I missed this the first time around, but around 6:30am this thread took off on a troublesome tangent because of it. (Maybe that's why I woke up at 6:30, thinking maybe I should stay up & start my day early. My nightowl nature made me go back to sleep instead!)
I can see your point - to a point - about morality being a group phenomenon. However, I think it's very very easy to take that concept too far. (I think JediGirl has fallen into that trap.)
Two problems in particular I see. 1) I think that for humans, the reproductive urge is very indirect, and less important a foundation of morality than you seem to think. If it were, then the more prosperous societies would have at least as high a birthrate as struggling peasant societies. But they don't. Young adults in prosperous societies may have more ability to indulge our sex drives than youth who have to work the fields from sunup to sundown, for instance, but we've also developed moral codes and technologies that prevent such indulgence from creating more babies. And every prosperous society seems to use them. (Note: Even Europe, with its welfare states that subsidize out of wedlock births, has a lower-than-replenishment birthrate.)
2) Assuming that morality is based on passing on our genes strikes me as awfully collectivist, and collectivism is squarely at odds with our nature as rational beings with free will. Communism of any form may be the best "strategy" for ants, to take AndrewC's example, precisely because ants' brains have, what, a couple dozen neurons? Free will is something that only people with a sufficient capacity for thought can sustain.
You can look at morality as placing the long-term needs of the group over the short-term desires of the individual.
Reading that passage again, I think that's your biggest mistake. I look at morality as placing the individual's long-term interests over the individual's short-term interests. I agree that a person's long term interests tend to be maximized by their cooperation within the context of a particular kind of society (but not just any society!), but the society is secondary to the fundamental goal: The individual's long-term interests.
IMO this avoids the trap of thinking that morals are determined by which group one is in: Society is merely a tool we use to sustain our long-term values.
p.s. Ayn Rand would be much less charitable with you... :-)
You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
- Ayn Rand (via John Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged)
Upon reflection, this definition actually does work better than the one I posted before. Excuse me while I shift my paradigm...
If, however, evolution works only through the passing-on of genes, then from an evolutionary standpoint lower-than-replacement societies are an evolutionary dead end.
. I look at morality as placing the individual's long-term interests over the individual's short-term interests.
But in the "long" term (which isn't very long on a geological scale) all individuals die. Which is to say, long-term individual needs have no lasting meaning. Here again if we are to grant the truth of evolution, the only long-term "need" for me as an individual is that my genes are passed on and protected in future generations. I cannot protect my progeny after I die -- only the group, which exists after I'm gone, can do that. Note that evolution is not exactly silent on the proper means for such protection; for example, the first thing a new Silverback gorilla tries to do is kill the former leader's offspring so that they cannot compete with his own offspring.
p.s. Ayn Rand would be much less charitable with you... :-)
Which is quite all right, considering that many of us are rather uncharitable toward Ayn, whose objectivist philosophy cannot withstand contact with the theory of evolution.
9/11 Firemen?
The above is a good example of why Objectivism is a totally bankrupt theory. Morality can never equal selfishness. Humans need other humans as much as they need food and shelter. Selfishness can therefore not be a viable method of structuring a society or man's behavior. What about a person's moral obligations towards one's children? Towards one's parents? Towards one's spouse? What about the moral obligation of protecting the weak? Objectivism is totally immoral.