(March 6, 2013 at 8:37 am)Esquilax Wrote: Let me help you with that. Humans are social animals, I'm sure you could agree with that. We form groups in order to survive, family units to help each other, civilizations to keep out nature and external dangers. This, of course, extends back into the past, where co-operation was forged via necessity for survival. Anti-social behavior, like violence against the group and so on, would lead to either ejection from the group- even today, we remove troublemakers from society- or retaliation. Either way, anti-social proto humans would hardly be expected to survive long on their own, and certainly not to breed. In this way, empathetic and co-operative behaviors became genetically favorable, whereas violent and negative behaviors become less so.
And hence, we have the formation of morality, stemming from the health of the group. There's an explanation for everything, assuming you're willing to actually look.
What you have explained here is the evolution of empathy or the altruistic instinct. Other animals have the same instincts as well and yet we do not hold them to any standard of moral behavior thereby suggesting that there is more to morality than following your empathetic instincts. Especially given the fact that those are not the only instincts to develop over the course of human evolution, you still haven't justified choosing those over others as a basis for morality. This is not a sufficient basis for secular ethics.
