From where does our morality come? An interesting new book by Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, discusses whether morality is evolved or innate. If it is the former, explaining morality seems to be a matter of identifying the particular chemical processes that create it. Yet this doesn't explain why we are moral beings. It doesn't explain the moral sense we all possess.
If it is the latter, however, we must assume that there is a fundamental structure or disposition
that somehow precedes and determines all else, including the moral sense. In other words, in order to produce the grounds of morality, the universe must itself be a moral universe. Morality cannot just pop into existence. Though morality, like all mental functions, is a product of neuronal interaction, it’s difficult to explain its presence on the basis of chemicals alone. Chemicals may produce morality, but can they enable it?
The linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that the ability to use language is hard wired into the human brain, that it appeared
as a single entity along the way of human development. Put another way, it did not evolve. As Chomsky sees it, we
simply “are” with language. But he cannot explain why.
Nor can we explain why we are moral without assenting to the possibility of a moral universe. And a moral universe is not something that can simply emerge out of nothing. Would we really have become moral (that is, not only able to choose what is moral, but to be able to choose) on our own?
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