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At its very core, I think our 'morality' and sense of 'right' and 'wrong' is a sophisticated child of social monkey/primate behaviour.
Certain areas of the brain (can't recall exactly which off the top of my head) have developed to operate impulse control, delayed gratification, and 'moral' understanding. It isn't fully developed until late teens, and in some damaged individuals never develops at all.
It's this, I think, that gives us that sense of unease, bordering on revulsion, around some of the people who lack those things (I'm thinking mainly of psychopaths and sociopaths). We instinctively recognise the threat posed to group survival by people who aren't coded to co-operate smoothly. An unfortunate by-product of this instinct is, I suspect, at the root of much of the social unease and stigma around non-threatening mental or neurological conditions.
How each group of humans codifies their particular moral understanding and structures will vary enormously according to the particular social, political, economic and historical factors that have shaped their world and culture. The extent to which that group morality will be accepted and acceded to, or rejected and resisted, by any one sub-group likewise.
But certain core themes seem present across the board. Mostly they seem to be the kind that support group survival. Laws and customs that either prohibit, or reduce the limits of acceptability on, acts of fatal violence. Laws or customs that prohibit or place agreed boundaries around responses to acts of fatal violence. Against acts of theft, or, to borrow HQ's terminology, attempting to take a bigger monkey's bananas without permission. Laws and customs protecting various elements of marriage or partnering, and care of children.
We've added a lot of refinements as our need for organisation and increased co-operation expanded, but that's the core of it I think.
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