Why, then, did feelings, and therefore conscious awareness evolve? Because, Damasio and Carvalho propose, it helps in life regulation: “Given that body states are necessarily valenced — they are either good or bad from the point of view of homeostasis — feelings are powerful proxies of ongoing biological value and natural guides to adaptive behavior.”

If you take the words "good" and "bad" in their moral sense in the paragraph above, you have the beginnings of a neurophysiological basis for meta-ethics. This is to say, this analysis may provide the means to identify and characterize the various components of a moral system.