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Valentina's picture

Gosh, morality is so

Gosh, morality is so frustrating. Thinking about it makes me just wish someone would write a big book (no, not the Bible) that defined, for everyone equally, what is moral and what isn't. Then people would lose points for each rule from each category (some being more severe than others) they broke- kind of like a credit score. Finally, people would live with other people of the same level of morality as them and we could all be happy.

"The Moral Life of Babies" really intrested me. My initial reactions were "Looking time is bs" and that it would be easy to skew the results with bias researchers and that whomever made up these experiments is really smart or crazy or both. But towards the end of the (very lengthy) article, I became very intrested in what the results really indicated.

First, the results showed that a majority of the babies thought the same- choosing the good toys over the bad ones. For my purpose, I'll ignore the few who didn't choose the good toys as having been confused. Does this mean we are not just born with morality, but equal "amounts" of it? So is morality not like other traits, a combination of "nature and nurture"? In order for it to be so, the "nature" aspect could not be equal in all because if it was then it could be said we are only affected by our enironment. Therefore, thus presuming there is not genetic component involved with morality, we could be living in peace and harmony if only our environments would allow for it?

In biology, we looked at this: VP= VG + VE. I forgot what the letters exactly stood for but 'E' is environment and 'G' is genes and 'P', I guess, is kind of like the final product. If VG is equal to an arbitrary number, say, 10 for everyone- then this indicates we have huge control over what our societies could be like and there is nothing stopping us from living in a perfect world except for the cultures and environments we have already set up. If any of this is really possible, then I'd say it's time to set up some universal socialism and hope for the best.

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