Morality Play <- Link to the Boston.com Article
I’m sorry; I just don’t think religion has ever been a building block for our morality, I have always viewed it as a loose guide. I also don’t think we are necessarily hard wired at birth with all the tools either. I am raising three children and I’ve seen first hand when they become aware of themselves and subsequently push every limit in the quest to learn what is right versus what is wrong.
First and foremost, I believe Hauser is using the wrong experimental group. Children of kindergarten age have already been through some process as they grow older. Through repeated experiments with their environments, children this age have already learned through reprimands and encouragement (or lack thereof) given by their guardians.
Not to mention if Hauser were to take this test to Africa and replace the stickers with food, I would be curious to see if he’d get identical results. Morality is often a question of fight or flight syndrome based on our current environment. It is almost a conditioning to our surroundings; one that will be passed onto other generations suffering or experiencing the same situations.
I would argue a toddler would kill a puppy and not know the difference of what he or she did. There would be no forethought into grabbing a leg and twisting. There would be no remorse at that age, only a feeling of guilt that the child would experience should they be spanked or scolded.
This is what inherently separates the Jerry Springer crowd from the future lawyers and doctors of tomorrow. Morality is definitely a product of our environment to deal with large social scale issues. I would like to believe we’ve come a long way from feeding prisoners to lions, yet something tells me as early as 60-70 years ago, we have just changed our methodologies. If anything apathy has only grown which severely impacts our moral judgment.
If what the article says is true, and most of us think it is worse to be a perpetrator as opposed to sitting back and letting something happen, it shows what a weak race we truly are. For those are both unforgivable sins in my book. Killing someone in cold blood is just as bad doing nothing about the AIDS situation in Africa, or the genocide in Darfur.
Oh look, I’m back on religion.
Shame on me.
I was over my father’s house channel surfing yesterday. Between ‘What Not to Wear’ and Super Bowl pre-game shows, an animal planet show caught my eye.
‘The Puppy Bowl III.’
That’s right! 3 hours of watching nothing but cute puppies frolic around the small mock football field. Occasionally a human ref would walk out, throw a penalty down for unnecessary roughness and then walk away.
What surprised me the most was this had a sponsor! Bissell vacuum cleaners sponsored 3 hours of adorable quadrupeds licking each other. My kids absolutely loved it, and my father’s cat actually sat transfixed to the 42” screen.
I can’t go without mentioning the incredibly cute Kitty Half Time show.
I may be a diabetic now, because I think I’m in sugar shock. This was way too sweet for me!
