Babies v. Culture?

I was reading this article from a few weeks ago in The-The New York Times on the moral lives of babies; I recommend you do the same immediately if you have any curiosity about human nature.

The conclusions reported here make plenty of intuitive sense, evolutionarily speaking.  Of course baby brains aren't blank slates, because they can't learn or perceive specific things without the pre-wired ability to do so.  And of course we have an innate, evolutionarily derived capacity for empathy, even if it's primitive and in-group-focused, because we are social animals that survive best in groups.  Still, the relative sophistication of babies' understanding of social interactions, of not only good/bad but also just/unjust, is pretty darned neat.

But where it gets really interesting (and where I have a thought to add below) is page 6-7, discussing the implications for "higher" morality and society, and whether higher morality must have a divine source:

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify your actions, and you say, “Because I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire. But explanations like “It was my turn” or “It’s my fair share” are potentially moral, because they imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same.  

...The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book The Selfish Gene, “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” 

...It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

Well said, but I would go even further.  I don't think that higher morality is at war with our primitive moral sense.  I think it's a logical extension of it.  We wouldn't have the basis for culture in the first place without our innate ability to be fair and play well with others.  Yes yes, wars and genocides and etc., but through it all, our definition of "others" has shifted and expanded as our world has.  We have mapped our micro awareness that people should be nice onto our macro awareness that the world is full of people just like us.  And of course this predates globalization; the article notes the impartiality found in Confucius and early Christianity and on and on.  Humanity had already grown up quite a bit by then, and continues to grow, but nothing grows without seeds.  Of course we have conflicting impulses such as self-interest that get in the way of our highest morality.  But the one is no more innate than the other.  We're not at war with our baser selves; if anything, our baser selves are at war with themselves.