In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically.

Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others actions feel empathy and compassion act to soothe those in distress and have a rudimentary sense of justice. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone.įrom John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates.Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society and especially parents to transform them from little sociopathsinto civilized beings.

Just Babies by Paul Bloom