morality:
Subjective or objective?
A DEEP LOOK INTO MORALITY FROM A TORAH PERSPECTIVE
BY: DAVID KLEIN
L
ittle children
seem to have
a
special
knack
at
putting a smile
on
people’s
faces.
They
seem to radiate a deep and
inner purity that one cannot
help but admire when
witnessing it firsthand.
However,psychologists
and philosophers have
long believed that humans
are born neither good nor
bad. They simply have a
clean slate, with the ability
to absorb whatever ideas
they are exposed to. This
idea of tabula rasa can be
traced back to the writings
of Aristotle. It has been the
predominant theory since
then, appearing in the
writings of such influential
thinkers as John Locke,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
andSigmund Freud. Yet,
this is a hard concept to
accept. Can it really be
possible that humans are
just as likely to become
good, altruistic, members
of society as it is for them
to become murderers?
Or do humans have an
inherent sense of right
and wrong, and are not
8
CLARITY MAGAZINE march 2014
the “perfect idiots” that
Rousseau describes?
Researchers
are
now studying this very
question. A recent study
led by Dr. Karen Wynn of
Yale University’s Infant
Cognition
Center
has
concluded that babies of
very young ages do in fact
have a certain sense of
morality. Experiments were
conducted where infants
as young as 5 months
old were presented with
different scenarios, and
their subsequent reactions
to them were analyzed.
In one such experiment, infants were shown
a scene in which an individual was struggling to
open a box, and the lid
was partially open and partially shut. Q