Joshua Greene

When you have food, who do you have to share it with?

Is it no one?

Is it just your immediate family?

Is it everyone in the village, right?

So it's more like language in a sense.

Like, is language innate or not?

Well, no one comes out of the womb speaking Mandarin Chinese in the way that a gazelle might come out of the womb and be able to walk pretty soon, right?

You have to be exposed to Mandarin in order to learn it.

But you can speak Mandarin to a chimp all day long and they're not going to learn it, right?

So what we have is an innate capacity to acquire...

But you don't just acquire morality like it's one thing.

You acquire different flavors, different versions of it in the same way that humans have genetic adaptations that enable us to acquire language.

But language is not innate in the sense that we pop out talking.

We have to be exposed to it.

So it's a genetic predisposition to learn.

Right.

This has been a hot topic for a while.

Okay.

And there have been different versions of this.

People first went to trolleyology when they started thinking about self-driving cars.