Moral minds

By Kirsten Weir
The Monitor on Psychology
September 2016, Vol 47, No. 8
Print version: page 42

Here is an excerpt:

"As young as you can test them, babies like good guys and don't like bad guys," Bloom says. "This suggests some sort of nascent moral understanding very early on."

Bloom likens that understanding to the building blocks of human language. "There's some evidence we start with rudimentary language capacity, but languages across the world differ in all sorts of ways," he says. "Obviously, culture matters."

Other psychologists, meanwhile, have tried to understand why morality varies from culture to culture, while retaining some common themes. Haidt's moral foundations theory proposes that there are at least six (and likely more) systems that provide a foundation of morality: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression.

The article is here.

Robert Wright's Interview with Paul Bloom

Originally published November 13, 2013
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
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