Where Does Morality Come From, and Where Is It Going?

Kant's epitaph bears these words: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

The starry heavens make one feel one's own insignificance, while the moral law makes one feel a certain dignity. Placed side by side, these two forms of awe constitute an ancient question: What exactly is morality? Where does it come from? Is it some absolute command engraved in the human heart by the universe, or is it a set of survival tools shaped by evolutionary pressures?

This article aims to seriously walk through this path of inquiry, without presupposing answers, but merely trying to articulate the logic as clearly as possible.

I. The Selfish Gene and the Paradox of Morality

A common starting point is Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. The essence of genes is self-replication; all biological behaviors, on the surface, can ultimately be traced back to this underlying logic. Cooperation, prosocial behavior, and even the sense of morality are, within this framework, "strategies" evolved by genes to better perpetuate themselves.

This explanation covers a broad scope. Kin selection can explain why people sacrifice for family; reciprocal altruism can explain why strangers cooperate; group selection can explain why groups capable of stable cooperation outcompete groups rife with internal betrayal.

But this explanation has a boundary, beyond which it begins to patch things up.

Humans give up seats to strangers they will never see again, shed tears over photos of refugees they have never met in the news, and donate money under completely anonymous conditions with no possibility of return. Even more peculiar, humans not only do these things but also question afterward: Was my action truly good? If I helped him only because my genes made me feel good, does this goodness still have meaning?

An animal shaped by evolution with an instinct for cooperation does not need to reflect on this instinct. This questioning and scrutiny of one's own motives is superfluous, even detrimental, within the pure logic of natural selection. It makes people act slowly, causing them to fall into useless internal conflict.

Where does it come from, then?

II. The Chain: From Natural Criteria to Moral Judgment

To answer this question, we first need to build the chain.

Nature has a set of criteria—fitness, meaning the ability to survive in the environment and pass on genes. With this criterion, "normal" and "abnormal" gain meaning. The function of the heart is to pump blood; a congenital heart defect is a developmental abnormality, not because someone decreed it, but because the lack of pumping function means an inability to adapt to the environment, ultimately leading to elimination.

Does the sense of morality have a similar natural criterion?

Yes, and it is quite clear: the stability of group cooperation.

能够维持内部稳定协作的群体，在与其他群体的竞争中具有压倒性优势。自然压力由此催生了一套情绪调控机制——做了有害于群体的事会产生真实的生理不适（罪恶感、羞耻感），做了有利于群体的事会获得真实的情绪奖励（归属感、被认可的愉悦）。这套机制有其神经基础：镜像神经元、腹内侧前额叶、催产素系统，都是可测量的物质结构。

所以链条的前半段是清晰的：

自然准则（群体协作压力）→ 情绪调控机制（对违规的惩罚，对合作的奖励）→ 道德感

但链条到这里还没完。道德感只是一种情绪倾向，道德判断是另一件事。而人类的道德判断，显然超出了这套机制最初被校准的范围。

三、涌现：两套机制的意外交叉

这里需要引入另一条平行的进化线索。

人类在某个节点上发展出了抽象表征能力——大脑不再只处理眼前的真实刺激，而是能够处理符号、语言、想象出来的场景，并对它们产生与真实刺激几乎相同的情绪反应。这个能力由前额叶皮层支撑，它带来了延迟满足、因果建模、反事实推理等一系列功能，进化出来的原因是为了更好地规划、预测、协作。

关键在于这个能力有一个结构性特征：抽象化会自动抹去作用域。

当你把“痛苦是坏的”从具体经验里提炼为一个抽象规则，这个规则里没有写“仅限于我认识的人”。抽象的工作方式本来就是去掉具体情境，留下普遍形式。规则一旦被抽象化，它就自动变成无边界的。

所以情绪回路和抽象思维能力在某个交叉点上发生了一件谁都没有预料到的事：原本只被眼前真实痛苦触发的情绪回路，开始被大脑构建出来的抽象痛苦表征触发。你为远方陌生人哭泣，不是因为自然选择让你爱陌生人，而是因为你的大脑构建了一个足够真实的表征，绕过了那套原始回路的过滤机制。

这就是涌现。每一层机制都有自己的自然逻辑，没有任何一层是为了“产生道德外推”而存在的。但它们叠加在一起，出现了一个任何单层都无法预测的东西。湿度不在氢原子里，意识不在单个神经元里，道德对陌生人的扩展，不在情绪回路或前额叶的任何一个里。

完整的链条因此应该是：

自然准则 → 情绪调控机制 + 抽象思维能力 → 两套机制交叉叠加 → 道德感及其向陌生人、未来世代、整个物种的外推

这个外推不是被主动选择的，不是某种自然压力直接施压的结果，而是多层生理机制叠加之后涌现出来的副产品。

四、社会叙事：填充涌现结果的容器

But the question does not end here.

If moral sense comes from stable physiological mechanisms, why has the same human species produced such different moral judgments throughout history? Racism was once mainstream morality, slavery was once the natural order, and the property status of women was once unquestioned common sense. The mechanisms have not changed, yet the outputs are as different as clouds and mud.

This indicates there is another variable in the chain that has not been addressed: the social narrative system.

Physiological mechanisms provide the raw materials—emotional circuits, abstract extrapolation abilities, the instinct to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups. But what shape these raw materials ultimately take depends on the social container into which they are placed. Who is "us," who is "them," whose suffering is worthy of feeling, whose suffering can be ignored—these are not decided by the mechanisms themselves; culture, power structures, and historical narratives fill in the parameters for the mechanisms.

And the narrative system itself has its material basis.

Productive forces and production relations determine who needs whom. After the emergence of agriculture, large-scale cooperation, land property rights, and labor control became necessary, and the narrative system began to serve these needs. The caste system, the moral legitimization of slavery, and the propertization of women are all results of production relations seeking legitimacy at the narrative level.

At the same time, the relationship between the narrative system and power is not a one-way causality but a mutually constructing cycle. Power is not maintained solely by violence; it needs to be "spoken as right." The most effective control is not making people afraid, but making them feel that the current state is natural, correct, and proper—that is, cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense. Therefore, moral judgment is a product of power struggles, and power struggles themselves rely on moral judgment to sustain their operation.

Thus, the final complete version of the chain is:

Natural principles → Physiological mechanisms (emergence) → Primitive form of moral sense → Intervention of social narrative system (parameters set by production relations and power structures) → Moral judgment

V. Direction: Progress or Oscillation?

There is a common optimistic narrative: violence has continuously declined throughout history, the moral circle is expanding, and humanity is moving toward a better state.

This narrative has data support, but the data itself has serious measurement problems. It counts direct physical violence but does not count structural violence—deaths caused by colonial systems, financial exploitation, and climate displacement. These deaths are clean, bloodless, and not included in statistics. The other side of the "expansion" of the moral circle is that the benefits of the rules within the circle are highly concentrated and flow to specific groups. Formal moral progress sometimes serves as a more concealed fig leaf for substantive inequality.

There is an even more fundamental problem: Homo sapiens have existed for about 300,000 years, recorded history spans about 5,000 years, and modern human rights discourse is about 200 years old. On the time scale of Earth's life evolution, these are just a few samples. What we observe may not be an upward line but a local fluctuation; we happen to be standing at a relatively high point and call it progress.

The history of morality currently lacks a sufficiently long time window to confirm its direction. It may be a spiral, a fluctuation, or a shape we are not yet capable of discerning.

VI. The Remaining Questions

Having come this far, we can look back at Kant's statement.

He said the moral law filled him with awe because it could not be fully explained by nature. But after walking this path, we seem to have arrived at a different answer: the moral law can be explained by nature; it is an emergent product of layered physiological mechanisms, its content is filled by production relations and power structures, its judgments drift through history, and there is no external referee to tell us whether its extrapolation is correct or how far is reasonable.

This answer strips morality of its sanctity, but it does not thereby make morality unreal. The mechanisms have been found, but after finding them, one question becomes even more open:

Where should this extrapolation go?

Nature has no answer. The narrative system's answer is written by power and drifts with the times. The physiological mechanism's answer is "continue to emerge, without setting boundaries."

Perhaps this is the real trouble with morality—not where it comes from, but that after it arrives, no force prescribes where it should stop. That decision ultimately falls upon humans themselves. This is neither comforting nor despairing, just colder and more honest than Kant's answer.

End of full text. This article has been polished by Claude.