The Dawn of Man

From an article recommended by KevinB:

Freud believed that education and establishing the dictatorship of reason would be the only solution to the cruel and immoral behavior that characterizes human history. Our best hope for the future, he proclaims, is that intellect the scientific spirit, reason may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. In a letter to Albert Einstein, who had written to Freud asking what could be done to protect mankind from war, Freud responds: The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason.

The article goes on to discuss the tragedies of the 20th century and the abominations of "reason" that swept the globe and did unspeakable evil.

I think we can safely say that reason itself is not the source of morality. (And this destroys the functionalist analysis of ethical game theory, where morality is chosen rationally instead of developing irrationally. But I adhere to evolutionary game theory, anyways).

(Speculation Ahead)

But we know it came from somewhere because we know it exists, and we know it exists because we can see the effects of its causal gravity all around us.

My hunch is that morality is in its first instance visual. Empathy, projection, whatever you want to call it, I think the human ability of extrapolation is the source of morality.

When a person sees another slaughtered, for instance, that visual experience is not isolated. The realtime data is filtered through that person's mental posture, and one of the thoughts that emerge is what it must be like to have that happen. This projection is built off of the watcher's prior experience of pain and anguish, and transmuted onto the other person's visible horror at what is happening to him.

In the book "Wider than the Sky", which is about consciousness, the author talks about levels of conscious development. The first level is simply receiving and acting on data without storing it, the next is storing and comparing in real time (reactionary), the third is storing and comparing reflectively (the genesis of the self).

If a small animal is walking through the jungle and hears a growl, and right after that growl a tiger appears, the next time the animal hears a growl it will not have to wait for the appearance of the tiger to react as if the tiger had already appeared. This is the reactionary level, where the memory cannot be accessed until the same circumstances that created the memory occur once more to unleash it. It is the most primitive level of learning, but you can see how it adds to survivability.

The ability to actively access memory in reflection, which is the higher consciousness of human beings, is the next level. After a certain period of development and use of this higher consciousness, a being's aggregate of memories creates the impression for him of being a 'sensation receiving unit' that extends linearly backwards, and this impression becomes the idea of the self. This is why it takes a child until 5 or 6 to realize that he is an interacting unit in a system of other interacting units.

This also allows for extrapolation, which is the basis of imagination and invention. When new information comes in, not only does it filter through old experiences, reflection can create new correlations that may or may not really exist. Likewise, the juxtaposition of a pattern from one experienced system to another, like in Hume's example of the gradation of color. If you experience one color's gradation, e.g. light to dark blue, you do not have to experience light to dark red to get an idea of it.

So, if you are watching someone getting slaughtered and no other emotions are predominant (like hate, which acts to dull your reflective capacity), your brain can analyze the situation and extrapolate that action onto yourself, which creates the emotional phenomenon of empathy. You cringe in these situations because you are mentally recreating that episode with yourself as the victim.

Enough of these emotional bonds and actions amongst like-minded individuals soon will be coordinated, and it is here we enter the Hobbesian realm of "flight from fear" leading to society. The visual experience of such episodes supplies you with something to be fearful of, and creates acceptance of novel arrangements. These arrangement are taught to the next generation by example, and society builds as life goes on. Society is built by education, and memory. Memory and the empathy it engenders is the genesis of the Golden Rule.

As an aside, this is as good an explanation as any why Autistic kids never discover C.S. Lewis's natural morality. Autism is a sensory integration disorder. Memory and memetic correlations are severely atrophied, which leaves more power for primitive activities like counting, but does not leave room for higher consciousness and reflection. Autistics do not have the brain efficiency of a normal person, where "mundane" information is not processed. Because of this, the Autistic person feels himself continuously in a new situation, room, environment, etc. If the shadow on the floor changes, he can feel like he's in a new room entirely because the information has changed, if but a little. In many ways he is purely reactionary. One of the things he loses by this is empathy, and morality.