People often cite their moral intuitions as the foundation on which they build their moral values. This has always seemed odd to me, as throughout most of the biological and cultural evolution of these intuitions, the higher order moral values which people recognize today were not targets for optimization. Physical suffering, generally recognized as bad by modern humans [citation needed], was completely irrelevant over many millennia of biological evolution. The blind idiot god produced many such creatures fated to suffer by their very nature because it didn’t harm their odds of reproduction. The same has been true over much of the cultural evolution of humans — warring tribes did not win out through their benevolence towards all mankind. They did, however, develop benevolence towards their own tribes, and particularly so towards their own family. Such cooperation is clearly positive sum, and so cultural traditions that successfully institute it as a shared contract are highly memetic.
I believe that the phenomenon of moral intuitions are predicated on a similar foundation. A straightforward litmus test for this is to consider the correlation between moral worth assigned to entities, and the necessity of one’s cooperation with them. Within the tightest moral circle, one’s family is both assigned the highest moral value and expected to be the primary “team” that one is expected to fight for (Historically speaking, Western individualism has really bucked this trend). As you move outwards geographically within a country the expected contract of cooperation and thus moral valuation continually decreases. Ask someone to choose between donating to a charity in their hometown or one across the country, which will they choose? Extend this internationally and you see the same trend, where the continual expansion of our collective moral circle tracks with our need to cooperate with a wider range of countries as diplomatic and trade partners. I don’t believe that international relationships only function with a shared moral code, but rather that high trust systems are highly positive-sum, and shared moral intuitions are an effective way of bootstrapping into such systems.
All this is to say that some fundamental morality isn’t at the heart of our moral intuitions, they are a blanket draped over our social contracts to discourage defecting by pinning them to higher values. I am not claiming that these intuitions are fraudulent and should thus be ignored, I think they should remain and be respected, but not serve as the basis for one’s more fundamental moral values. It should also be said that these intuitions are a pragmatic heuristic. One makes many moral decisions and hardly has the time to analyze them all in sufficient depth, so having an alarm bell ring as a signal to look deeper is a useful tool, even if it only lines up with your ultimate values a fraction of the time.