Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil Hardcover
Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Bloom Page - ISBN: 0307886840 - Language: English - Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
A Conversation with Paul Bloom, Author of Just Babies
Q) What’s up with the title?
A) It’s meant to be playful, because it has two quite different meanings. Just Babies can express a reasonable skepticism about the abilities of these tiny creatures—what do you expect of them, they’re just babies? But of course “just” also derives from justice—as in “a just society”—and so the title captures one of the main arguments of the book, which is that we are born as moral creatures. We start off as just babies. I know this sounds like a remarkable claim, but I hope that my book will convince people to take it seriously.
Q) What made you choose to write this book at this moment?
A) These are exciting times for anyone interested in morality. There are major developments in areas like social neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and moral philosophy. And several research teams—including my own at Yale—are making surprising discoveries about the moral lives of babies and children. I think that now, perhaps for the first time in history, we have scientifically informed answers to some of the questions that matter most: How is it that we are capable of transcendent kindness—and unspeakable cruelty? How do evolution, culture, parenting, and religion conspire to shape our moral natures? How do we make sense of people’s strongly held opinions about abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, and torture? And how can we become better people? Just Babies tries to answer these questions.
Q) How can you even study morality in babies?
A) In most of our own studies, we use puppet shows. We show babies characters who interact in certain ways—such as one individual helping another or one individual hitting another—and then see who the babies want to interact with, who they want to reward, and who they want to punish. Using these methods, we have discovered that even young babies have the capacity for moral judgment.
Q)So are babies naturally good, or naturally evil?
A) Both! We are born with empathy and compassion, the capacity to judge the actions of others, and a rudimentary understanding of justice and fairness. Morality is bred in the bone. But there is a nastier side to our natures as well. There’s a lot of evidence that even the youngest babies carve the world into Us versus Them—and they are strongly biased to favor the Us. We are very tribal beings. Our natures are not just kind; they are also cruel and selfish. We favor those who look like us and are naturally cold-blooded towards strangers.
Q) Does this mean that prejudice and racism are inevitable?
A) Happily, no. For one thing, social experience really matters—babies and children have to learn who Us versus Them is by observing how those around them act. So while some distinctions are inevitable, such as friends versus strangers, others are not. Notably, it only pretty late in development—by about the age of five—that some children come to use skin color and similar cues when decide who to befriend and who to prefer. Before this, they don’t know that race matters, and so whether or not children will be racist is dependent on how they are raised; what sort of social environments they find themselves in.
Also, we are smart critters, smart enough to override our impulses and biases when we think they are inappropriate. Once we learn about these ugly aspects of our nature, we can move to combat them. We can create treaties and international organizations aimed at protecting universal human rights. We can employ procedures such as blind reviewing and blind auditions that are designed to prevent judges from being biased, consciously or unconsciously, by a candidate’s race—or anything other than what is under evaluation.
Q) It seems as if a lot of your interest is in how we come to transcend our hard-wired morality.
A) That’s right. A complete theory of morality has to have two parts. It starts with what we are born with, and this is surprisingly rich. But a critical part of our morality—so much of what makes us human—is not the product of evolution, but emerges over the course of human history and individual development. It is the product of our compassion, our imagination, and our magnificent capacity for reason. We bring all that to bear when we consider such questions as: How much should we give to charity? Is it right to eat meat? Are there any sorts of consensual sex acts that are morally wrong?
Q) What do you want to accomplish with this book?
A) Two things. First, many people believe that we are born selfish and amoral—that we start off as natural-born psychopaths. And many argue that we are, as David Hume put it, slaves of the passions: our moral judgments and moral actions are the product of neural mechanisms that we have no awareness of and no conscious control over. Intelligence and wisdom are largely impotent. This is an ugly view of human nature. Now, if it were true, we should buck up and learn to leave with it. But it’s not true; these dismissive claims are refuted by everyday experience, by history, and by the science of developmental psychology. We are moral animals, and we are powerfully influenced by our capacity for reason.
Second, I think there are practical implications to the scientific study of morality. If you’re interested in reducing racism and bigotry, for instance, it is critical to understand our inborn proclivity to favor our own group over others; if you want to create a just society, you’ll want to learn about how we naturally think about fairness and equity. Good social policy is informed by an understanding of human nature at its best and its worst, and this is what Just Babies is all about.
From Publishers Weekly
DETAILS
- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Crown (November 12, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307886840
- ISBN-13: 978-0307886842
- Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #74 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Neuropsychology
- #76 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Child Psychology
- #99 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Child Psychology
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Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil The Origins of Good and Evil Hardcover or download a FREE Kindle Reading App Available in NOOK Book eBook Paperback Hardcover Audiobook Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil eBook Pub Date 11 12 2013 Publisher 78 Reviews Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil To view this video download Flash Player From the Hardcover edition Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Paul Bloom on bookish com Includes an overview about the book recommendations famous quotes reviews related books 1 review Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil and over 2 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle Learn more 1 review or download a FREE Kindle Reading The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom Hardcover CDN 18 81 Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil is that kind Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Hardcover February 24 2014 Leave a comment Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Hardcover by Hardcover Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Power By JustJust Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Hardcover Retail Price 26 00 19 64 Download Format EPUB What 39 s this Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives From the Hardcover Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Paul Download About Browse
I read Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby: How The Science Of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human some years ago and found it an intriguing and persuasive read. This book in some ways picks up where that one left off. Descartes' Baby had the thesis that babies are born in some sense 'hardwired' for things like a very basic understanding of physics, like that objects have some sort of physical permanence and that objects that go up will come down. This book, cataloguing a host of intriguing studies, argues that babies are 'hardwired' for certain basic moral sentiments (a basic sense of justice, fairness, etc).
For instance, in some studies, infants and toddlers will 'help' a stranger by pushing a ball back to the stranger or helping a stranger by reaching for an object the stranger seems to want. In other studies, babies are shown a puppet show with two sets of puppets; in one, the puppets help each other, and in the other, one puppet does not help the other. When given a choice, Bloom reports that a statistically significant number of infants and toddlers choose to play with the helping puppet rather than the non-helping puppet.
Bloom's chapters range from exploring infants' and toddlers' sense of justice (little egalitarians, they tend to be), their sense of empathy (they generally prefer to help others, but this desire increases with age), whether their 'moral sentiments' change when dealing with members of their family or those who look like them, their sense of disgust (both moral and physical), etc. But here is where my mild complaint about Bloom's book starts.
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