#22 We Are Born with a Sense of Morality

There is good news!!  University professors, part of a group of moral naturalists, believe that we are born with the capacity to recognize right from wrong.  They also believe that we continue to learn fairness and other virtues through observation as to how people live and cooperate with one another.  These observations help to form our moral values.

David Brooks, author of the Social Animal, makes this contention in a July 22, 1010 article published in the New York Times.  He reports that a University of Virginia social psychologist believes that a "moral sense is like our sense of taste, we have receptors that help us detect sweetness and saltiness, and we also have "receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty". 

In addition, Professor Paul Bloom of Yale University has found that babies "have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age."  Babies as young as six months will choose photos of someone attempting to help another person over someone who is attempting to do them harm, or to hinder them. 

These moral abilities rely upon emotional, intuitive processes, for good and ill.  Of particular note is the fact that general fear makes us risk-averse; anger makes us more risk-seeking.   At times, healthy anger can be a very good thing.  It empowers us to stand up and be counted -- to speak truth to power and to do the right thing  -- the moral thing.

I will also believe that most people, if allowed, want to do the right thing.  I saw it so many times during my working career.  Co-workers willing to step up an help the other -- working collaboratively with others to come up with solutions that were good for everyone -- stakeholders and employees.  Working in this type of moral and ethical environment is very empowering and beneficial for everyone.   

We have the ability to bring morality back to our society -- government and corporate America.  Collectively we have to do stand up and do the right thing -- hold officials accountable for their actions, and demand better.  I know we can -- it is in our DNA.