harder for babies to interpret what they are seeing as a social

interaction.)

This experiment was designed to explore babies’ expectations about social interactions, not their

moral capacities per se. But if you look at the movies, it’s clear that, at least to adult eyes, there

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is some latent moral content to the situation: the triangle is kind of a jerk; the square is a

sweetheart. So we set out to investigate whether babies make the same judgments about the

characters that adults do. Forget about how babies expect the ball to act toward the other

characters; what do babies themselves think about the square and the triangle? Do they prefer the

good guy and dislike the bad guy?

Here we began our more focused investigations into baby morality. For these studies, parents

took their babies to the Infant Cognition Center, which is within one of the Yale psychology

buildings. (The center is just a couple of blocks away from where Stanley Milgram did his

famous experiments on obedience in the early 1960s, tricking New Haven residents into

believing that they had severely harmed or even killed strangers with electrical shocks.) The

parents were told about what was going to happen and filled out consent forms, which described

the study, the risks to the baby (minimal) and the benefits to the baby (minimal, though it is a

nice-enough experience). Parents often asked, reasonably enough, if they would learn how their

baby does, and the answer was no. This sort of study provides no clinical or educational

feedback about individual babies; the findings make sense only when computed as a group.

For the experiment proper, a parent will carry his or her baby into a small testing room. A typical

experiment takes about 15 minutes. Usually, the parent sits on a chair, with the baby on his or

her lap, though for some studies, the baby is strapped into a high chair with the parent standing

behind. At this point, some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; there will

then be a short break for the baby to wake up or calm down, but on average this kind of study

ends up losing about a quarter of the subjects. Just as critics describe much of experimental

psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants to make some extra

money or needs to fulfill an Intro Psych requirement, there’s some truth to the claim that this

developmental work is a science of the interested and alert baby.

In one of our first studies of moral evaluation, we decided not to use two-dimensional animated

movies but rather a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated

like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow square would help the circle up

the hill; a red triangle would push it down. After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter

placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we

opted to record not the babies’ looking time but rather which character they reached for, on the

theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what a baby wants. In the end, we

found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the

hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for

the good guy.

(Experimental minutiae: What if babies simply like the color red or prefer squares or something

like that? To control for this, half the babies got the yellow square as the helper; half got it as the

hinderer. What about problems of unconscious cueing and unconscious bias? To avoid this, at

the moment when the two characters were offered on the tray, the parent had his or her eyes

closed, and the experimenter holding out the characters and recording the responses hadn’t seen

the puppet show, so he or she didn’t know who was the good guy and who the bad guy.)

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One question that arose with these experiments was how to understand the babies’ preference:

did they act as they did because they were attracted to the helpful individual or because they

were repelled by the hinderer or was it both? We explored this question in a further series of

studies that introduced a neutral character, one that neither helps nor hinders. We found that,

given a choice, infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one; and prefer a neutral character

to one who hinders. This finding indicates that both inclinations are at work — babies are drawn

to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost

always showed this pattern of response.

Does our research show that babies believe that the helpful character is good and the hindering

character is bad? Not necessarily. All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is

that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is

that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one

individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a

very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or

mean. When we showed these scenes to much older kids — 18-month-olds — and asked them,

“Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as

adults would, identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.

To increase our confidence that the babies we studied were really responding to niceness and

naughtiness, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin, in a separate series of studies, created different sets

of one-act morality plays to show the babies. In one, an individual struggled to open a box; the

lid would be partly opened but then fall back down. Then, on alternating trials, one puppet would

grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut.

In another study (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article), a puppet would play with a

ball. The puppet would roll the ball to another puppet, who would roll it back, and the first

puppet would roll the ball to a different puppet who would run away with it. In both studies, 5-

month-olds preferred the good guy — the one who helped to open the box; the one who rolled

the ball back — to the bad guy. This all suggests that the babies we studied have a general

appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of actions.

A further question that arises is whether babies possess more subtle moral capacities than

preferring good and avoiding bad. Part and parcel of adult morality, for instance, is the idea that

good acts should meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative response — justice

demands the good be rewarded and the bad punished. For our next studies, we turned our

attention back to the older babies and toddlers and tried to explore whether the preferences that

we were finding had anything to do with moral judgment in this mature sense. In collaboration

with Neha Mahajan, a psychology graduate student at Yale, Hamlin, Wynn and I exposed 21-

month-olds to the good guy/bad guy situations described above, and we gave them the

opportunity to reward or punish either by giving a treat to, or taking a treat from, one of the

characters. We found that when asked to give, they tended to chose the positive character; when

asked to take, they tended to choose the negative one.

Dispensing justice like this is a more elaborate conceptual operation than merely preferring good

to bad, but there are still-more-elaborate moral calculations that adults, at least, can easily make.

For example: Which individual would you prefer — someone who rewarded good guys and

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punished bad guys or someone who punished good guys and rewarded bad guys? The same

amount of rewarding and punishing is going on in both cases, but by adult lights, one individual

is acting justly and the other isn’t. Can babies see this, too?

To find out, we tested 8-month-olds by first showing them a character who acted as a helper (for

instance, helping a puppet trying to open a box) and then presenting a scene in which this helper

was the target of a good action by one puppet and a bad action by another puppet. Then we got

the babies to choose between these two puppets. That is, they had to choose between a puppet

who rewarded a good guy versus a puppet who punished a good guy. Likewise, we showed them

a character who acted as a hinderer (for example, keeping a puppet from opening a box) and then

had them choose between a puppet who rewarded the bad guy versus one who punished the bad

guy.

The results were striking. When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred

the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies

found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting

was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they

chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are

drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even

possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral

terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why

certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies

during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap

during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events

(remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be

cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires. But

this shouldn’t strike you as an altogether alien experience: while we adults possess the additional

critical capacity of being able to consciously reason about morality, we’re not otherwise that

different from babies — our moral feelings are often instinctive. In fact, one discovery of

contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional

underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.

Is This the Morality We’re Looking For? What do these findings about babies’ moral notions tell us about adult morality? Some scholars

think that the very existence of an innate moral sense has profound implications. In 1869, Alfred

Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin discovered natural selection, wrote that certain human

capacities — including “the higher moral faculties” — are richer than what you could expect

from a product of biological evolution. He concluded that some sort of godly force must

intervene to create these capacities. (Darwin was horrified at this suggestion, writing to Wallace,

“I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”)

A few years ago, in his book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” the social and cultural critic

Dinesh D’Souza revived this argument. He conceded that evolution can explain our niceness in

instances like kindness to kin, where the niceness has a clear genetic payoff, but he drew the line

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at “high altruism,” acts of entirely disinterested kindness. For D’Souza, “there is no Darwinian

rationale” for why you would give up your seat for an old lady on a bus, an act of nice-guyness

that does nothing for your genes. And what about those who donate blood to strangers or

sacrifice their lives for a worthy cause? D’Souza reasoned that these stirrings of conscience are

best explained not by evolution or psychology but by “the voice of God within our souls.”

The evolutionary psychologist has a quick response to this: To say that a biological trait evolves

for a purpose doesn’t mean that it always functions, in the here and now, for that purpose. Sexual

arousal, for instance, presumably evolved because of its connection to making babies; but of

course we can get aroused in all sorts of situations in which baby-making just isn’t an option —

for instance, while looking at pornography. Similarly, our impulse to help others has likely

evolved because of the reproductive benefit that it gives us in certain contexts — and it’s not a

problem for this argument that some acts of niceness that people perform don’t provide this sort

of benefit. (And for what it’s worth, giving up a bus seat for an old lady, although the motives

might be psychologically pure, turns out to be a coldbloodedly smart move from a Darwinian

standpoint, an easy way to show off yourself as an attractively good person.)

The general argument that critics like Wallace and D’Souza put forward, however, still needs to

be taken seriously. The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution

could possibly have endowed us with; moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible

relation to our reproductive success and don’t appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved

adaptations. Many of us care about strangers in faraway lands, sometimes to the extent that we

give up resources that could be used for our friends and family; many of us care about the fates

of nonhuman animals, so much so that we deprive ourselves of pleasures like rib-eye steak and

veal scaloppine. We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all; we see

racism and sexism as evil; we reject slavery and genocide; we try to love our enemies. Of course,

our actions typically fall short, often far short, of our moral principles, but these principles do

shape, in a substantial way, the world that we live in. It makes sense then to marvel at the extent

of our moral insight and to reject the notion that it can be explained in the language of natural

selection. If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine

creation would get just a bit stronger.

But it is not present in babies. In fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our

own kind. There’s plenty of research showing that babies have within-group preferences: 3-

month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-

month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to

be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks

their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young

children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most

arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own

groups in their attitudes and their actions.

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify

your actions, and you say, “Because I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire. But

explanations like “It was my turn” or “It’s my fair share” are potentially moral, because they

imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same. This is the sort of

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argument that could be convincing to a neutral observer and is at the foundation of standards of

justice and law. The philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out that this notion of impartiality can

be found in religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity

to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls’s landmark theory of

justice. This is an insight that emerges within communities of intelligent, deliberating and

negotiating beings, and it can override our parochial impulses.

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product

of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed

morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-

earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense

that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an

enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal

footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go.

The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish

Gene,” “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate

generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological

nature.” Or as a character in the Kingsley Amis novel “One Fat Englishman” puts it, “It was no

wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.”

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered

and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to

judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness.

Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing

more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as

babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and

unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.