Morality: A Sociological Analysis

Apparently, most people seem to behave in the same way regarding morality. Even babies seem to behave in a somewhat moral fashion. If morality was learned, people wouldn’t share a common moral behavior. Marc Hauser theorizes that morality works like language. American linguist Noam Chomsky found that most languages in the world share similar grammatical principles, they all have nouns, verbs, and adjectives, for example, but the specifics allow for some variations of location and usage. In the same way, morality may consist of a universal collection of principles that allow some variation. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” revenge, and doing something nice for someone who did something nice seem to be a consistent component

As explained before, humans tend to be more “moral” to people of their own community, but this takes a somewhat ill-fated turn if we analyze it in depth. Our communities have always been based on accepting people that look or act like us, but nowadays, many have adopted the moral system that is based on the acceptance of differences and tolerance to everyone. Villamizar mentioned a video, in which the experiments showed kids a picture of a white and a black kid, and asked them to chose the prettier one. The (white) kids consistently chose the white option (Villamizar). In a similar way, Yale’s baby lab’s experts discovered that kids have certain behaviors that do not seem to correspond with our moral system today: “Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.” They state that through this experiments, “we’re seeing the underbelly of judgments we make as adults but try not to” (Tucker). Paul Bloom, one of the most recognized experts in baby morality, even goes as far as saying: “We are by nature indifferent, even hostile to strangers; we are prone towards parochialism and bigotry. Some of our instinctive emotional responses, most notably disgust, spur us to do terrible things, including acts of genocide” (Barns). “So is there a generic rule that says, ‘don't kill others’? No, there's not, because that rule is always adjoined to a caveat, which says, ‘Well, we kill some people, but not everybody.’ It's always an in-group, out-group distinction” (Glausiusz). Villamizar explains that “there is something there, some tendencies, some empathy, some recognition of the other, any moral that exists comes from that; but accepting them, that’s different. Recognition comes first, knowing that there is someone similar to [ourselves]. In babies, that