How do we know which came first, our humanity or our morality?

I read the passage twice before I realised you may have sneaked another presumption in the below passage: that morality is confined to the domain of human consideration. At the same time, it doesn't appear to be consistently treated in the following sentence: "Small primate groups operate with some form of socially functioning hierarchy..."

I would examine this closely, particularly exactly what you mean by 'morality', because then it might make more sense to understand how life, in a taxonomical sense, precedes (my definition of) morality.

I'll expand: it makes sense to me in that one cannot have morality without life, and that life has a broader definition that entirely contains morality...assuming that the concept of taxonomy and evolution is at least in a broad sense valid, I could say that insofar as there is berth for social interaction there is a berth for the notion of morality- but we consider things that don't necessarily have this to be living (e.g. bacteria, fungi etc.) That said, that we recognise fundamental similarities between the social structures of other animal species and our own through our observation of their behaviors, and also our own interactions, which would imply that we could quite possibly apply the term moral beings to them as well.

As said above, this leaves me more versatile and more able to make sense of things I observe with greater precision.

Speaking of which, my definition of morality is the judgement that is formed by and informs behaviors. I should have said that earlier, my bad.

Well yes, let's see if I can write something off the top of my head, make it clear and readable at the same!

...this is going to be long...

First, I do agree with your broad interpretation of "society" and "social interactions". The nuances when discussing animals in generals and human society is important; I'll come back to this later.

To answer your question directly, I guess that with the notion of 'society' comes 'morality', thus morality would technically precede homo sapiens. This isn't all that big a deal for the following reasons:

* When I think of society and morality, I do indeed think 'executive function and processing with relation between self and others'. As in this is a necessary (and sufficient) part of both, hence society necessarily entails morality. They kinda form at the same time and end up being mutually interdependent.

* These taxonomical labels and chronologies aren't exactly the most concrete thing in the world; they're defined by sufficient divergence in characteristics (this relates to the whole 'human' thing, but it's essentially more of a side note), and since evolution and adaptation is a continual process, there's obviously going to be an element of incompatability.

* I would reject that animals "do not possess any executive functioning, unlike humans". To claim this would be to say that animals are biological machines- from my previous post I find it difficult to say that and then reject the same claim for humans, and since I find it more useful to reject incompatiblist determinism for humans...you see where this is going?

* Hence I'd rather consider animals agents in their own right- it is then a matter of coming to understand the manner in which they go about their ways, not to mention interspecies interactions (including, or especially with humans). Obviously they are different from humans- on that note, it seems to me that what is uniquely human, I could loosely describe as metaphysical querying, supported by the degree of the formation of our language.

So from all the above, I get this: we can claim that the animals whose behaviors we can recognise share the same fundamental structure have a form of 'society' and 'morality'. Exactly how this manifests with them would be unique to them, just as the way we discuss society and morality as humans is unique to us. In this case, because of our empahsis on cognisation, the scope of morality has acheived a level of abstraction that we observe in cultural theatres.

But I would still say it stemmed from our 'organic capabilities', in a sense- again, it's difficult to avoid slipping between the interpretations of "we are different to other animals".

So...yeah, seeing as much of the evidence I've alluded to as support for the arguments I present are retrospective, the connection was probably made before we arrived on the scene, but it was only represented, articulated and debated after we arrived on the scene.

I have a few examples up my sleeve if need be, but this post is probably too long as it is.

Ooh, thanks for the heads-up. Will hunt it down.

In this regard...and sorry for derailing the thread y'all! In this regard, what I'm concerned with is propagating the understanding that what we've been doing until recently is directly comparing animal behaviors to our own without being aware of the context of human behaviors. For example the huge deal that people make of intelligence.

Anyway...we were originally talking about bases for moral codes or something, wasn't it?

If there wasn't one, we'd be rather savage.

Hm, really? I think between Garifu and I over the last page, we managed to put up a pretty strong case that this isn't necessarily true.

I'm no economist, but I find from what I've written, morality comes in handy in the following way: let's appreciate that whatever actions one does, it is by definition for their own motivation. What morality does is tells us whether we should feel good about something, or not good about something such that it becomes a factor in how much sense of reward we derive from performing an action or abstaining from it.

This works towards a balance of maximising benefit for self. However, this doesn't necessarily mean one should be self-centered (ethical egotism) as opposed to altruisticic, seeing as one can argue that doing things for benefiting others entails benefiting oneself either directly (from the feeling of moral right), or from encouraging others to support oneself.

IMO this is the fundamental mechanism behind determining what is "wrong"- in your example, Armed, it'd benefit you but comes at the expense of others, and will lead them to judge that way because it is an action that we wish to discourage as a whole, both as a result of cultural development and because we are living beings.