There has been some discussion here about whether there is any such thing as absolute morality or whether it is all relative (however defined). If it is relative one thing that follows is that it is all learned.
Today a friend drew my attention to some work on "baby morality" and the results are interesting. This first link is from 2010, and it covers some work from Yale researchers. You have to get over the sugary pictures at the start and the very populist (and biased) presentation of the material: which is quite hard to do. But it is interesting to watch nonetheless
www.nytimes.com/video/2010/05/04/ma...from-wrong.htmlThe research was published in nature.
More recently researchers in New Zealand have cast doubt on the findings.
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-08/uoo-bmn081512.phpThe problems are the same as usual: the findings are factual: the interpretation is not. Scientists are people and they bring their prejudices both to experimental design and to interpretation.
It is interesting to watch what is actually done (in the first video) and then to consider the interpretation in that linked report to the challenge: sadly I did not find video of the New Zealand study, but I did notice this in the report:
QUOTE
"On the help and hinder trials, the toys collided with one another, an event we thought infants may not like. Furthermore, only on the help trials, the climber bounced up and down at the top of hill, an event we thought infants may enjoy."
<snip>
"For example, when we had the climber bounce at the bottom of the hill, but not at the top of the hill, infants preferred the hinderer, that is, the one that pushed the climber down the hill. If the social evaluation hypothesis was correct, we should have seen a clear preference for the helper, irrespective of the location of the bounce, because the helper always helped the climber achieve its goal of reaching the top of the hill."
Maybe: but the baby may have thought that bouncing up and down indicated happiness: in which case it is not obvious that they agreed that the climber wanted to go up the hill in the first place: after all babies often get made to do things they do not want to do, like keeping their socks on. The "helper" who keeps putting those socks back on is a pain in the butt.
As with all such things we bring our own prism and it is very difficult to control for all the things that might be going on: human beings are not billiard balls rolling down inclined planes.
