"The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." - Spinoza

Humans are animals and their morality comes from their living brains not from dead dogma. Other animals care for their young, protect their group and help cooperate and connect with their community. Animal Morality is  real. Other animals may lack written language but their actions of care and protection are as real as human morality. For those who want to separate humans from the animal kingdom you are like a leaf that did not know it was part of a tree.

"Empathy and solidarity have held human groups together for ages. Admittedly, these groups were small. In both animals and humans empathy is biased. It is always stronger for the in-group than the out-group, stronger for one's own family than for nonrelatives. These biases are not hard to explain in evolutionary terms and have also been found in animal studies. We still have the psychology of a primate that evolved in smaller groups, even though now we live among millions of strangers. In order to do so successfully we need to rely on a blend of old psychology that makes us empathize with others and an appeal to what is good for all of us. "
Frans de Waal

"There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties ... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals."
Charles Darwin

"The brain becomes both much larger and still more complex as we move to vertebrates such as fish, amphibians, and reptiles. The spinal cord, now protected within the vertebrae of the backbone, has become primarily a servant of the brain, a busy two-way highway of communication with fibers segregated into descending motor pathways and ascending sensory ones. The brain itself is now composed of a series of swellings of the anterior end of the spinal cord (the brain stem), the three major ones making up the three major parts of the vertebrate brain: the hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain. From the hindbrain sprouts a distinctive structure, the "cerebellum" (Latin for "little brain").

Among mammals, the brain keeps its three major components, but with two new structures. The neocerebellum ("new cerebellum") is added to the cerebellum, looking much like a fungal growth at the base of the brain, and the neocortex ("new cortex") grows out of the front of the forebrain. In most mammals, these new additions are not particularly large relative to the brain stem. In primates they are much larger, and in the human they are so large that the original brain stem is almost completely hidden by this large convoluted mass of grey neural matter.
 American evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould provided a term for this phenomenon--exaptation. He made a major contribution to our understanding of evolution by insisting that we distinguish adaptation, the evolutionary process through which adaptedly complex structures and behaviors are progressively fine-tuned by natural selection with no marked change in the structure's or behavior's function, from exaptation, through which structures and behaviors originally selected for one function become involved in another, possibly quite unrelated, function. Exaptation makes it difficult if not impossible to understand why our brain evolved as it did. Although the brain allows us to speak, sing, dance, laugh, design computers, and solve differential equations, these and other abilities may well be accidental side effects of its evolution."

Professor Gary Cziko