1. morals drive ethics, so no point separating the two.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it.
I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
This is apparently an unpopular idea but you're right: human nature is based on cooperation. Even under "free market" systems people do things that are not optimal market decisions because they are naturally predisposed to helping other people, even when it is often exploited. A lot of marketing deliberately exploits this, e.g. the common tactic of "giving something for free" to make the consumer feel like they owe a favor, or giving products a cutesy persona so consumers anthropomorphize the product and their interactions with it instead of seeing it as a disposable tool.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
