[v-erne]

I always preferred to look at morals as survival strategies for societies. From this point of view they do not have to be universal to work - its enough that they skew the probablity a bit towards survival of given group and the rest is just some version of Darwins Game of Life.

[nautilius]

Obviously they don't have to be universal to work, that's my whole post - they aren't, and humanity was pretty successful in settling every last piece of this planet.