Captain Adverse said:
Because other primates, to the best of out current knowledge and experience, do not have sufficient cognitive capability to reason at that level of complexity nor communicate the lessons learned down through the generations.
OK...I'm not sure I agree, but so what? This doesn't do anything to answer the question at all. Suppose what you've said is correct. This doesn't mean that human beings cannot be born with some innate moral capacity or foundation. Just to drive the point home, it is possible to take what you say as true, but also hold that human beings have an innate moral code or foundation. I can consistently believe that other primates lack even the basic capacity for moral reasoning, because they lack sufficient cognitive capacity to reason at the requisite level of complexity and to communicate the lessons learned through the generations, but also that human beings do have those capacities and are born with an innate moral code or foundation.
Captain Adverse said:
Morals are a development of high-level social cooperation and generational communication.
Again, this begs the question. If you assume this is what morals are, then they cannot be innate. But you're assuming the conclusion you wish to draw, at least to some extent, before you start arguing. You don't get to help yourself to this proposition, at least in this way. If you have independent reasons for arguing that this is
all that morals are, that wouldn't be begging the question, so feel free to state those.
Captain Adverse said:
Our early human ancestors probably didn't have much more use for morals than our ape cousins did, unless one counts "I'm strongest, I get everything and you all fight over the leftovers" as an early development of moral code.
Well, not even those ape cousins work on such a code. But the best evidence we have of primitive human societies suggests they had a well-developed moral code.
Captain Adverse said:
Over time this simple process was replaced with more complex ways of interacting, verbal communication;
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a chronology of human development or something, but human beings have always had verbal communication of some kind. Chimpanzees and other primates have verbal communication, and all the evidence we have of human beings indicates there was never a hiatus of human vocal interaction.
Captain Adverse said:
and this would aid moral developments even further after encountering other groups and exchanging information. Moral conduct, i.e. how to deal wth each other and how to deal with such groups, comes from retained experiences. We, unlike other apes, are able to pass this down generationally through complex methods of communication; "Songs" or stories.
Well, just to be clear: I don't think human beings are born with a bunch of propositions in their minds such as "murder is wrong, except in circumstances c1...c115" or "theft is only acceptable in cases of extreme desperation." But we don't employ such propositions even when navigating the normal exigencies of life. If I'm confronted with a novel situation that has some moral import, I don't find my way through it by reasoning about it. What happens instead is that I intuit what the proper way to act is, and I either do that, or not. I would agree that upon reflection, I might decide I should have acted differently. But the intuitions are still there, and they remain more or less primary.
Captain Adverse said:
The only things we get at birth that help this process are the abilities to learn and communicate. We are a tabula rasa with the qualities of a sponge, and we learn our moral codes from our parents and as we grow within our social environment.
I think Locke's psychology has been refuted pretty thoroughly. His theory of knowledge doesn't work, as both Liebniz and Hume were able to show. I don't know if you're aware, but this (i.e. Locke's) position is what you seem to be taking here. Perhaps you could state your position a little more clearly, and if it is your intent to revive Locke's psychology, you might state that openly. Alternately, if that's not your intent, I'd appreciate some sense of why you think human beings are born as a blank slate. It's a commonplace of psychology since the 1950's that we know we are not.
Captain Adverse said:
That's all; no mystical pre-ordained, innate weathervane of "good or evil."
Whether it's mystical or not is beside the point. Most modern proponents of some kind of innate moral code or foundation think it's due to similarities in how human brains are wired, not in whether there's some divinely inspired code implanted in the human soul or something.