The paper looks
at the moral life of kids and the psychological dimension that is depicted by
those moral actions. The author takes us
through psychological experiments which help us to understand these morals. This
is preceded by a real life action which triggers the interest I this topic by
the author: a kid punishes a puppet for hurting another puppet.
The ideas
furthered by this article are interesting and hard to believe. The author is of
the opinion that children have morals that later change to adult standards. This
change is normally bad as, according to the author, adults do have as good
morals as the kids. With reference to past research, Bloom (4) further analyzes
a fact furthered in this article that kids have a ‘smartness’ in them that is
wrapped in idiocy. This is hard to believe as I find contradicting. What I
think is that children have great honesty and truthfulness but they may not
have the shrewd mind as Bloom depicts in the article.
In every society
there is some level of unfairness and fairness as per the people that live
there and what they believe in. Morality at the same time calls for punishment
of what is bad and reward of the good things that emanate from others. However,
that can only happen in an ideal society. Bloom (6) depicts this society as the
one in which kids would live in. he claims that they are so nice and they
wouldn’t tolerate anything apart from fairness. In my thinking that is even
more idealistic. It is especially true to see kid’s fight over something which
forms part of unfairness. And just like in the normal social set up, there are those
kids that would advocate for fairness which may have been the area of study for
the author (Bloom, 5).
The author is
keen on presenting morality experiments to show kids as totally impeccable in
that department. One of the experiments involved the pushing of an object up a
hill and the help that comes from other balls and observing faces of kids for
reaction. Ideally, this is the kind of morality we are looking for. But in real
sense this cannot happen as long as people have personal interests and
different personalities which shape up as life experiences shape people. Children
should have a good and solid foundation of morality as they grow up.
Work
Cited
Bloom, Paul. “The Moral Life of Babies.” The
New York Times, 9 May, 2010.
Retrieved on December 12, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all
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