Comment by sdenton4

No only the basics related to survival have evolved instincts. modern concepts like abortion did not have millions of years of natural selection to evolve instincts.

However it is universally reviled to kill babies or rape toddlers and slice their faces off for food. This is identical across all cultures. The basest morals are universal and so is disgust, the high level ideologies like abortion are just made up.

These high level ideologies are attempts to make sense of moral instincts that only existed to help us survive. For example abortion. It's the extension of your instincts to avoid killing. At what point does decapitating the head of a fetus to abort the birth become disgusting? The third trimester or before that? You're trying to rationalize your base moral instincts into a codification of law. It's almost pointless because these moral instincts weren't evolved to be logically cohesive anyway. They're just like feelings of hunger and pain.

Evolution never had to answer that question so it didn't give us any answers. But decapitating a 1 year old baby? Now that's universally reviled because it effected the survival of the human race. It's so reviled that I may even get voted down for using this as an example. It's the perfect example though, the revulsion is so much stronger than abortion that some people can sense that it's not a cultural thing but more of an inborn instinct.

The practical consequence of abortion and decapitating a 1 day year old baby are virtually identical though. But even someone who is against abortion will still sense a gigantic difference. That sense is an illusion, a biological instinct that bypasses your rational thought.

Go here for more information:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/91508-morality

https://www.joshua-greene.net/research/moral-cognition