Although behaviorists emphasize environment, they agree that biology does not influence the development of morals in children. Their basic assumptions are that the mind of a newborn child is a blank slate. All behaviors are determined by environmental factors, and the development of children is the result of those environmental variables. (Lickona, Raising Good Children).
All children are born on the path to moral development. A number of inborn responses cause them to act in an ethical way. Newborns cry when they hear others cry and show signs of pleasure at happy sounds such as cooing and laughter. Several studies (Damon, Scientific American) have been published showing that children everywhere start life with caring feelings toward those close to them and react to inhumane or unjust behavior. Differences in how these reactions are triggered appear later after the children have been exposed to a particular value system in their culture. Children learn through observation, imitation, and reward. Hartshorne and May studied how young children react when given the chance to cheat. The child's behavior was more influenced by whether they thought they would get caught and the punishment that would follow. It was not based on how much they knew about moral rules, the Ten Commandments or the Koran (Edmonds, Islam).
The most important figure in the environment of a newborn is the caregiver. In today's society, "caregiver" is defined in many ways as not all children are raised by a biological parent. Where does the caregiver learn their morals? The caregiver's morals were learned from their caregiver, and so on. These morals are passed on from one generation to the next. Morals are a learned behavior. If each one of the two hundred, eleven million professed atheists had a child, the next generation would have four hundred, twenty-two million people who would not learn morality from caregivers with morals based religion.
