John Wilkes Booth

I don't disagree about morality's evolutionary origins, but like Richard Dawkins I believe that a society which based its morality strictly on evolutionary concerns would be a pretty nasty place to live. So that said: yes, we have built on our natural empathy towards kin and out of this has come much of our modern morality. Is this not a good thing? I'd personally rather live in a world where people have compassion for each other regardless of what their genes stand to gain from it.

So expanding on this, I think that our morality has evolved a fundamental value for human life through cultural evolution building on top of biological evolution. In essence, we behave as if human life is sacred. I think that fundamentally, this applies to members of our cooperative society and non-members alike. It also applies, for many people, to unborn humans. It only really ceases to apply to them when you rationalize their humanity away.

The other way around this dilemma is to drop the idea of valuing human life altogether and take a more pragmatic approach like valuing human lives that benefit you, or wishing to reduce suffering in general, etc. The only problem I see with these approaches is that they can't actually account for how we really behave. That was why I was giving you scenarios to show the shortcomings of that logic. Not to say "this moral theory isn't perfect" but to say "that isn't why we actually behave the way we do."

Now, maybe the valuing of human life in general is also not a perfect moral principle, but it is in my opinion much closer to the mark than any of the alternatives I've seen. Functionally, we behave as if human life were something to value. It's wrong to kill that unknown hobo, even painlessly, because it's a waste of human life. It's worse when a pregnant woman gets killed, regardless of whether there's anyone in the world who cared about her or her baby, because we do instinctively recognize her bloated stomach as an additional human life that was wasted.

That's basically where I stand. I get the feeling we won't see eye to eye completely, but I think I do understand where you're coming from. At the end of the day, despite our conversation, I do prefer that people have the option to control procreation. It's just that stance comes with a certain level of cognitive dissonance for me which I haven't been able to resolve.