"Definitely" seems awfully strong. It seems to me that a pragmatic judgement gets you from A to B just as well, and that therefore calling it a moral judgement might very well be arbitrary. More on this to come...
It's not about preventing myself from feeling pain (though that's not a bad idea either); it's about knowing that it's wrong if someone inflicts it on me, and therefore it would be wrong for me to inflict it on another.
Ah, but now I've got to lay bare the assumptions inherent in this statement. Why, precisely, is it "wrong" for someone to inflict pain upon you? Why, precisely, is it "wrong" for you to inflict pain upon another person?
If it's "survival of the species", why should I care more about that than about simply doing right by my neighbor?
Assume for the sake of argument that I accept your notion of "doing right" for a moment. You don't have to care more about survival of the species than about doing right by your neighbor - if you do right by your neighbor, survival of the species follows as a consequence. It's not an either/or proposition ;)
That would rather depend on what you define to be points A and B, wouldn't it?
Why, precisely, is it "wrong" for someone to inflict pain upon you? Why, precisely, is it "wrong" for you to inflict pain upon another person?
As to the first question, I can no more objectively describe what makes it wrong than I can objectively describe pain in the first place. The question more or less answers itself, for anyone who understands what pain is. If someone does it to you, you know why it's wrong. And the answer to the second question is but a very quick extrapolation of the answer to the first.
You don't have to care more about survival of the species than about doing right by your neighbor - if you do right by your neighbor, survival of the species follows as a consequence.
Speculation, wishful thinking. It may be true in most cases. And sure, helping the species survive is of course one way of doing right by your neighbor. But not all things that promote optimal survival prospects for the species from a purely utilitarian perspective, would necessarily involve doing the right thing to people. Fascists wanted society to be arranged like the human body, with defective "cells" regularly eliminated. Maybe such a plan, if people were to accept it, truly would have made for a more durable society. But they weren't willing to accept it - and nor should they have, as you seemed willing to agree earlier.