^if you ask for the cause of morality, love, etc, there is a lot of uncertainty (just saying that they are chemical in nature is A. somewhat obvious B. vague C. doesnt give the whole picture... as if you ask me what that bar is made out of and i say atoms)
you could ask the question from a number of angles.
evolutionary: does the ability to feel morality have an evolutionary advantage, or perhaps do we have the ability on accident because of some other attribute we've evolved with?
psychological: how do we develop our feelings of morality?
sociological: to what extend does culture influence our morality?
my own hypothesizing leads me to suspect that our strongest subjective feelings have more of a basis in our early childhood experiences than in our genetics
i see the mind as something that builds on itself, and the top layer is always the "conscious" layer.
for example, a particular idea makes a kid uneasy. the more he thinks about it, the more it appears. he doesnt have the control of his mind that he wants. so what he does is consciously redirects his attention to other interesting things. eventually, all of his efforts no longer need to be applied consciously. he's influenced his subconscious will, creating a program to keep that concept out of consciousness. now the top layer can worry about other things, and right below the surface is his earlier self acting as censor (which takes up a lot of psychological energy). in a few years, after many programs (not all are the censor type program i pointed out), that program is buried relatively deep
why did that concept make him uneasy? the interaction between his present programs (conscious and subconscious), and his environment
following this line of thought, the more time you've been alive, the higher and more complex and more stable your mind has become. as a baby, the mind is very unstable (you see a baby cry horribly, then be happy in a moment when given what he wants) and this means it's more impressionable (and experience is more "real," closer to raw sense data)
for more on childrearing, heres a cool thread about a sociological study "Body pleasure and the origins of violence":
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=236404
and finally, to the point... perhaps we have morality because of the way we raise children? human groups, like any group of similar things that exchange information, are prone to self-perpetuating patterns (life itself could be seen as simply a self-perpetuating pattern--a group of materials arranged in such a way as to mechanically keep itself intact and create more versions of itself). if, somewhere along human history, someone with a peculiar brain gets the idea that people need to be punished for certain things, and everyone believes him and goes along with it, well now not only do you have people indoctrinating their offspring with this idea, you will probably see entirely new methods of child-rearing with this new concept of punishment. punishing the kids will lead to new psychological paradigms that call for more punishment (imho)
this self-perpetuating paradigm, i think, reached its height in the middle ages, when we see many signs of child abuse (e.g., in shakespeare's plays, hallucinations are common, as well as perhaps indications of derealization 'the world is a play' and of course the brutality of the time could be indicative as well)
hmm, perhaps this should start a new thread? sorry for the length
. Doesn't it seem more logical that we unintentionally and unknowingly create universes of a smaller magnitude ourselves from the reactions we cause, or do you believe we're on the lowest wrung of the cosmic hierarchy and can't?