This is written in the first person to emphasize that morality is a personal issue.
This view of morality is based upon survival. Survival is almost never about one generation. Survival is about generation after generation. As such, children are the basis of morality.
I have children. I have told them that my one responsibility is to teach them to be able to take care of themselves. Again, I will have only succeeded in my moral obligation if what I teach them extends beyond one generation.
Morality is based upon survival. For humans, that means the survival of the individual, the family and the community.
There are many ways to live, but far fewer ways to provide for survival over the generations.
There is an obvious problem to any statement made about moral rules. They are sometimes fluid. Ultimately humans
can only survive as a community, but sometimes they must survive as families or individuals separate from the community. Sometimes a community is destroyed and only a few families or individuals survive to perpetuate the people. This is far more common in what would be called a disturbed ecology such as occurs during war or other widespread calamity. History even describes communities that created their own destruction, leaving behind only a few individuals or families that left because they recognized the immorality of the community and left. I have talked to a number of Jews that were basically all that survived of their families after World War II. They survived either because they were young or else because they knew when to abandon everything and run.
A child told his father that only a fool would work for a living. I tell my children that we are all working together as a community. If you don't believe in working for a living, you are exploiting the others of your community. If this becomes common to a community, it will not survive.
At the same time, consider the morality of the Italian Mafia. Their criminal actions were almost universally abhorred, but traditionally it was a very family oriented organization. Originally, it was created as a defense against invaders. Only later was it more oriented towards criminal activity. In the larger community, it was a liability, but on its own, it was moral because it was very successful at preserving the family and community. Not surprisingly, the larger community it existed in attacked it because it was a threat to that community's survival.
Since morality is defined by the community's survival, then what is morality may be different for different communities. The mafia was a good example. Originally it was important to the larger community's survival. Later it became more of a liability. Still it may well have been as much a symbiot as a parasite or threat. It did not allow competition. Other criminal elements were limited by it. Criminality could not overwhelm the entire society. It was regulated.
Many ruling classes, with far greater legitimacy in history, were far more violent and exploitive of the larger community than the mafia. Many dynasties have considered the general population to be their possessions whose existence was simply for the rulers benefit.
Human development shows a continuing tendency towards connectedness. The world is getting smaller. Our society is getting far more interconnected physically, politically, socially and as a community. Looking beyond the short view a person living today is restricted to, it seems almost certain that we will soon be one community. In terms of disease, we already are. That is a main point of this book. As such, a basis of the community is going to be equality. As such, the community is not going to want to tolerate parasites. Why should the efforts of the community be absconded by a minority within the community? Competition is already regulated. A society attempts to restrict competition to methods that increase the survival potential of the entire community. A stable community works to restrict competition based upon violence because not only is it unproductive, it is destructive to the rest of the society.