“Social” comes from the demonstrable fact that we are a social species with codes of right and wrong behaviour occurring within a social context - as is well understood by behavioural scientists.
It's the combination of "social" and "well-being" that's puzzling me - do you mean "well-being as that's defined by society"? Or "the well-being of society"?
Natural selection ensures that reproductive fitness for the environment, i.e. survival, is an actual goal, not just a possible goal.
Yes, but it's an accident that a mechanism happened to arise to exploit the free-floating rationale.
Correct. Why would you expect more?
It's not that I expect more, it's that there is a more to be explained (i.e. the expansion of the "circle of regard" beyond kin altruism).
As always, this is where you lose me. You have taken a leap of faith. There’s no reason, other than a subjective one, for such language as “ought” coming from “direct experience of essential and intrinsic non-difference from the Whole”. What “Whole!” Where did this concept suddenly spring from?
The sense of self (self-identification, "what I am") roughly speaking, divides what's inside the "moist robot"'s skin bag from outside. With non-dual experience, that dividing line is directly understood, seen and experienced as it actually, objectively is - as only relatively valid and even as (to some extent) arbitrary. It's the total causal system of the world, the whole, that's the ultimate cause of (that focusses-down-on, so to speak), that moist robot, that particular human causal bundle, and that is what the moist robot understands itself to finally, truly and absolutely be - as a sort of "feeler" or "eye" of the Whole (i.e. the whole, causally interconnected complex of matter/energy - although of course since those concepts weren't available in the past, it was cast differently in older systems, usually something like "Consciousness" with a big C - or God).
That being the case, since the sense of "what I am", the self-identification, has shifted to the infinite Whole, the "circle of regard" ("what I care for") also instantly shoots out to infinity, to all that is. (Of course the mapping from the sense of self-identification to the Whole isn't quite the same as the mapping from the sense of self-identification to the body - tigers are still dangerous and all that - it's perhaps more like a sense of kinship, a real feeling of mutual stardustiness underlying all the relative differences.)
After all, instinctive behaviours such as cooperation and a sense of fairness existed long before any notions of mysticism or religion developed. They even pre-date our humanity. As Harris says, “Do you think that capuchin monkeys are worried about fairness as an abstract principle, or do you think they just don’t like the way it feels to be treated unfairly?” Research indicates the latter.
Yes, but kin altruism only gets you so far. It forms a stable, extensible platform so to speak, something on which to build. But it doesn't itself go beyond family and tribe - there is no instrumental rationality from kin altruism that goes beyond that.
Indeed, what morality usually has to fight against is the constant pull back to the biologically-drawn boundaries, the constant tug to view other families and tribes as competitors only (or as means only).
There’s good reason why the Golden Rule, in its various forms, is found in virtually every human culture throughout history. It long pre-dates Jesus and embodies the direct and indirect reciprocity which is instinctive, via natural selection, for a social species such as us.
But again, that only covers family and tribe. The extra step of cosmopolitanism - of viewing all human beings, even those outside your tribe - as sort of like brothers and sisters, that isn't given by anything biologically driven.
That comes from spirituality, and ultimately, from non-dual experiences and experiences of self-transcendence had strongly by some people, and weakly by most people.
