Can Darwinism account for morality?

[FatAndFaithless]

Let's just be careful with our wording on this topic, because sometimes I feel that people overreach when discussing morality and evolution.

It's no doubt that the base drives and feelings we have (empathy, protection of family and friends, cooperation being desirable, etc) have emerged through our evolution as a social species.  But I sometimes encounter people who try to address any moral issue we have today from an evolutionary perspective, and I find their arguments pretty terrible.  Our moral and legal systems today have been designed (intelligently designed, one might say~) by us and our predecessors for the millenia that human societies have existed.  

Many times our intrinsic and natural instincts or feelings about a situation (bred by evolution in a social species) would be considered immoral if we were to act on those reactive feelings.  For example, I'm sure anyone here has been in a situation where they've been angry enough that they've desired to punch the asshat that's making you so angry (a natural reaction, animals fight all the damn time), but I'd also wager that most of us here would agree that reacting with violence towards speech is immoral.

Our moral and legal systems might draw from a common pool of natural evolved instincts or feelings, but in many situations we create systems in order to discourage some of those natural reactions (territorialism, tribalism, aggression, etc).

That's an excellent post, thank you.

I hope I didn't infer that everything constituting the moral system of any given society is derived from natural selection.  The human intellect is quite liberated from the confines of instinct, and this is what furnishes people with the ability to conjecture on the morality/immorality of things like making lewd remarks, which can't really be addressed from the perspective of evolution.

The most annoying thing is when creationists ask a fascile question like "If evolution and survival of the fittest is true, why should we help the needy/why shouldn't we kill people with disabilities/etc etc." They view Darwinism as some sort of proscriptive code, instead of simply the biological mechanisms through which we arrived at our current state of genetic diversity. You might not hear that line of argument much in the UK, but I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked "why be good, if we're all just animals and only the fittest should survive?", along with the attendent comparisons to nazi eugenics and the like.