Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing infants as sentient beings capable of experience and emotion.
Paul Bloom eloquently points out that denying infants their emotional and experiential dimensions is not only irrational but also morally wrong. He reminds us that even from an early age, humans are not simply blank slates but instead possess feelings and experiences that shape their interactions with the world around them, challenging us to view infancy with reverence and understanding.
In practice
During a parenting workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the emotional capacities of infants.
Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.
No one should question the faith of others, for no human being can judge the ways of God.
The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away.
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperorβs New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
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