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mwengler comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Perhaps we should view our moral intuitions as yet another evolved mechanism, in that they are imperfect and arbitrary though they work well enough for hunter gatherers.
When we lived as hunter gatherers, an individual could find a group with compatible moral intuitions or walk away from a group with incompatible ones. The ability or possibility that an unpleasant individual's moral intuitions would affect you from one valley over was minimal.
One should note, though, that studies of murder rates amongst hunter gatherer groups found that they were on the high side compared to industrialized societies.
I suspect that this was much less true among hunter gatherers than it is now. From what I have read of groups in the Amazon and New Guinea, if you were to walk away from your group and try to walk into another, you would most likely be killed, and possibly captured and enslaved.
What groups? Low-tech tribal societies in the Amazon and New Guinea aren't necessarily hunter-gatherers. Both regions have agricultural societies going back a long way.
Perhaps this varies because of local environmental/economic conditions. From my undergraduate studies, I seem to remember that !Kung Bushmen would sometimes walk away from conflicts into another group.
Yes. That's true of many other mobile forager societies as well.