Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness in Human Infants

We review recent experimental studies relevant to assess the proposal that human infants possess a sense of fairness that relies on sociomoral knowledge. We propose that this knowledge may include a core concept of justice with four foundational aspects: impartiality, agency, obligatoriness and conflicting claims. Infants’ and toddlers’ looking times, manual preferences and spontaneous actions provide some evidence for the first three features. Very early-emerging sociomoral evaluations and expectations about resource distributions show that infants process morally relevant information about distributors and recipients, suggesting that they are sensitive to the agency and impartiality constraints. Early evaluations appear to be linked to third-party expressions of praise or admonishment and to the deliverance of rewards and punishment, providing initial support for the obligatoriness constraint. More work is needed to investigate the sensitivity to conflicting claims, to assess the universality of early emerging evaluation skills and to show how core concepts relate to the development of explicit judgments and beliefs about duties and rights.