Joshua Greene

But if you drop somebody through a trapdoor with a switch, and people kind of laugh, right?

And that is a normative philosophical laugh.

What you're laughing at is you're thinking, that doesn't make a lot of sense, right?

And the way I sometimes put it is, if someone called you from a footbridge and was like,

Allie, there's a train and it's coming.

There are five people and I might be able to save them.

Should I do it?

I'd have to kill someone.

And then you wouldn't say, well, that depends.

Would you have to push this person with your hands or could you do it more indirectly?

Like that shouldn't matter.

Yeah.

So that's a kind of bug.

And likewise, when it comes to something that's maybe easier to defend, like, you know,

caring about the people who are immediately in front of us, like the child who's drowning in front of us, or even more so people with whom we have a personal relationship,

We can understand that in more evolutionary terms.

We evolved to be cooperative creatures.

The group that is willing to pull its fellow tribe mates out of the raging river, that group's going to survive much better.

Our moral, emotional dispositions are designed for this group teamwork, but they're not designed to save the lives of strangers on the other side of the world.

It wasn't even possible for most of human history.