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In a world ruled by survival of the fittest, from where does morality come?

Anyone?

Good question. I'll have to think about this one a bit more, but at an initial guess, I would say it is an outgrowth of the pack survival instinct and Maslow's hierarchy of need. Survival of the fittest doesn't mean surviving alone.

Most social animals have something's like what we'd call morality, empathy,  etc. Likely because social animals that had the tendency towards those behaviors tended to survive better.

Even the much maligned rat has  empathy for others. Behold:

http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/06/16/rat-empathy/ (http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/06/16/rat-empathy/)

If we consider kindness,  sympathy,  a desire to help anotber for no reward to be moral,  then even rats have it.  Cats certainly do,  has a cat ever brought you a dead mouse or bird?  If so he was sharing food with you. An old friend of mine had cats who did this when he was il and bedridden.

Even a wolf pack cares for the weaker members, in what may be a form of moral behavior.

(https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/aBYKZDN_700b_v1.jpg)

Agreed, a lot of what we call morality is likely empathy: the intellectual and emotional ability to step outside oneself and see the world as others see it.

Dark Alex is also correct that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean being a backstabbing bastard, because such folk are more likely to make enemies and either be killed, shunned, or fail to find a mate. The fittest are the most likable. Dogs are more numerous than their cousins the wolves because they learned to suck-up to humans rather than try to directly compete with them for prey.

Also, natural selection operates at the level of the gene, not the individual. So being self-sacrificing towards your close family is a better way to spread your genes in the long term than being totally selfish.

But I suppose the question of where each individual moral principal comes from would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Morals are generally proposed and promulgated by the social group for the (perceived) good of that group.

Yes,  group survival can promote a sense of morality and,  unfortunately, also it's  opposite. A dedication to family, then to a "tribe",  then a state and even towards a "race" can promote a sense of moral behavior towards your collective,  but it can also inspire a sense of hostility towards "others" leading an urge and "justification" to kill them simply because they could possibly be a threat or even a competitor to your collective for food, land,  etc.

The human race needs an existential menace to it from outside to promote a sense of inclusion of the entire species and not jus a tribe,  state,  race,  etc.

As to the first line here,  Freud pretty well defined the human psyche as consisting of a trinity: the ego (sense of self),  the super ego (the ability to recognize the existence of others and relate to them) and the Id (pretty well described in "forbidden planet",  also in biological terms the hypothalamus,  the "dinosaur brain" at the base of the human brain.)

There are peolle who seem to mostly or entirely lack the super ego,  possibly thru a genetic issue or terrible upbringing (?)  and the accepted professional terms for them are sociopaths and psychopaths. (There are a lot of other terms but the board's filter blocks most of them.)

As to the second line of Rev's comment,  a completely selfish backstabbing person may be a better survivor in many cases than a person with empathy,  but in a social setting such people  may suffer handicaps in doing well as the collective tends to frown in such behavior and develop consequences for it.  As Commander Adams put it in forbidden planet "Morbius,  we're all part monster in our sub consciousness!  So we have laws and religion! "

A real problem arises when such peolle are intelligent enough to circumvent such consequences as the collective imposes on  selfish individuals,  and charasimatic enough to pass themselves off as acceptable.

I don't know. I know what it is, I try to have standards.
Basic right and wrong, I reckon.

Thank you, guys.

If you think my posts in this thread were  positive and praiseworthy i remind you the applaud button is just to the left of the boo button...

I am old school:   I think mankind's moral sense is a bequest of our Creator.

It's  close to christmas which I celebrate in a secular way,  so i'll pass on this.

Society works best when everyone co-operates and work towards common goals (the communists got that much right). When too many people get too greedy then things fall over and collapse (see the financial crash of 10 years ago). We are, in the best case scenario a pack working towards our communal survival. We do need wealth creators (and I think its fair that they get a higher share of the rewards. If you don't agree, then try having a look at those countries out there where they have gotten rid of the wealth creators. These countries do not do well. I'd argue that the only thing that has kept the regime in Cuba is the existence of a unifying external threat (the USA in this case. Had the states more or less ignored Fidel and not bothered with sanctions I think the communist party there would have been brought down by internal factors within the country).

And bugger, I am out of time to write and need to leave for work.

One major problem with your post is that when harming society, peolle,  the environment,  etc becomes profitable the wealth creators will cause harm to most of the world to make more profit.

Actually it isn't a problem with my post. That is one of the things I am talking about when I mentioned that the systems falls down when people get too greedy.

One thing to remember, it isn't just the wealth creators that cause the kind of damage you are talking about. It goes all the way down the chain, everyone who knows what is going on and does nothing to stop it, right down to the ordinary people who just keep their heads down and do their job, and even people who know various companies are doing wrong, but still continue to buy the goods and feed the profit margins of these self same businesses. Its easy and convenient to blame the people at the top, and just ignore our own culpability in these things, but if we didn't make it profitable for companies to operate in this manner then they would change their policies. Unless you are boycotting such companies, then you share the blame for how they operate anytime you buy something they make. It is entirely possible to go and live off grid and avoid contributing to such things and I know quite a few people who do. In fact we have an village nearby where they all live this way.

Another factor to consider is that it isn't always the people at the top of a company who are operating in unscrupulous ways. The CEO of a business can quite easily believe that he is running an ethical model, complying with environmental regulations, looking after his employees. You go several steps down the ladder though and find that a middle man is cutting corners to make his section more profitable. Ever seen any of the TV shows where bosses go spend a week working on the shop floor of their businesses? It is often quite an eye opener for these people when they find out their companies are not being ran the way they thought. While sociopath's are more common at the top of businesses and do operate in such fashions, they still make up a very small percentage of business leaders.

The best analogy I can give for how this works with the human race is imagine a company structure is like a rope with a bunch of monkeys climbing it. The monkey at the top looks down and all he see's is the faces of monkeys below him. The monkeys at the bottom look up and all they see is a load of arseholes.

I didn't .