just ask yourself if you might want to help people even if there were no morality
This is still the interesting bit for me as well. I think that on reflection, the answer would have to be ‘no, by definition’. Wanting to help people creates your morality, not vice versa. Your morality is created by your actions, it doesn’t define them. If there can be any form of objective judgment of an animal’s ethics, surely it can only be defined by what that animal did. Not what it thinks, not what it thinks it should have done, but what it did.
Hence, if you want to help people, that’s your morality. Otherwise the cart is coming before the horse.
just ask yourself if you might want to help people even if there were no morality
This is still the interesting bit for me as well. I think that on reflection, the answer would have to be ‘no, by definition’. Wanting to help people creates your morality, not vice versa. Your morality is created by your actions, it doesn’t define them. If there can be any form of objective judgment of an animal’s ethics, surely it can only be defined by what that animal did. Not what it thinks, not what it thinks it should have done, but what it did.
Hence, if you want to help people, that’s your morality. Otherwise the cart is coming before the horse.