Right from Wrong

Awesomeocalypse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Awesomeocalypse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 2:48 am

My coworkers and I, when there's nothing going on at work, often get into discussions that often turn into heated debates and occasionally spark into arguments. One such discussion was the ability to determine right from wrong.

Literally half of the group said that the instant you are born, you are somehow biologically implanted with the knowledge to differentiate between right and wrong. I was a member of this group. We believed that at no point did our parents sit us down and explain to us that lying was wrong, stealing was wrong, cheating was wrong, murder was wrong...but somehow, we just knew it was.

The other half says that as you grow up, you naturally observe your parents, relatives, and those around you and begin to determine what is right and wrong since newborn children's brains are constantly absorbing information.

I believe that, even though my parents never told me don't take cookies out of the cookie jar, I knew that when I reached my hand in there, I was doing something wrong. I was just curious to see what everyone else thought.

Blackbird26 · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Blackbird26** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 7:19 am

I think that no matter how good your memory is you can't say that never, from the moment you are born, no one told you that it's wrong to take things that don't belong to you or lie. Even though your conscious self has no memory, your subconscious will register everything you see and hear from the moment you are born, maybe even before. That is what I believe.

Although there is a part of our brain that allows us to tell right from wrong, I don't think we are born aware of what is exactly right and wrong.

That's just my opinion though.

botukon · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **botukon** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 7:48 pm

It isn't possible for a human being to just 'know' anything. All a newborn knows is to cry anytime something is wrong. That crying is an instinct. The newborn doesn't 'know' that crying works. As the newborn matures it indeed does learn 'if i cry ,my caregivers come running". A toddler does not naturally understand not to take cookies from a jar. Because while one kid knows better another kid the same age does not and cannot understand why an adult is upset. Parents don't always have to literally say something is wrong. We learn stuff through experience sometimes. Toddler A may see Toddler B get punished for stealing a cookie. Toddler A probably now knows not to steal cookies even though no one told them.

silverclawedmouse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **silverclawedmouse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 9:34 pm

I believe that babies are born as blank slates - they have a few things that are hardwired, like the need to cry as botukun pointed out, but everything else is learned through observation and experience. Being 'right' and being 'wrong' is, to me, a gray area with no satisfactory definition. What is right to one culture is wrong to another, and what is right and what is wrong changes over time. In the U.S., we now consider slavery 'wrong', but we did it for hundreds of years. I believe that homosexuals have a 'right' to get married and it is 'wrong' to deny them that, but one of my very close friends thinks it is 'wrong' for a man to love another man. If we were naturally born knowing right and wrong, how can we have differing opinions about this? I understand these situations are more extreme than than a simple 'stealing from a cookie jar', but I think it follows the same idea.

And who knows Awesome, maybe you were just an awesome kid and rarely had to be told you were being bad. I know I was pretty good myself, but I still had to be told that hitting others was bad, that I shouldn't cheat on tests, and the like.

Awesomeocalypse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Awesomeocalypse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:01 pm

You all have very valid points. And no, I wasn't a good kid at all. I was always in trouble.

botukon wrote:We learn stuff through experience sometimes. Toddler A may see Toddler B get punished for stealing a cookie. Toddler A probably now knows not to steal cookies even though no one told them.

So do you think that children have the capability to recognize and analyze anything that seems wrong. Like if Toddler A watched his father beat his mother (terrible example, I know). Even though Toddler A was never told that it was wrong, just because he sees his mom crying he knows that what his father is doing is wrong?

I think my whole thing is the human conscious. It's confuses me. Let's say that a child grows up with the Manson family and witnesses everything they're doing. The Mansons would never tell the child it was wrong, and he would witness their psychotic joy and assume that they were having fun. But wouldn't there still be a feeling deep down that what they were doing is wrong? Even though the child has never known any other way?

Blackbird26 · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Blackbird26** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:23 pm

How many children who witness abuse grow up to be abusers when adults? Then those particular people were born morally damaged?
Or they learned at a young age that it's okay to do such things and no matter how much they heard it's wrong, a part of them still believes their actions are justified? Maybe both.

Psychopaths are born laking the ability to experience emotions (simply put). So even if they know right from wrong... They don't care. So if they go around killing people is not because they don't know it's wrong.

There are several things that make a decent human being. They might be different things for each individual... I'm really just speculating here.

silverclawedmouse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **silverclawedmouse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:33 pm

Your scenario is all speculation - we can't know if the child feels something deep down unless we ask it or someone in a very similar situation. And I think the point that botukun was trying to make with his child analogy wasn't that "they can recognize and analyze anything that seems wrong." I think he was saying something more like Toddler A knows there is a punishment if he is bad because Toddler B received the punishment. By watching B get punished, A is indirectly told that stealing is bad (please correct me if I'm wrong botukun, I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth). Just like we have to be told that hurting people on purpose is bad - when we're children we all pull hair and bite when were angry. We learn through experience - punishment and rewards - what behaviors are 'good' and acceptable and which ones are 'bad' and to be avoided.

As for the child abuse scenario, children that come from abusive homes are more likely, though not certain to, have abusive relationships in their future. A child watches his father beat his mother and if no ones tells him it is wrong, he may very well grow up to think it is acceptable behavior and do the same to his wife. I don't come from an abusive family so I can't say anything for sure, but children generally take what they are presented with as the norm.

Awesomeocalypse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Awesomeocalypse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 11:09 pm

Blackbird26 wrote:How many children who witness abuse grow up to be abusers when adults?

silverclawedmouse wrote:As for the child abuse scenario, children that come from abusive homes are more likely, though not certain to, have abusive relationships in their future.

I never even began to think about that, which is entirely correct. However, not all children grow up to do the same as their parents. I don't come from an abusive family, either, so my points are all speculations. Nothing but what ifs.

I did, however, once find some science stuff that some science guys did where they took a mouse and put it into a box with a large colored square in the middle of it. If the mouse wandered into the square, it received a jolt of electricity. This continued for some time. The mouse, at first, would accidentally wander into the square and get shocked. After some time, the mouse would seem to test the square, but still receive the jolt. Later on, after the mouse gave birth, they were separated and the child was put into the same box. It avoided the colored square at all costs.

Now I'm not saying that the test is without flaws, but don't you think there's some genetic imprinting from our parents. Some sort of knowledge of the world already, even if very minimal. I mean, when we're born, we immediately breathe. Nobody teaches us that. I understand that breathing is instinctual, but couldn't there be some way that having a general idea of right and wrong is instinctual as well?

silverclawedmouse · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **silverclawedmouse** on Thu Dec 09, 2010 11:37 pm

I'm not going to give a flat 'no, never' because I honestly don't know enough about the subject and we may find new things in the future that seem absolutely alien to us right now (600 years ago, they would have probably called you a witch and burned you at the stake if you mentioned cars, genetics, or the idea that women deserve equal rights). I am going to say that I disagree, but you've made me think.

I'm going to call the mouse experiment a fluke. It sounds to much like Lamarck's theory, that characteristics acquired through a creatures lifetime were then passed on to it's offspring. The idea was that a giraffe stretched its neck to get higher, juicer leaves. Its offspring was then born with a slightly longer neck, and so on. This has, in the two hundred years since its creation, been proven false. On that same notion, if a lion lost a limb during a fight, its cubs would also only have three limbs. Memories, such as those for unnatural behavior (like avoiding a colored square) are just connections between neurons. To me, it doesn't make any more sense that connected neurons in the brain are passed onto children than an extended neck.

End of Reality · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **End of Reality** on Fri Dec 10, 2010 12:24 am

It's both. We have a natural sense of right and wrong that has evolved in us, but we also learn from society.

Simple, right?

EDIT: I don't know to the degree with evolution has an effect relative to society, and vice-versa. I'm sure it would be interesting to study something like that.

Kestrel · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Kestrel** on Fri Dec 10, 2010 6:04 am

Right and wrong are not taught, but observed. Not just from the parents but from the world as a whole. In relation to the cookie jar, you probably felt uneasy. Perhaps because it was out of your logical pattern that you could take a cookie from the jar without asking. More likely though because you had already been punished before for wrongs you committed while at the time you did not know you were actually doing something wrong; so the anticipated unknown becomes a recurring element affecting you emotionally. Are you right? Are you wrong? Will you be punished?

There are things that make us uneasy, but as a child (at first-time-cookie-jar-age) your brain has not developed to the part where it can judge concepts like right and wrong on an individual scale. All they know is allowed and disallowed. You cannot predict those without a pre-existing informational base.

I'm 60/40 in nature/nurture myself, dude, but come on. There are millions of things we learn that we're not aware of, simply because we find them so normal and for granted.

Vicarious · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Vicarious** on Sat Dec 11, 2010 7:18 pm

botukon wrote:It isn't possible for a human being to just 'know' anything.

Actually, there's the collective unconscious, which is a psychological term that basically says that everyone within a society shares unconscious thoughts to a certain extent.

"collective unconscious n. In Jungian psychology, a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product."

"The collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind common to all humans. "

I follow that to a certain point, because I enjoy Psychology, but I also believe that people differentiate "right from wrong" according to how they are raised and where they are raised. People tend to subconsciously follow the "social norms" that surround them. To quote a movie:

"You're as violent as they come. I know. because I'm as violent as they come. Don't embarrass yourself by denying your own blood lust, son. Don't embarrass me. If the constraints of society were removed, and I was all that stood between you and a meal, you'd crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts." - "Warden" from Shutter Island.

It's the constraints of society that teaches us right from wrong.

Leif Cauldor · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Leif Cauldor** on Sun Dec 12, 2010 2:30 pm

I believe that if you were born with the natural instinct of being able to differentiate between right and wrong, you would more than likely be a prodigy. Or, you would be a freak of nature. Most things, such as Right and Wrong, come with being taught said things. Now, I'll argue the fact that some people do not have this ability. Some are born with parts of their genetics missing. But, that doesn't mean that we know from the word 'Go'. If we were not taught what is right and what is wrong, by the standards of the mass general populace, then we would probably do the wrong thing, thinking it was right.

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