Let's start at the beginning: What is morality, where does it come from? The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I've seen, which clarifies so many things for me, is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. 'Built-in' doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches: What sorts of things do people talk about across disciplines that you find across cultures and even species? We found five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.