Babies, morals and ethics, ev psych, religion

The New York Times magazine has a good, but far short of great, article on these issues, previewed on the paper's main website.

The first six pages? Very good. But, on the last webpage, the story and author throws out sops to culture being needed to bring us to new moral heights.

Among those? The claim that human babies distinguishing between in-groups and out-groups as to who gets more of their moral attention proves that cultural-based morality is needed to make us love our brothers, and to define the whole world as brother and sister.

Now, Paul Bloom does not specify religion, or philosophy, as a primary cultural vehicle for this, but I think most people would put religion and philosophy as Nos. 1 and 2 on the list of cultural vehicles for moral development.

From religion, that would be the same morality that, in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, had Saul being told by Yahweh to commit genocide against the Amalekites, and even their livestock, right?

From philosophy, would that include some of the more heartless philosophies, such as Zen (if we're not counting it a religion)? Or would it include philosophies like Hegel's that have little thought for ethics?

Rather, religion, as a human creation, has expanded its definition of in-group along with the culture which transmits it doing the same. Ditto for philosophy as an organized movement.

It's quite arguable that something like freer trade, hastened by the invention of coinage, actually improved in-group vs. out-group perceptions more than religion or philosophy on the cultural side.

Indeed, Matt Ridley notes that seashell distribution argues that trade networks existed 80,000 years ago. That's far older than possibly religious-driven cave paintings at Lascaux or Altamira.

And, beyond all this, Bloom makes an unwarranted philosophical and religious assumption or two. Try this whopper:

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. ... The philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out that this notion of impartiality can be found in religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls’s landmark theory of justice.

Says who? On what grounds? Walter Kaufmann kind of obliterated Rawls decades ago. (Read "Without Guilt and Justice.")

On religion, see what I posted above about Yahweh. See what fundamentalists in the various Western monotheisms today say about other religious traditions. No, impartiality is still restricted to in-groups in religion in many cases.