What functions of the mind cause someone to have strong morals?
2 general functions of the mind cause most reactions and or decisions of a person. To varying degrees of each, instinct and conscious thought are functions of the human mind that cause just about everything we do. So what degrees of each of these cause someone to have strong morals?
By morals, I’m basically referring to believing in and taking action in the belief of considering others of equal value to oneself and trying to allow the most preferable scenarios for the most people. I went into further technicalities in a post from 5.5yrs ago; Moral Mess
Regarding instinct as the 1st component of human thought and action, instinct would be the natural reinforcement triggers that someone is born with, which drive and influence someone. Further detail in a post from 6 yrs ago; Instinctivity. The aspect of instinct which influences morals, would be the instincts to care about others, such as empathy. If someone had no empathy, such as a sociopath, they would have no drive to regard the well being of anyone other than themself. If someone had theoretical maximum empathy, they would have a drive to care more about others than virtually anything else in their life. But too much empathy could cause someone to disregard themself to such a degree that they are harmed by others or circumstances. Having a strong drive to care about others doesn't necessarily mean strong morals through action, since strong morals includes actions which cause the intent effectively. Effective action requires the other component of the mind, being conscious thought.
Conscious thought is relevant for the cause of strong morals, since conscious thought causes effective results through understanding and comprehension of cause and effect. A high degree of effective conscious thought would be virtually a high degree of intelligence to understand concepts and cause intent. Without intelligence, someone might have high empathy and an intent to care about others' well being, but they would not be able to cause action of that intent, and would sometimes cause the opposite effect of their intent. There are many scenarios in this complex world where a person has high empathy, but lacks intelligence, and therefore unknowingly and unintentionally causes harm to others.
Since someone with high intelligence, but no empathy would still have other instincts for personal gain, they would likely only take action for those other personal instincts and have weak or no morals. And since someone with high empathy, but no intelligence, would take ineffective and sometimes counter-intentional actions, they wouldn’t have strong effective morals. For someone to have strong morals, it requires a high degree of both components of the human mind that influence action. High intelligence through effective conscious thought, in order to effectively cause intent of morals, and high empathy through instinct, in order to have the drive to highly regard the well being of others.