Thank you so much for your thoughtful response!

We may disagree from the very start (with the premise you wrote) depending on what you meant,

> Good and bad are judgments based on our evolutionary goal of survival eventually culminating in some idea of society.

but we may also be in heated agreement. [If we disagree, this will continue a nice conversation, and if not, well, it's useful for me to periodically put my thoughts into words so I can see whether they make sense or whether I really believe them ^_^]

So I agree that this is almost certainly why I (or anyone else) has a sense of morality. We've evolved to be social creatures (as a strategy) and our sense of good and bad lines up pretty well with prosocial and antisocial behavior (e.g. a sense of justice or fairness as a means to enable cooperation).

But I don't think this endows use with any obligation to obey the biological imperative. We may agree that we have some social obligations – at the very least to avoid causing harm to each other, perhaps also to actively help each other. (And if not out of altruism, out of self-interest and good sense.) But I don't think building a good society requires that we aim to reproduce (let alone perpetually borrow against future generations, as we've been doing lately).

Consider supernormal stimuli: there are birds that seem to sit on their eggs not because they care for their young, but because they feel a compulsion to sit on large, round, colorful objects. If you present them with a larger, rounder, or more colorful object than their own eggs, they will preferentially sit on the faux egg (abandoning their own). The only thing necessary for the trait to be selected (passed on) is that it ultimately results in viable offspring, even if the mechanism is absurd, and even if having viable offspring is a side effect rather than the goal.

What I'm hoping to establish is that what it feels like to be a certain way – and the underlying values or priorities you actually hold – can be rather divorced from the reason you have those feelings. So we may have a sense of morality because we're social creatures because that's the strategy that let our species survive, but it does not automatically follow that you can reverse the arrows of implication – without more argument, you can only claim that if we want our species to survive, we should be moral (not that we ought to have our species survive). To argue that we ought to have our species survive, you'd need to appeal to some common goal or feeling – either a desire for the survival of species itself or some other goal that the survival of our species enables. But we may not necessarily have this feeling, as the example with the birds and their eggs shows.

[Stepping away from theory for a moment: people obviously are trying to ensure the perpetuation of humanity, but I wonder whether people don't actually desire it directly. Maybe what they actually desire is some preservation of their legacy (as a way to feel remembered or connected), or a sense of victory, or vicariously experiencing in some small part a happier future that they are imagining. And of course, this is only when people do stop to consider the long-term; people may usually reproduce simply because sex can be awesome.]

In any case, I think it's alright to value something even if it doesn't serve the ultimate purpose of reproduction. Because of other values that I hold, I've tried to extrapolate or generalize useful social feelings to a sense of good and bad that considers and gives significant weight to the lives of other species, or that cares more about the eudamonia/suffering of people than about life/death. This thwarts the reproduction of humanity (indeed, I'm evolutionarily a dead end, because as a result of my thoughts and feelings I've taken lengths to ensure I can't create new life with my genes), but it makes me personally feel better to live this way and I think it's also works out to be better for others, too.

In the absence of any (strong evidence for) objective, universal morality – as you pointed out! – we're left to determine it for ourselves, and in a sense there are no right or wrong answers, because we're also left to do our own meaning-making and to determine our own goals (which I suppose would be true even if there were objective, universal morality). Perhaps you could say life on earth has an inherent goal, namely reproduction, but I'd say that's not a goal so much as an observation about what living things on earth do, definitionally.

To wrap up (good lord I wrote more than I meant to), morality is a useful tool, something we have for practical purposes, and I think it can be for social purposes and personal satisfaction.

I do agree having a diversity of life on earth is more interesting, and I'm glad to be alive to witness it. It's also my preference. I just wouldn't want to keep someone or something alive that was suffering, or didn't choose to be alive, just to satisfy my curiosity. Or perhaps I would, but the idea at least makes me uncomfortable.