Name: Gerda Matas LBIC Student Number: 32894
Human beings are not born morally.
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditation
Morality is the sense of the distinction between the right and wrong, the behaviour
conforming to a moral law or accepted standards. It is because of these reasons that it is not
possible that human beings can born moral, in the world there are many moral laws, values, and
ethics code which human grows and the personality it is accepted or not. However, there are
some many baby labs that do experiments on babies to show that baby knows the right from the
wrong and says that babies have a simple understanding of the good and bad. Because of that,
the aim of this essay is to demonstrate that human beings are not born morally because morality
grows through the years, as a result, they become moral.
In the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), the moral it is related to human behaviour, in
relation to their actions between the right and wrong, what is ethical or not. According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, children develop their sense of moral at the age of two and these are
called moral standards. Meaning that humans grow and learn to differentiate between the right
and wrong based on the teaching of their parents.
However, Marc H. (2007) in his book refer to “Gottfried Leibniz claimed that our
knowledge of morality and arithmetic is innate” and in an article about “The moral sense by
Charles Darwin” the father of the “Descent of Man” says that the difference between a man and
a lower animal is that for the men the sense of morality is more important, also, humans born
Name: Gerda Matas LBIC Student Number: 32894
with instinct and this instinct warns them of what is good and what is not. To support his
argument CNN give a news by Susan C. (2014) that The Baby Lab made some studies to babies
showing them bunnies and the 80% of the babies choose the good ones, in the conclusion believe
that babies born with a little sense of moral, this study was made at Yale University’s Infant
Centre.
Nevertheless, Mill says in his book of Utilitarianism that the moral feelings are not innate
because there are not actually part of our nature, but it can be acquired, like it is natural for the
men to speak, feel, cultivate the ground, to build cities, to reason, though these are acquired
faculties. Also, in the book “The moral Child” argue that children born with immoral tendencies
and is responsibility of his parent to form the child’s moral character telling them about the
values of the society and the virtues of the society, because children are naturally good but they
can become morally corrupted when they are exposed to wrong social influences.
To conclude, there is a debate between if humans born moral or not, in this essay I
demonstrate that the moral is learned because it is not part of their nature and that the world
already has stipulated ethic codes to know what is right or wrong. All the social influences are
already exposed by society because of that is not possible that humans born with morality if they
do not know what is right or wrong.
Name: Gerda Matas LBIC Student Number: 32894
REFERENCES
Chun, S. (2014) 'Are we born with a moral core? The Baby Lab says 'yes'', CNN, 14 February.
Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/baby-lab-morals-
ac360/index.html (Accessed: 18 February 2020).
Damon, W. (1988) The Moral Child. Place of publication: Collier Macmillan Publishers.
Djuric, D. (2009). ‘Moral sense by Charles Darwin’. Theoria, Beograd. 52. 49-59.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (February 19, 2019) Human behaviour. Available at:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/human-behavior/Symbolic-ability-and-
imitation (Accessed: 18 February 2020).
Hauser, M. (2007) Moral Minds, the Nature of Right and Wrong. Place of publication:
HarperCollins eBook.
Mill, J. and Bentham, J. (2004) Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Place of publication: Penguin
Books.
Oxford English Dictionary (1989) Moral, a. Available at: https://www.oed.com/oed2/00151262
(Accessed: 19 February 2020).
Name: Gerda Matas LBIC Student Number: 32894
