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Infants’ preferential looking and habituation can be used to determine when expectancies
are met and when defied. Judging from patterns of preferential looking and habituation, infants
distinguish helpful from hurtful actions because they expect reciprocation. If one dot helps or
hurts another, they expect the latter dot to reciprocate in kind. There is an even greater
expectation of reciprocity if the two dots behave as though they belong to the same group. To a
small extent, dots which look alike tend to be perceived as belonging to the same group, whereas
dots which do not look alike are seen as not belonging to the same group; but an even stronger
criterion is sameness of motion. In the absence of any previous helping or hurting, infants will
expect members of the same group to help each other. The concept of possession or ownership is
also present. If one dot appears to exert power over another object, then hurting the overpowered
object or liberating it from the other dot will be seen as hurting the other dot and reciprocation
will be expected (Premack and Premack, 1994).
This is not, of course, to say that infants are capable of moral evaluation, but it is evidence
that they have concepts which play important roles in such evaluation. These sorts of data in
conjunction with more commonsense considerations of poverty of the moral stimulus make a
good provisional case for moral nativism.
One might think that moral nativism is enough to refute moral pluralism, and it is true
that, classically, talk of cognitive universals is often anathema to pluralists. There is at least a
rough consensus that human diversity would refute nativism, or, equivalently, that a good case
for nativism would debunk apparent diversity. The consensus, however, rests on confusion. One
must bear in mind that poverty-of-the-stimulus considerations were first raised in recent times
with regard to language, and linguistic nativism does not imply that everyone speaks the same
language. Likewise, as we shall see, moral nativism need not imply that everyone shares
compatible values.