Out of the mouths of babes

What do babies know about right and wrong? Perhaps more than is realized. Results of Paul Bloom's study may challenge some ingrained secular assumptions. From the source:

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.

HT: Clare

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3 Responses to “Out of the mouths of babes”

Bradford Says:
June 13th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
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.

The Dr. Spock approach to child rearing and social justice advocacy within our schools. Rousseau's step-children.

Comment by Bradford — June 13, 2010 @ 9:50 pm

MikeGene Says:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
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.

Comment by MikeGene — June 14, 2010 @ 6:43 pm

Daniel Smith Says:
June 14th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
He [Bloom] 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.

So there you have it…

It doesn't matter what the empirical results of a study are, what matters is the interpretation.

The clash between ID (or any theory or hypothesis that allows God a 'foot in the door') and naturalism/materialism is not scientific, nor is it based on evidence… It is philosophical at its core.

Comment by Daniel Smith — June 14, 2010 @ 7:28 pm

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Out of the mouths of babes

3 Responses to “Out of the mouths of babes”

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