For starters, you don’t really answer the question. I take it we are to conclude from your reasoning that moral statements aren’t arbitrary. But you don’t make a very clear argument as to why this is so.

Although I agree with what you are (probably) trying to say, that there can be moral statements that can be deemed to be true or false, it’s not very clear how you reach this cunclusion.

Secondly, you state: “The basis of it all is empathy which has to be hard-wired into you as a motivation. There’s no reason to think you can be reasoned into it.”

Why does empathy have to be exclusively hardwired? As Keddaw rightly pointed out: a lot (maybe most) of our ‘empathy’ is a result of our upbringing in a certain environment. This nature vs. nurture debate is hardly a done deal, but I think we can safely say that both play a role in our moral upbringing.

So you can’t be reasoned into it, but you can be praised, rewarded, punished and condemned into (or out of) it.

As for killing the offspring of a new mate, there’s evidence that people are much more likely to mistreat (and kill) step-children than their own… which makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view although obviously when your partner is a thinking, feeling human being with moral values it’s kinda hard to get away with killing their babies.

All that’s a side point though. I think I get what you mean.

We did evolve from social animals AND we are social animals.

The vestigial instincts are the ones that I can’t name as such creatures don’t exist any more, but I imagine things like killing the offspring of a new mate if they’re not yours, taking advantage of a situation rather than being empathetic etc. would probably be from parts of the brain borne of a more selfish time. Not all of those instincts are with us, but some remnants of them and their ilk are.

Sorry, but sometimes I am less than obvious and have to define my position more clearly…

Anyway – great couple of posts, am looking forward to the next installment…

We evolved from social animals, but they evolved from non-social animals and we have some vestigial morality/survival instinct from them.
We grow up surrounded by parents and friends and take much of our early morality from them.
We grow up in a society that has norms (often historical) and punishes those that step outside of those and praises people who adhere giving us yet another level of morality.

The main problem here is that we have a whole host of moral systems within the brain, all competing to tell us what is right and only one can ever win in a given situation. And above all those we have our intellect trying to decide if it is moral if the ends justifies the means or should we have absolute moral rules…

Metaethics is not impossible, but it requires an agreement of the aim or purpose that is possibly not grounded in morality. In fact, the only system I can think of which would adapt to a cohesive and consistent form of morality would be a Pareto optimal one where no action can be performed if it decreases the well being of any individual. But even then you’re assuming humans are worth more than other animals, or that animal life is worth more than plant life, or that living matter is worth more than non-living matter.

I await your way to bring all these points together.

Incidentally, everyone can criticise Hitler from within their own moral spheres but they can’t criticise him from within his own (i.e. he wasn’t immoral in his own mind). But that’s fine as very few people are in that moral sphere and those that are tend to not spout too much about morality anyway.