Are we born with a conscience or do we develop one?

Question:

Are we born with a conscience or do we develop one?

Cause somethings we think are wrong today weren't thought of as wrong thousands of years ago like human sacrifice and stealing(talking about Spartan agoge). Or does the conscience change as people's idea of morality change?
I know that Hamurabi's code and the ten commandments are very similar so that sort of suggest being born with a conscience right?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'd humbly suggest that we as humans are taught a lot about what is right and wrong. As many have mentioned morality does change with time and culture. But...

There are two exceptions you have to note to this:

--Every human culture and society does have one principle in common. And this principle, in primitive form, also shows up in most warm-blooded social animals as well.

The principle is called "tit-for-tat" in biology circles, and operates from the idea that with two strangers who are members of the same species, you 1) first assume friendly relations, and then 2) return the favor shown, doing as you are done by.

In humans it's much the same in all cultures: You do for others as you would have them do for you.

I'd suggest this bit alone is pretty solidly instinctive, and is something people *want* to do by default....you see this all the time in healthy kids as they make friends.

--There is a catch though. Not all people are healthy in the social sense. It is a part of the price we pay for having such massive, overgrown, powerful brains--any little thing can go wrong and make people antisocial to various degrees and in manifold ways.

Some folks just don't have it in them intellectually to learn and remember the rules and moralities we live by day to day.

Others are smart enough but are flawed when it comes to impulse control....they can think their way through anything but have a flaw within them that sabotages their emotional reserves of self control.

Others still....well, I could go on all night but others still can have problems even *understanding* the barest basics of what it means to be social or what human nature as behavior is about. The stuff most folks take for granted, the "unspoken language" whereby we sort of half-learn, half-memorize the informal rules that tell us what's "appropriate" and what isn't, some people just don't pick up correctly, and basically have to have it broken down and *told to them* as if it were a laundry list or a script.

Point is. Different people are born with different capacities for morality and sociality, and while we *can* drill a very basic and elementary sense of right and wrong into the overwhelming majority of humans, still, the fact remains that for a very few individuals, talking about "right" or "wrong" or "good" or "evil" is like talking about color to someone *born blind*. You're not going to get anywhere really.

So for those few people....I'd say they were born without the *ability* to develop a conscience. And that the reverse of that is, most people *are born* with the ability, or the potential, to develop a conscience, but yes, it has to be developed like anything else. Somebody has to help people put in the time and effort somewhere to grow this attribute, or else a person will wind up with a crippled or malformed social capacity for sure.

Hope this helps. Thanks for your time.