On Fri, 21 May 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Paul Bloom, the psychologist who heads the study team, said: ''Some
>> sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.''
>
> Maybe babies like squares better than triangles.
>
> Really, this is a pretty heroic conclusion from a single experiment.
To be fair to Paul Bloom, this is a bleeding abstract. The full article, "The Moral Life of Babies," is both interesting and amusing. It ran in the NYT Magazine a couple of weeks ago and I was about to send it to you and Liza as something I was sure you'd enjoy (as all parents who theorize about their children would), but I assumed you'd seen it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html
Even better on this subject IMHO is Alison Gopnik, who gives an interview on the new baby research in Seed Magazine:
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/to_be_a_baby/
I'm looking forward to reading her book, "The Philosophical Baby" when it comes out in paperback in July.
Last point: I think what's hanging everybody up here is the equation of "innate" with "unchanging." The first does not imply the other -- at all. As it is being used here, innate features are what allow us to learn -- i.e., change. They are a kind of operating program on which the moral or linguistic programs we actually use -- and collectively keep changing -- are built.
The point of this research is not to back up ev psyche -- at all. It is to establish the roots of the mind in the body, as something that emerges from it.
Michael