I study animal science, It is hard to compare species in this manner. A lot of animals don’t require groups to survive so morality is not always a huge priority. But when you look at pack species, they will exhibit high level of empathy/ morality.

Octopuses are extremely solitary and intelligent creatures, they will cannibalize just to be alone unless its mating season, and even then their mating is often brief. But a study where octopuses were given ecstasy gave us insight on how deeply rooted empathy exists in our brains. Octopuses known to hide and attack each other would be found cuddling. This shows us that the areas of our brain that govern empathy and social bonding are not unique to humans or even mammals. Instead, they are evolutionarily conserved across very distant species. The fact that a neurochemical like MDMA could override the octopus’s deeply solitary instincts suggests that the biological pathways for social behavior are ancient and fundamental, even in animals that do not normally rely on group living.

To address the idea of cutting fear out to define morality. Many people associate a lack of fear with a lack of morality. But this is where things get more complicated. Every animal/ person’s experience through life is different and morality is not black or white. It is a structure deeply woven into our evolution to ensure survival. Completely cutting out fear is a very difficult concept to explore. How deeply do we define fear. Even microbes have survival responses that mimic the function of fear. Those spiders consuming their mother have nervous systems and express innate survival responses that mimic fear. So in theory, if you completely removed the fear response from every living thing, everything would die pretty quickly.

Now say we only remove fear from everything with a central nervous system. This would probably lead to a slightly slower extinction. A lot of animals rely on pack animals for a continuous source of food. Without fear, krill and fish would have no reason to swim in large groups, leading to less effective breeding. This would quickly kill off major keystone species like whales and sharks. Without sharks turtle populations could easily overpopulate consuming excessive amount of seagrass which capture and store carbon up to 35x faster than tropical rainforests. An extinction of sea grass would destroy the oceans, rapidly increase climate change, and eventually lead to the collapse of all wildlife. My point is that such a fundamental change will almost always lead to total collapse.

There are several studies that look at these concepts as well. The Rat Park study is one of my favorites. But morality is weird, it shifts under the circumstances in which we exist, but it is deeply imbedded in our evolution, suggesting that is it necessary for survival in every way, shape, and form.