Just Babies Quotes

“For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“And it isn’t a mistake in taste, like believing that the Matrix sequels were as good as the original.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (‘That’s the way it’s done’) into an explicit observation (‘That’s what our tribe happens to do now’).” This is the point that Herodotus was making when he told the story of the Greeks and the Indians.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Marsh recounts an anecdote about a psychopath who was being tested with a series of pictures and who failed over and over again to recognize fearful expressions, until finally she figured it out: “That’s the look people get right before I stab them.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“The serial killer Gary Gilmore summed up the attitude of someone without moral feelings: “I was always capable of murder.… I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional. I know I’m doing something grossly fucking wrong. I can still go ahead and do it.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“In 1999, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin’s Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” or Rabbi Hillel’s statement, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Gopnik compares baby consciousness to that of an adult dumped into the middle of a foreign city, totally overwhelmed, constantly turning to see new things, struggling to make sense of it all. Things are even worse for a baby, actually, because even the most stressed-out adult can choose to think of something else: we can look forward to getting back to the hotel; imagine how we would describe our trip to friends; fantasize, daydream, or pray. The baby just is, trapped in the here and now.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons. A two-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult would be terrifying.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Part of being a good person, then, involves overriding one’s compassion, not cultivating it.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (‘That’s the way it’s done’) into an explicit observation (‘That’s what our tribe happens to do now’).”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Another important factor in expanding the circle is exposure to stories. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains how stories teach children to empathize and identify with people whose perspectives and identities may be very different from their own: “We see personlike shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them?… What storytelling in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of conjecturing that this shape, so similar to our own, is a house for emotions and wishes and projects that are also in some ways similar to our own; but it also gets us into the habit of understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social circumstances.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“As the philosopher Pamela Hieronymi says, “A past wrong against you, standing in your history without apology, atonement, retribution, punishment, restitution, condemnation, or anything else that might recognize it as a wrong, makes a claim. It says, in effect, that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Is it fair for the most productive people to possess more than everyone else, so long as they had equal opportunities to start with? Is it fair for a government to take money from the rich to give to the poor—and does the answer change if the goal of such redistribution is not to help the poor in a tangible sense but just to make people more equal, as in Louis C.K.’s story of breaking his other daughter’s toy? The psychologist William Damon, in a”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Here's how to freak out a baby: sit across from the baby, engage with him or her, and then suddenly become still. If this goes on for more than a few seconds, with you looking all corpselike, the baby will become upset.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil