AWA suggests reading the following article (represented here in part) in its entirety to understand why it is important to teach children morals beginning with infants.... Do Babies Know Right From Wrong? We find that even 3-month-olds prefer the good guy to the bad guy, and that older babies and toddlers will reward the good guy and punish the bad guy. Babies also prefer other characters that do the same; they prefer a just puppet who rewards the good and punishes the bad over an unjust puppet who does the opposite. The existence of a universal moral sense is the good news. But we are, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it, risen apes, not fallen angels. Our brains are the products of natural selection and so one would expect our innate morality to have certain limits. Indeed, studies find that babies start off as little bigots, eagerly dividing the world into us versus them and strongly favoring their own group over everyone else. Although the babys capacity for moral judgment applies broadly, when it comes to kindness and compassion, we start off indifferent—or worse—toward strangers. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of The Selfish Gene, Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Or, as a character in a Kingsley Amis novel put it: It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children. cnn/2014/02/12/opinion/bloom-babies-right-wrong/
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 23:34:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015