morality is subjective and people don't have free will

[Angrboda]

Two points.

First, regarding free will.  The fact that our choice isn't free does not mean that others can have no influence on the determinants of choice.  If you reach for that last cookie and there is nothing preventing you, you will likely succeed.  You will choose that cookie.  If your mother tells you that if you take the last cookie, you will be grounded, her telling you that alters the conditions of your decision.  Getting angry at people, protesting, threats, the law, and many other human interactions alter the grounds of decision making.  To argue that because their will is not free that we shouldn't intervene is to ignore the ways in which we can shape the grounds of their decisions, and ultimately, their outcome.

Second, regarding morals.  That our moral sense is not anchored by objective moral values does not mean that our moral inclinations are without foundation.  Our feelings give us feedback on the world just as surely as our eyes and ears do.  A person who does not feel pain will likely die.  The body has a wisdom the reasoning mind lacks.  Johnathan Haidt postulates that our moral reasoning has five dimensions, or bases.  1) harm, 2) fairness, 3) authority, 4) loyalty/ingroup allegiance, and 5) purity or sacredness.   These five bases all matter objectively in the working out of functioning of a social group or species.  To suggest that morals being relative means they are just arbitrary is to ignore their foundation in our functioning as a society.  Those who care not for harming others will be detrimental to the functioning of the social group.  Those who disregard fairness, likewise.  Morality is a brain shortcut for caring for these values, which ultimately is caring about the well being of the group.  An individual on their own can decide not to care about the well being of the group, but that choice is not without consequences for our own.  We are evolved to care about our overall well-being as a group, and these 5 bases are merely the mechanism by which we implement that bias.  We are biased to be pro-survival, and likewise we are biased in favor of actions that preserve these properties.  Acting otherwise is an attack upon the group, and such attacks are not ignored by the group.  If you were the caretaker of a group, would you tolerate harm, unfairness, disobedience, disloyalty and defamation?  Do you really need anything more than the combined interest of the group to justify your actions?  Humans are a social species.  Our moral emotions are an artifact of that.  That doesn't mean they're arbitrary or meaningless.



I'm not saying I've got all the pieces right.  But we are evolved to have and act on emotions.  Our moral emotions have been shaped by the evolution of the group.  It is no less logical to act on these emotions than it is to tend to the pain in your foot.  Our emotions guide our survival.  We have evolved to the point where we can imagine that the group doesn't matter to us.  To imagine that we as individuals don't matter.  But our feelings betray us, in morals, and in life.

Even monkeys can evolve group protective emotions.