I think we have a misunderstanding. Obviously humans are not “completely empty” even at birth. We are “imbued” with the necessary reflexes, the ability to breathe, to eat, etc. What we do not have is the innate ability to speak, to walk, and zillions of learned abilities and traits. We do not have the inborn ability to read, to conceptualize, to make conscious decisions, after all these activities require a much more complex brain than what a newborn has. However, we have the inborn ability to learn - which is the most important trait of all. Of course this ability varies from individual to individual.
Well, I think that’s not a well rounded view of human biology/psychology. Human babies cry sympathetically, at just days or hours old, with other babies crying. It’s not a product of a well-developed theory of mind, and the babe is not capable of articulating or differentiating those emotions. But that is the primary point here. Humans are hard-wired, from birth to do this, every bit as much as the babe is hardwired to instinctually suck when put to Mother’s breast.
It’s not a learned response, and that empathic response, rudimentary though it is in a newborn, is the foundation for huge parts of the moral edifice that gets built on top of it as a moral framework. And this framework gets built inevitably, no matter what you teach the child. The human is intrinsically moral, or as is said in homage to Chomsky’s ideas about an intrinsic ‘linguistic grammar’ in humans, humans have a “moral grammar”, a set of instincts that are distinctively and unavoidably moral in nature. Frans de Waal’s
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved is a particular good resource to get at if wish to review this area of inquiry. Not only is it good on the human side, but because it’s de Waal, it’s exceptionally strong in connecting that to our natural cousins on the Tree of Life, the other primates. They, too are “wired for morality”, in their respective species-specific ways.
All of which is not to deny the vast “open spaces” the “Third Chimpanzee” brings to the table developmentally. Humans build ornate, exotic moral structures on top of that. But all of that superstructure is just more testimony to the moral infrastructure that humans rest it on.
I don’t think so. Children are inherently selfish.
Well, there you go. That’s a moral position right there, and one that ramifies right on through adulthood and maturity. Like empathy, these impulses and instincts are visceral and they compete and interact in complex ways in humans, and in increasingly more complex ways as the human child develops cognitively.
We have to train them that sharing is good.
I won’t dispute that, as the father of six children – although I know from that experience that child are often kind, sympathetic, compassionate and sharing before they can be taught any such concept, too – but your observation misses the transcendental salient here: that there is
good to train them presumes the “moral grammar” of the child. It’s a bit like that ‘fish is so in the water he doesn’t know he’s in the water’ thing: to talk about ‘teaching morality’ is to presume a moral disposition and capacity in the child in the first place.
This is where Christians get all confused and superstitious. This is where science and rational thinking are discovering morality as a endemic feature of human/primate evolution.
Children are also inherently cruel - probably because they lack the ability to “put themselves into the other person’s shoes”.
Observably, they
don’t lack such abilities. Again, a 6 month old child will “put themselves in the other baby’s diapers” so to speak, and cry sympathetically with a nearby baby who is crying. Cruelty is a moral disposition, too, and this applies to humans as adults as well as children, which I’m sure you know all too well, as do I.
Scientifically, the “lacks ability” hypothesis doesn’t work, because so much evidence exists for empathetic and sympathetic behavior in the same children, and from the earliest ages. The model that accounts for what we observe is one where the egocentric urges compete with other prosocial urges, and work themselves out in complex ways. A display of cruelty doesn’t deny the capacity for empathy, but rather points to the prevalence of selfish and egocentric urges over more prosocial urges in that particular instance.
There are pschopaths and sociopatchs, without any empathy. I don’t think it is true that those “human monsters” are really “sweet, loving persons” on the inside, they just suppress it for whatever reason.
I don’t think that’s the case, either. But that again supports my point; We describe such a person as “sociopathic” precisely because their psychology is anamolous, aberrent. It’s because humans are naturally empathetic and social that we classify them as morally/socially problematic when they are missing those inclinations.
As a summary, I merely argue that humans learn a moral code, and do not have it as an inborn ability.
I think this may be resolved by understanding that the innate ability to “learn a moral code” (if we understand here that ‘moral code’ is something more detailed and structured than a toddler can grok conceptually) is ITSELF evidence and manifestation of the moral nature of humans, biologically/physiologically.
-TS
