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The foundations of human morality : a critical analysis of moral nativism

“…He argues that moral intuitions are complex and that the "moral competence of both adults and children exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract and agency." 1 Because the emergence of such knowledge cannot be explained by appealing to the environment, associative learning, 2 imitation, or explicit instruction, there must be an innate faculty that accounts for this information, as is the case with language. Mikhail argues that three and four year olds use both intent and purpose to distinguish acts with similar consequences, as is the case with the Trolley Dilemma, calibrate the level of punishment for harmful acts on the basis of provocation, intent, and purpose, and display the doctrine of double effect a little later on in childhood, at the age of eight.…”