Is it wrong? Aren't ethics and intelligence two different axes?

Different, but probably not as orthogonal as one might think.

E.g. cooperating ethics had been necessary for the further development of human populations intelligence (and culture, technology, material wealth, nutrition etc that lead to further increases in intelligence).

So lack of ethics might be a sign of intelligence, but it's also a parasitic intelligence that benefits the individual, and beyond certain level and spread to the detriment of the further evolutionary development of the species.

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robcohen 5 days ago | parent [-]

Aren't there only two rules that all groups follow in the animal kingdom?

- don't lie too often

- don't kill members of the in group

Seems like these would be required for any group to survive, which makes sense why they are universal. All other rules/ethics seem to be dependent on resource scarcity.

	▲	DrScientist 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Groups don't follow rules as such, group behaviours emerge from the interaction of individual behaviours. As to whether all groups display those rules - I suspect not - though it rather does depend on how you define a group - the definition of group probably has some sort of colloboration built in ( as oppose to a bunch of indviduals that happen to live in the same geographic area ).
	▲	coldtea 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>All other rules/ethics seem to be dependent on resource scarcity That doesn't make the rest of the ethics (as a rule and mechanism) any less useful to help nurture the species and its intelligence. It just makes them not absolute but dynamic and condition dependent. But given a condition (e.g. resource scarcity) the appropriate ethics retain the utility we talk about.