When my baby was about nine months old, he started giving out hugs with his own unique twist: He'd wrap his chubby arms around whomever he was hugging, and then gently pat their back. It made sense; his bedtime routine usually consists of Daddy holding him in his arms and gently patting his back until he falls asleep. The logic behind the behavior didn't diminish my gut-level reaction, however, at the sight of my son snuggled up in Daddy's arms, his small hand barely reaching around the curve of Daddy's broad shoulders, patting away.

Now 14 months old, my son says "Pat-pat" as he hugs and pats, and what we've dubbed "baby hugs with pat-pats" are a big part of family life. Along with the cuteness factor, my curiosity has been piqued: is my son just mimicking the behavior he's observed? Or does he possess some rudimentary understanding of the meaning of a hug, a pat on the back? In the middle of a difficult day recently, I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands, trying not to cry in front of my children. Seconds later my 14-month-old was in my lap, his arms around my neck, patting my back. "Pat-pat," he breathed as he hugged me.

I've written elsewhere about watching my children develop empathy and a sense of morality, so it was with great interest that I read Yale psychologist Paul Bloom's lengthy article in The New York Times on the moral capacities of babies. In graduate school, one of my professors was renowned for telling his students that the more studies we do on babies, the more we discover they are much smarter than we think—and Bloom would apparently agree. His article details a set of increasingly complicated experiments that he and his wife, also a Yale psychology professor, designed to measure babies' morality.

In the first experiment, six- and ten-month-old babies were shown three puppets acting out a basic morality play: one puppet is trying to climb a hill while a second puppet helps the first and a third puppet pushes the first back down. At the end of the play, babies are offered the "helping" and "hindering" puppets to play with, and the experimenters tracked which puppet the babies reached for. (The basic assumption, of course, is that what an infant reaches for is what the infant desires; Bloom actually delves at some depth into the presuppositions behind the experiments, and the controls taken, in the NYT article.)

The result? Babies overwhelmingly preferred the "helping" puppet. Further experiments introduced a neutral character, and those results showed that babies prefer a helping character to a neutral one, and a neutral character to a hindering character. "To have a genuinely moral system," Bloom writes, "some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering." In other words, actions carry a moral weight: it matters that one puppet is helping another, and vice-versa.

(I must admit, my favorite part of the article is the description of how some of the experiments are derailed by uncooperative babies: " … some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; there will then be a short break for the baby to wake up or calm down, but on average this kind of study ends up losing about a quarter of the subjects." I found it reassuring to discover that even the Yale Infant Cognition Center is affected by the vagaries of babies, who—moral or not—aren't always known for their cooperation.)

Back to that matter at hand, Bloom writes, "what's exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean." Behaviors, in other words, indicate a moral code.

It's perhaps impossible to discuss innate morality without addressing where that morality comes from, and the article doesn't avoid asking that question. Quoting Dinesh D'Souza in What's So Great About Christianity?, Bloom addresses the argument that evolutionary biology can only account for so much in terms of altruism: namely, that altruistic acts toward genetic family can be explained using the Darwinian model of evolution, but acts of "higher altruism," (for example, kindness to strangers) cannot.

Evolutionary psychology has an answer to that argument, Bloom goes on to say: Just because a biological trait has evolved for a purpose doesn't mean it always functions for that purpose. Besides, kindness to strangers could be nothing more than an evolutionary development designed to make individuals appear more attractive to potential mates.

D'Souza's "general argument," however, "still needs to be taken seriously," writes Bloom. "The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with," he writes. "Moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible relation to our reproductive success and don't appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved adaptations."

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So where does this leave us? If a type of "higher altruism" was discovered in infants, Bloom submits that "the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger." But it's not. Babies' morality is highly skewed toward an "in-kind preference," research has shown, meaning that babies prefer people who look like them, sound like them, eat the same foods that they do. And because the infant morality code lacks "generality and universality," Bloom says, "there is no need to posit divine intervention."

Yet the fact of an infant moral code remains. Babies may need to be taught a "higher altruism," but I don't think that negates the evidence pointing to a Designer. Babies need to be taught a lot of things—how to sit up, how to crawl, that food goes in the mouth, not the nose or ear. It's logical that a more developed morality would be on the list.

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