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and our experiments had certain features that we hoped would exclude this possibility. We tested babies in other scenarios in which the “climber” was replaced with an inanimate block that didn’t move on its own. The helper and hinderer went through the very same physical movements, but now they weren’t actually helping or hindering. The substitution caused the babies’ preference to disappear, which suggests that babies were indeed responding to the social interactions, not merely the movements.
    Also, ina project led by Mariko Yamaguchi, then an undergraduate in Karen’s lab, the research team retested the children who had been tested years ago in the original studies led by Valerie Kuhlmeier, where they had predicted the behavior of a ball who was either helped or hindered. It turned out that their performance on the original helper/hinderer experiment (but not their performance on other tasks) was related to their social reasoning skills asfour-year-olds. This too suggests that the helper/hinderer experiments really do tap babies’ social understanding.
    Still, it was important to see whether the same results would ensue if we moved away from the original helper/hinderer scenarios, soKiley and Karen created different sets of morality plays to show the babies. In one of these, an individual struggled to lift the lid on a box. On alternating trials, one puppet would grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut. In another scenario, an individual would play with a ball, and the ball would roll away. Similarly, one puppet would roll the ball back, and another puppet would grab it and run away. In both situations, five-month-olds preferred the good guy—the one who helped to open the box, the one who rolled the ball back—to the bad guy.
    T HESE experiments suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of interactions, including those that the babies most likely have never seen before. Now, we certainly haven’t proven that the understanding that guides the babies’ choices actually counts as moral. But the baby responses do have certain signature properties of adult moral judgments. They are disinterested judgments, concerning behaviors that don’t affect the babies themselves. And they are judgments about behaviors that adults would describe as good or bad. Indeed, when we showed the very same scenes to toddlers and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded asadults would,identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.
    I think that we are finding in babies what philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment described as a moral sense. This is not the same as an impulse to do good and avoid doing evil. Rather, it is the capacity to make certain types of judgments—to distinguish between good and bad, kindness and cruelty.Adam Smith, though himself skeptical of its existence, describes the moral sense as “somewhat analogous to the external senses. As the bodies around us, by affecting these in a certain manner, appear to possess the different qualities of sound, taste, odour, colour; so the various affections of the human mind, by touching this particular faculty in a certain manner, appear to possess the different qualities of amiable and odious, of virtuous and vicious, of right and wrong.”
    I think that we naturally possess a moral sense, and I’m going to return to this point over and over in the pages that follow. But morality involves much more than a capacity to make certain distinctions. It entails certain feelings and motivations, such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions. We have considered so far the head; what about the heart?

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    E MPATHY AND
C OMPASSION
    People could not be moral without the capacity to tell right from