Ken Wilber articulates “The Basic Moral Intuition” as the imperative to “protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span”.
I take this as the same stance (emphatically) advanced by Robert Pirsig in Lila:
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the Metaphysics of Quality there’s the morality called the “laws of nature,” by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the “law of the jungle” where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, “the law”; and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. Each of these sets of moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to flip-flops.
What is today conventionally called “morality” covers only one of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to be a minor, “subjective,” physically non-existent part of the universe. But in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another Dynamic morality, are not only real, they are the whole thing.
In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral.
An example of this is the statement that, “It’s more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient.” The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he’s at a higher level of evolution.
Taken by itself that seems obvious enough. But what’s not so obvious is that, given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient. This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures. It’s true for all people at all time, now and forever, a moral pattern of reality as real as H2O. We’re at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before.
While Wilber’s AQAL model doesn’t ground its moral intuition as Pirsig’s MoQ does (by universalizing value as the fundamental reality), its more inclusive evolutionary scheme allows even more precision than Pirsig’s simple 4-levels of major emergence.