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Just Babies: The Origins Of Good And Evil (2013)

by Paul Bloom(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307886840 (ISBN13: 9780307886842)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Crown

review 1: Just finished reading "Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil" (2013) by Paul Bloom. The book explores how morality - of good and evil - comes in people ever since they were babies, and quotes many works from other illustrious people in the fields of social psychology, neuroscience and philosphy.Bloom's argument and findings claim that morality is something instinctive and inherent to all human beings. They are traits that separates us from our ancestors and discusses how they emerge and become into what we understand as equality and fairness. He also explores topics such as empathy and compassion (related but not the same), altruism and self-interest, as well as religion and atheism.I praise the book for its succinctness and simplicity in explaining theories from works... more of the people such as Jonathan Haidt, Dan Ariely, Daniel Gilbert, David Hume and a whole lot of others. His ability to condense topics and coherently write to make the content very easy to follow for the general reader.However, as a researcher, I feel that Bloom's own work contributes little to the book. The content is hardly groundbreaking; as a whole, the book serves more as one that generally explains what morality is all about rather than his own findings.Certainly, as babies, we already have some kind of morality compass that changes over time according to the environment. All in all, as many social psychologists would say, humans are certainly social animals.NEXT BOOK: "Who Owns the Future?" (2013) by Jaron Lanier.
review 2: I took Bloom's Coursera class called "Moralities of Everyday Life" earlier this year and it was the best Coursera class I have taken so far. I enjoyed the class SO much but at the time this book had just come out and my library didn't have it. Now that I have read it, I can tell you that the class very much follows the book but works through the ideas much more thoroughly. My one complaint about this book was that it was too short. It seemed to end pretty abruptly but perhaps that is because I had taken the class and knew there was more behind the words on the page. less

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