I will ask two questions and answer one of them myself. You may answer questions posted, post one yourself or comment on other answers but please be respectful. Whether you choose to base your answer on logic, religion or even your gut sense is entirely up to you.
A common interpretation of important words is necessary if we are to understand each other.
Definitions
Ethics: A branch of Philosophy addressing questions of right and wrong
regarding human actions.
Philosophy: The study of general and fundamental problems through logic and
rational reasoning.
Morality: Personal or cultural values that distinguish between right and wrong
in a limited frame of an individual, human society or social group.
Moral: A message conveying a single case of which a choice of morality is made.
The point of a moral is for the assimilating party to take experience from it and adopt its suggestive behavioral
patterns. It may be up to the individual to interpret, or it may be explicitly conveyed.
Introductory question: Society
Nature has a primordial system perhaps described best as “survival of the fittest”. For what reason do human
societies promote ethical values that do not advocate such a system?
1st question: Life & Death
Many ethical questions addresses placing a distinct border on a gradient surface. You must choose between sacrificing a
life to save another or let both go to waste. Consider the given candidates totally alike apart from what information is
provided and what is obvious from the info.
1. Candidate A is a bug. Candidate B is a human being. (Both is assumed to be abundant or common).
2. A is a celebrity zoo animal. B is a lonely human. (this is a question of social connection).
3. A is an endangered species. B is a human. (This is a question of larger consequences).
4. A is an endangered species and important link in a big eco-system. B is a human.
5. A is a child. B is an adult (notice the species is not mentioned).
6. A is an infant. B is a healthy juvenile.
7. A is a disabled human. B is a thief (human).
You may add other cases and discuss them but the most important and interesting about the answers is the reasoning behind them, whatever you may find out they are. Notice there are many gradient values to validate. If you wish to post an answer it would be nice if you also specified where you would consider the border to be placed, aka cases where both candidates are approximately equally valued. Before reading my answer, I suggest you think about both questions long enough to reach a conclusion of your own.
My answer to the introductory question
Nature's system
As nature's system includes all life on earth there is one thing crucial to a human society that seems to be an
impossibility in inter-species systems. That is communication. And as cooperation usually depends on both sufficient intelligence and communication, what
remains is competition. While this is true at a broad perspective, cooperation
is still necessary at the level of a single (or in some times even multiple) species. The requirements are fairly
simple, survive and multiply. And for multiplication to be possible cross-gender competition must not interfere. However
nature has countered even those extremely rare cases as in the ant species Wasmannia auropunctata. Good examples of
cooperation in nature is wolf packs, bee hives, ant colonies and school of fish. Examples of inter-species cooperation
is shrimps cleaning fish, insects pollinating flowers and countless cases of species and bacteria symbiosis. I also wish
to address principles at a cellular level but I feel that will migrate too far from the topic at hand.
Human's society
When comparing our global society with nature, you would think we are very cooperative. However looking more closely and
ignoring the difference in species of nature's system we find shockingly more similarities than differences. In
fact one of the biggest difference I perceive is where cooperation is limited to very few inter-species connections in
nature, the limit in our society is not larger than what we call a corporation
or organization. In our monetary system what one competes for is no longer
survival, but money, initially as a means of trading but now almost a necessity for survival. With the increased
technology and abstraction of money to digitally represented debit and credit, the concept of nations has become very
illusive, as all governments and even royal families ultimately appear to be for-profit companies. It is however to
their advantage that national pride is sturdier that corporate pride. Now what keeps these powerful entities from
clashing together in a war with sparks flying? In fact we are all in war/competition, albeit not a physically violent
one as in nature (which is another big difference). Of course history has proven that violence does indeed occur in
human society as well, and when at the scale of corporations (which we call war) is always ultimately motivated by
money. War is a moneymachine like no other. The wealth gap between people is growing, and so for several reasons, most
of which are inherently inescapable causes of the very monetary system itself. This fact is regrettably thickly veiled
by a screen of complex and often boring numbers and graphs effectively discouraging people from trying to understand it.
Corporate media usually directs attention to whatever is not important and affects its direct derivative common belief.
You probably already see the ethical errors in our own society, yet we still judge individuals acting predictably
according to it.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." - Henry Thoreau
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Our very social society being inherently unethical further complicates both questions and answers. A good question and answer alike should not be based on presumptions derived from our society. Be critical about distinguishing what you really know and what you take for granted.
"Our mind is of 3 categories: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we
don’t know we don’t know.
Not knowing is unfortunate; not knowing that we don’t know is tragic." – W. Erhart.
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." - Albert Einstein
All this text and I have not yet really answered the question. This is my basis for saying I think ethical values are promoted for two reasons. The first is the requirement of fairness at the level of individuals. Perhaps in fear of being oppressed or violated in some way. And that is absolutely fine. Ethics should serve humanity in eliminating unjust behavior and advocate cooperation. The other, for the better informed are for masking the violations that occur at a larger scale. People can easily point out a single culprit it a small case, but fail to realize. There is something terribly wrong with our very basic society!
