Is it wrong to judge how people behaved in the past based on today's morals?
Jul 17, 2018 7:55:33 GMT
Post by Eλευθερί on Jul 17, 2018 7:55:33 GMT
[Psychology professor Judi] Smetana believes that children know more about morality than they're able to articulate, especially when they're toddlers. "We are born with some very rudimentary sense of empathy hard-wired in," she says.
A study published last month bolsters the theory that empathy is coded into human genes. A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Oregon Health and Science University found that a highly social strain of mice could learn to connect a tone played in a specific cage to something negative, merely by hearing the distressed squeak of a mouse who received a shock in the cage when the tone was played. When a mouse who had observed the distress was then placed in the cage and played the same tone, it exhibited signs of stress even though it did not experience a shock.
If a highly social mouse can relate another mouse's stress to itself, does this suggest that there's an evolutionary advantage to empathy? And if humans have inherited this advantage and are in fact genetically hard-wired to be empathetic, how does empathy relate to the moral development of children?
A study published last month bolsters the theory that empathy is coded into human genes. A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Oregon Health and Science University found that a highly social strain of mice could learn to connect a tone played in a specific cage to something negative, merely by hearing the distressed squeak of a mouse who received a shock in the cage when the tone was played. When a mouse who had observed the distress was then placed in the cage and played the same tone, it exhibited signs of stress even though it did not experience a shock.
If a highly social mouse can relate another mouse's stress to itself, does this suggest that there's an evolutionary advantage to empathy? And if humans have inherited this advantage and are in fact genetically hard-wired to be empathetic, how does empathy relate to the moral development of children?