David Hume had this idea that if we see an action and it seems good to us, then there's a kind of evolutionary selection to make sure that actions that seem good to us are also morally good. Adam Smith elaborated this in his system of propriety when he talks about the four different origins of moral sentiments. He thought that over time, human beings, both individually and collectively, were capable of honing of perfecting this sense of propriety. And so that much of our behavior would actually be governed by the reactions of others which we had internalized to such an extent.
Civilization and the pleasantness of everyday life depend on unwritten rules. Early in the 20th century, an English mathematician and government official, Lord Moulton, described complying with these rules as "obedience to the unenforceable"--the area of personal choice that falls between illegal acts and complete freedom. Listen as economist Michael Munger talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the power and challenge of the unenforceable.