The Moral Instinct (Steven Pinker, New York Times, 2008)

See: The Moral Instinct (Steven Pinker, New York Times, 2008)
I am betting that the moral sense (which is constantly being exploited in virtually every personal, social and political interaction) is fully explained by two factors:

• genetic structures that promote survival of through group cooperation in pairs, immediate family and extended family
  
• cultural memes that appropriate these genetic prejudices to generate commitment to a kaleidoscope of larger social groups from the sublime to the ridiculous – religions of all sorts, political parties of all sorts, groups self-defined by like views on a cluster of issues etc etc.

Rorty asserts “We have no pre-linguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell out in language. What is described as such a consciousness is simply a disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors... We try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat everything - our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance. (See Contingency Irony and Solidarity)

I would change the word “time and chance” to “physics”.....