Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word morality entered Middle English around 1375, first attested in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, from the Old French moralite. It derives from the Latin mōrālitās, itself from the noun mōs, meaning manner, character, or proper behavior. The Latin adjective mōrālis was coined by Cicero as a translation of the Greek term ēthikos.
Anthropologists from Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed ethics from 60 societies using over 600,000 words from more than 600 sources. They identified seven rules present across all of them: help your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others' property.
Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert found that people in at least 60 nations have believed morality is continuously deteriorating, and this conviction has been present for at least the last 70 years. However, participants' actual evaluations of their peers' morality had not decreased over time, indicating the perception of moral decline is a psychological illusion produced by distorted exposure to and memory of information.
Brain imaging meta-analyses show the neural network for moral decisions overlaps with networks for theory of mind and empathy. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex activates during explicit right-wrong judgments, while the temporoparietal junction activates for intuitive moral reactions. Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the VMPC impairs the ability to factor intent into moral judgments.
Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals valued care and fairness above loyalty, respect, and purity, while self-identified conservatives valued care and fairness less and the remaining three foundations more. Both groups ranked care highest overall, but conservatives ranked fairness lowest and liberals ranked purity lowest. Haidt traced the geographic roots of this divide to closely knit homogeneous communities for conservatism and culturally mixed port cities for liberalism.
Gregory S. Paul's 2005 study in the Journal of Religion and Society found that higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in prosperous democracies. Gary Jensen's subsequent response argued a complex relationship exists, with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and others discouraging it.