Does morality exist in some ultimate, cosmic sense? Hard no.

Does it follow that morality is meaningless? Also no.

Morality isn’t a set of laws etched into the stone tablets of the universe. It’s an evolved feature of social brains. To parrot Jonathan Haidt, we humans share deep moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, autonomy. Those undercurrents may get obscured by the glare of how cultures remix them in wildly different ways. However, make no mistake, they’re always there.

Those instincts have neural correlates. Moral behavior is wired into our pleasure circuitry. We can see their precursors in other social animals. A set of phenomena common across evolutionarily remote species with similar mechanisms had to enhance evolutionary fitness. Nature wouldn’t keep something that expensive around if it wasn’t doing work. In a species like ours, survival depended on pro-sociality. Morality is merely what that pro-sociality feels like from the inside.

So no, it’s not cosmic. But it’s not arbitrary either. It’s real in the same way pain, languages, and economies are real: the emergent features of certain kinds of systems. In this case, it is a system that interdependently navigates the world with other systems like it.

Now here’s where the pants get a little tight in the proverbial crotch: our stakes have scaled massively. For most of our history, morality operated at the scale of tribes. Then, 10-15kya villages. Then city-states about 5-6kya. Over time, Peter Singer’s “moral circle” had to widen. The scary thing to me is that today we’re running that same Pleistocene moral hardware on a planetary operating system: Global markets. Climactic upheavals. Nuclear weapons. Cooperation is no longer just advantageous. It’s existential at a species level. We evolved to get along well enough to survive. Now we have to learn to get along well enough not to kill ourselves (and the rest of the planet with us).