[edsheppa]

It's not hard to imagine how complex social skills such as morality can develop...

I don't think it's morality per se that is innate but rather more fundamental values and feelings. Rational analysis operates upon that to, e.g., combine innate senses of fairness and empathy into the Golden Rule. These invented rules are then ingrained as culture. The combined effect is what we call morality.

[UndauntedR]

I don't think it's morality per se that is innate but rather more fundamental values and feelings. Rational analysis operates upon that to, e.g., combine innate senses of fairness and empathy into the Golden Rule. These invented rules are then ingrained as culture. The combined effect is what we call morality.

I agree, but with one additional point. Beside having a definition of rational thought, actions that we would describe as moral (i.e. altruism and non-violence) exist in surprisingly simple animals. I think codes of conduct are more innate than we would like to think. The simple ones like inflicting pain/murder are easily innate as it's exhibited in almost every species (Yeah, it can break down between societies of the same species [i.e. lions kill young of other groups, termites fight for territory] but that happens in humans too - not terribly surprising it breaks at that scale). The more complex ones like stealing (The concept of possessions isn't very well defined in other social species anyway...) probably require more rational thought like you describe - empathy, fairness, weighing social consequences.