Biological Morals
I was on Yahoo today looking at the articles and there was one titled “Hidden Skills in Babies” so, naturally, I was intrigued. What kind of hidden skills might they have? I thought maybe there would be some sweet super power. Well it wasn’t quite a super power but it was actually really cool.
It turns out that babies are a good judge of moral character. Check out this excerpt:
The study released last month presented babies with a diorama-like display of an anthropomorphic circle struggling to make it up a hill. Just when it appeared that all hope was lost, a heroic triangle appeared, and pushed the circle to the top. The round climber bounces, clearly elated to have reached the summit. The same scenario is played out again, only this time a square appears at the top of the hill and pushes the circle to the bottom.
The babies were then asked to pick a toy – the helper or the hinderer, as scientists called them. One hundred percent of 6-month-olds and 87.5 percent of 10-month-olds chose the helper. The results were consistent even when the triangle and the square swapped places as good guy and bad guy. In several other iterations of the experiment, the helper, regardless of shape or color, won out.
“Babies are very competent socially,” says Kiley Hamlin, lead author of the study. “They can figure this kind of stuff out without people explicitly teaching what’s nice and not nice and who’s nice and who’s not nice.”
To me, that sounds as if there is some biological basis for moral judgment, that there is some inherent right and wrong that is built into humans. That is a big blow to relativists who think that each culture teaches its own morals and that is how humans decide what right and wrong is. I am not denying that culture has an influence, because that isn’t even debatable, but I am saying that it does not form our original basis for morality. From where, then, does this sense of morality come? I would argue that it comes from a Creator. I find it very difficult to believe that we somehow all develop similar moral standards during infancy by pure random chance. What do you think?
December 13 2007 | Absolutism and Creator and God and Relativism | No Comments »