Originally Posted by kerry

It's possible that some of the answers given to the question are actual descriptions of a person's moral motivations. At one time I was teaching lots of Middle Eastern male students from countries with legal systems closely allied to divine law. They consistently claimed that if God did not threaten them with punishment they would not be moral. I took that to be an honest statement about their personal motivations. In other words, the question may not be a strictly philosophical question but a question about the kinds of motivations which different societies produce.