I appreciate this take a lot! I actually have an episode with Patricia Churchland exploring this exact topic! I think she focuses to much on caring and altruism at the expense of the kinds of issues that you mentioned. But still very relevant.

https://on-humans.podcastpage.io/episode/1-origins-of-our-warm-blooded-morality-patricia-churchland

Also, do you know of the work of Oliver Scott Curry? his work is very relevant to your take. For him, morality is all about cooperation (non-zero-sum games). I would press against this extreme, too, and say that care and altruistic concern for others plays a role, too. But anyway, both are interesting scholars.

The best scholar who roots the evolution of morality to both care and sympathy (altruism), as well as mutualism and interdependence (cooperation), is Michael Tomasello. The Natural History of Human Morality is a masterpiece!

> Behaviours like a preference for harm reduction, preference for fairness, preference for autonomy, preference for established hierarchies, and a preference for loyalty can be seen in the non human animal kingdom. Furthermore, every human culture I'm aware of assigns a moral weight to sacred objects or actions.

Jonathan Haidt’s social psych research goes into this topic extensively. He spent the first half of his career doing giant surveys across cultures all over the world to identify the kinds of situations humans universally attach moral significance to, though the specifics of each will be modulated by local cultural norms. His list is more or less the same as yours, and he calls it “Moral Foundations Theory.” The most fascinating part to me is that while humans generally all respond somewhat to each of the foundations, the degree to which we attach significance to each one is highly correlated with how strongly we align broadly towards the liberal-left-progressive vs conservative-hierarchical-traditional political parties, religions, and lifestyles of the cultural environments we each inhabit.

I used to readily recommend his book on it “The Righteous Mind,” but it was written in the pre-Trump era, so it’s observations of how these foundations map onto political identities and how that could help us “all just get along” can come off as pretty naive and utopian now. The theory itself still appears to be largely valid, and has given me some very helpful insights in understanding the beliefs of certain kinds of people I don’t often see eye to eye with. So I’d say the book is still worth reading if you are capable of contextualizing some of the political commentary with its time.

He’s not an evolutionary biologist and generally steers clear of specifically diving into statements about that side of it, other than to point to the standard materialist interpretation of all behavior ie: something this universally observed must be at least in part a product of natural selection, with the relevant genetic correlates. It’s also important to note that this would not require any sort of “group level selection” theory to explain, individual- or gene-level explanations have no problem with it either.

Yup, you can be even more confident because Genetic predisposition to morality definitely predates homo sapiens.

Homo habilis, homo erectus, all the way back to ardipiths were social creatures, surely with many moral tendencies we have today.Many other animals have these morals as well. Even bees will sacrifice themselves to protect the colony(something most see as the most moral act there can be). Monkeys have a complex understanding of fairness and even sharing and empathy. The list could go on forever.

A lot of people misunderstand things like 'how did we develop the morals like our willingness to harm ourselves for others, if evolution only passes on traits beneficial to that organism'. If evolution is inherently selfish, how do we have unselfish morals. Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene can help many get over many misunderstanding of how morals developed and evolution works.

We shouldn't see evolution from just organism to organism, but we also need to think from a gene centered view. Once you understand that, its easy to see why these moral traits develop since they better the population and gene pool as a whole.

To anyone with a decent understanding of evolution it is glaringly obvious how our morals have developed, and also in many aspects why they have not.

This reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation

Preference for harm reduction? Harm is in practice defined in the eye of the beholder so it's not useful to talk about it as universal. On top of that once you add context and scrutinize it - it doesn't even hold water. Nobody will prefer living under a bell shielded as much as possible from any "harm" because then they would be the weakest. Suddenly there are obvious conditionals to this "preference for harm reduction." My point is the phrase is too vague and relative to be useful anchor of explanation unless contextualized with specific content and boundaries. Taleb's concept of antifragility comes to mind why this doesn't hold much weight without additional conditionals.

Why I seem pedantic or even petty about these distinctions? Because we could have seen in last decade term "harm" being used and abused for all sorts of ideologies to bully in changes into societies that otherwise people would never democratically agree upon under the pretense this is something universally good, almost like holy good - dogmatic and not to be questioned. And that's not good...