Humans are animals affected by natural selection, wherefore no translation from animals to humans is necessary or even possible.
"Morality" centrally refers to a set of beliefs and practices only attested in humans, so any attempts to found morality in the behaviour of non human animals requires a translation stage.
An individual is neither a predator nor a mugger by default. An individual is a predator or a mugger because of its traits and behaviour.
I don't see the relevance,
Probably the mugger does not value the mugging itself.
No, they probably value something that can be cashed out in fitness promoting terms, like continued survival, or enhanced attractiveness based on resources. Taken individualistically fitnessism leads to counterintuituve conclusions...
Humans who value the survival of their own behavioural genes would in all probability put into practice and enforce laws against mugging, since allowing mugging would risk adversely affecting not only each individual herself, but also other humans who to a large extent are carriers of the same behavioural genes as this individual. Please see my comment to gjm, where I mention “fitnessist contractarianism”, which, by the way, is universalizable.
... hence fitnessist Contractarianism .... but then the question is: why do you need the fitness competent, when you have the contraction component?
Ethics per se does not have any function.
I find that hard to understand. The practices of ethics reduces wasteful conflict, and allows people to satisfy their preferences.
And recognising that ethics fulfils role allows you to understand almost everything about it, providing you can alsomrid yourself of the assumption that it needs to correspond to something.
"Morality" centrally refers to a set of beliefs and practices only attested in humans, ...
Morality does also apply to non-human organisms, for example close human relatives such as chimpanzees and why not alien life on other planets or future successors to humans?
... so any attempts to found morality in the behaviour of non human animals requires a translation stage.
Ethical fitnessism is not founded on the behaviour of non-human organisms. Please see the definition of ethical fitnessism in my original comment to DeVliegendeHollander.
...No
I noticed that there has been some earlier discussion about Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge here at LW. As a writer on the Swedish politico-philosophical blog The Inverted Fable of Reality, I would like to share a response to the challenge, written by our main contributor, which I believe is interesting to read even if you are not familiar with The Moral Landscape or its content. See this link for the response and a short explanation of the challenge.
The response takes a different approach to most responses to the challenge. It is divided into four parts and starts by asking which ethic is most compatible with science and reality and finally tries to answer this question.