An interesting problem...trying to test moral behaviour without interacting
That would actually be pretty easy to set up, using a neutral environment with no "actors" besides machines which dole out food or "attention" based on mere physical cues and not according to social context.
Ironically such tests of moral behavior would be labelled as immoral to most.
I think there may be fundamental problems with any such experiment (apart from the immorality).
Firstly, even mecahnical interaction to provide food and attention could end up simulating a social context. In fact, you'd have to provide some simulation of social context in order to provide the cues for learning.
Secondly, testing whether the child has a moral sense would be very difficult. Would it be possible to judge whether the child had a moral sense without seeing how it interacted with others?
Thirdly, the development of a moral sense may, like the development of language, require particular kinds of training during a particular window of development. If your experiment provides that training then it doesn't prove the point you're trying prove; if it doesn't, then your child will never develop a moral sense, and your point will appear to be disproven.
I would argue so. As long as one is constricting behavior with associated feelings of liking or disliking one's own actions, though there is no objective reason to feel one way or the other, then that would be morality.
For example a person on their own might start by cheating at card games like solitaire, then realize they don't like the lack of challenge, and so force themself to stick to the rules and ingrain that so much that "cheating" feels uncomfortable and something to regret, or even punish onesself for having done.
I may be wrong, but I would have thought that the notion of cheating oneself was rather sophisticated - isn't it dependent on first developing the notion of cheating others?
'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang