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After our discussion, I found myself confused as to a definition of morality. I guess it's a sense of "right and wrong"or "good and bad" but those words in of themselves are not easily defined. Simply because morality is defined by so many subjective words, I don't believe we could ever come up with some universal moral principle. The closest thing I can think of that would hit on this "baseline" possibility would be to think about evolution and what traits would be beneficial, but even for these - helping other members of your species, etc - there are quite a few exceptions. I think that if there was some baseline "genetic" morality, it's been taken over by our ability to have rich social interactions. This isn't to say we are amoral, but that the social component has a much greater impact on moral development in humans. When I think of primates, I think more of those baseline traits because they are necessary.

I think there’s a lot of moral diversity, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that maybe it’s a good thing. Just as we talked about earlier with neural diversity, maybe there’s some advantage to having differing views. I’m not talking about extremes here (persecution, murder) and I suppose you could argue that moral diversity inevitably leads to some forms of persecution, but I think there are also instances in which this could have a positive effect. I’m struggling to come up with an example, but I’ll keep thinking about it and post later…

I also find it really interesting how morality is formed. Again, we talked about genes and the social environment, and I’m going to have to lean heavily toward the social aspect of this as well. There may very well be some genetic “predisposition” towards radical moral values, but just as in the “nature/nurture’ debates in education and other issues, I think the environment is the key factor.

Something else I was thinking about when we were talking about animal morality, and this sounds silly, is pets and their owners. I’ve definitely heard stories of dogs going for help if their owner is injured, dragging them out of a fire, etc… and when I think about it, there are a lot of things I’d do for my pets that I wouldn’t bother with for other people I don’t know. The idea that morality can cross species is a fascinating.