but there are rationalistic explanations for morality, and
focusing on supernatural explanations in the form of universals is
missing out on an opportunity to study something in detail.
when you're dealing with questions of biology, and the key point to get across is that it is
a question of biology, the kinds of laws you see in physics are usually
not applicable - because we're experiencing things at the micro level.
you zoom out enough, you'll see those laws start to work. but that
doesn't mean that what we're observing is universally "true" in some
sense. it just means that things begin to demonstrate an order when you
view them from a far enough distance of abstraction. which is basically a
tautology, and doesn't imply anything of any value.
so,
when you're looking at the moral systems of individual cultures this
universalizing approach is completely backwards. those universals are
just aggregate data. rather, each culture is going to develop an
entirely individualized set of moral codes and ethics that apply
uniquely to their environments. in other words, it's a question of
evolutionary biology.
so, a culture with more scarce or
less developed resources might have a tendency towards competition,
whereas a culture with more developed resources might have a tendency
towards a more social distribution. these things can get crossed when
cultural values change slower than the technology does, which is
essentially the situation we're in right now. when you look at specific
examples of the way that settled people constructed moral systems vs.
the way that nomadic peoples did, you see these kinds of differences
come out starkly.
i just remember getting into this
debate with profs into law or philosophy, and feeling like i was talking
to somebody stuck on the other side of an epiphany that should really
be old news by now. our morals don't come from a higher being. there's
nothing universal about the way they operate. they don't exist in some
cloud somewhere; they can't be revealed through mathematics, logic or
empirical discovery. rather, they're attempts to ensure our own survival
(some failed) that can be understood relatively well when looked at in
an evolutionary perspective. nor are they entirely unique to humans in
anything but their reflective complexity.