Humans have two basic survival strategies. The commonest survival strategy in nature is one of blind, mindless, endless competition referred to once as "red of tooth and claw". Strategically, it might be described as "winning is the only thing" or "might makes right". A less common one is cooperative social behavior where strategy involves survival as part of a group. Nature tends to be very selfish and exceptions are unusual. These two strategies are reflected in both moral instincts and moral systems.
About the time of Lucy (Australopithecus, say 3 million years ago), when humans started walking upright to enter the hunter-gatherer-scavenger ecology, they were poorly adapted to their new ecology. The big cats loved eating them. They were much like us, but small brained. To survive, they needed to develop better social skills of communication and cooperation. That is shown by the very rapid brain evolution that followed. They had more potential to survive by getting along and working together. It was necessary and drove human evolution. The usual blind competition and violence of nature in a tribe would endanger the whole tribe. Evolution proceeded this way until about 70,000 years ago, there was something of an evolutionary event... partly it could be said that the parietal lobe evolved or perhaps it could be said that the brain re-organized. It made humans much more efficient so that they were then dominant in the ecology. Art, tools, funerals, social customs and other behaviors changed. We started killing all those pesky cats and everything else. Violence, the most common evolutionary competitive behavior, again became a useful strategy because we were efficient enough as a species that it no longer endangered us as a tribe. There was competition within the tribe and between tribes, though competition within the tribe was reduced. No other species competed with us and many species went extinct because of human activity. We grew and spread out very successfully. Farming and culture developed as well, leading to cities and multi-tribal civilizations. In the West, this type of violent "competitive behavior" sort of peaked with Rome. The violence was so bad that various philosophies and religions arose to try to deal with it or promote peace, such as Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity. So here we are now, with instincts for both cooperation and violence. We can see it every day. The future, human survival, will be decided by which instinct we choose to follow.
Take a moment here to find both of those instincts within yourself. It should not be hard. Yes, most of the time you are a very nice person, but you are not human if you do not know about your potentials for much less social behavior. You may know just how nasty your instincts can be if you are threatened. Both instincts are very trainable and you probably have the potential to be trained as a warrior if you were raised in a warrior society. You can also be trained to be quite civil in a civil society. If you did not have both of those instincts, your ancestors would never have survived. In general, herding tribes had more potential for aggression than farming tribes. Herding developed wealth worth raiding. Farming was a competition with an impersonal nature.
