Just Babies

What is this book about?

A 2013 book by Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, subtitled "The Origins of Good and Evil". Through experiments on babies and young children, he asks where the moral sense comes from: even very young infants seem to distinguish helping from hindering and to prefer the helper, suggesting that basic empathy and a sense of good and bad may be innate. At the same time, he shows that humans are naturally partial to their own group and hostile to outsiders, so kindness and prejudice coexist in human nature.

Why read it?

It argues from experiments rather than speculating about whether human nature is good or evil: infants' preferences give observable evidence, putting the question of where universal values come from on an empirical footing. More valuable still is the other half — the same innate machinery that produces kindness toward others also produces in-group favouritism and out-group hostility. Understanding this makes a great deal of real-world polarisation legible.

Core Ideas

• Babies are born with a basic empathy and a sense of good and bad.
• Humans are also naturally biased toward their in-group and against outsiders.
• Universal kindness and narrow prejudice come from the same innate psychological machinery.
• The moral sense has biological roots, and is also shaped by later environment.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Where do universal values actually come from?
• Why do people hold universal goodwill and yet slide so easily into narrow, fanatical positions?

Who should read it?

For readers of developmental psychology and moral philosophy, and for anyone wanting a psychological handle on group fanaticism. The book runs on experiments and cases, is accessible, and requires no background in psychology; a little familiarity with evolutionary psychology makes it smoother.

How to Read It

The source note captures the book's two conclusions: infant experiments confirm that a universal sense of good and evil exists, and reveal the human weakness for in-group favouritism. Mind the limits of the experimental work — how far an infant's preference for a "helper" amounts to adult moral judgement is still debated, so leaping from results to moral-philosophical conclusions calls for care. The book explains the origins and mechanisms of the moral sense; it does not tell us how we ought to act.