“A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life,” writes Paul Bloom. “With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.”
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Are Babies Moral?
"A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life," writes Paul Bloom. "Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone."
Monthly Issue
April 2026
In this monthly issue, we examine how our understanding of energy — and how we source and use it — is evolving.
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