I guess I wasn’t clear enough, but this is really getting to “doing the right thing when no one is looking.” What makes people do good? Some believe it’s authority from a religious text, while others believe it’s authority from people, and an innate sense of morality.

In a sense I’m trying to explore what makes us do good when no one is watching. You are spot on about the concept of principles. The current research into morality makes the difference between principles and intuitions. We often have intuitions about moral actions without recourse to some set of principles. Or vice versa. Interesting things happen when our principles and our intuitions don’t coincide on the same action.

I’m new to this – I hope future blog posts will look at some practical aspects of morality too. The theory is no good without it.

This latter phrasing worries me because you could be moral and be concerned with such principles but behave quite badly. The second “concerned with” strikes me the same way.

So your definition of morals implies nothing about action or behavior. Perhaps that is right – but it is too academic for my tastes.

Finally, I think that most people think that they are doing mostly the right thing. We have a huge capacity for justifying much of what we do. I would hate for this to be classified under “moral” behavior.