“You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.”

“Sir? I thought–but he does. I have!”

“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not born with it–and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of mind.”

–Lt.-Colonel Jean V.  Dubois, M.I., retired, from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers