In my post below I made a distinction between a set of actions and behaviors arising from a particular situation, and those arising from an attribute. Psychopaths may behave totally normally and ethically in a situation where deviation from the norm would have negative consequences. A more psychologically normal person would behave ethically even when “no one is watching,” especially with the proper cultural condition. The latter issue is why I am very skeptical of religious conservatives who tell me personally that they would go on a raping and killing spree if they lost their faith in God.
But on a cultural level a set of actions arising from a situation may eventually become an attribute. The relationship between church & state in the United States of America is a classic case of this. The federal government was established my men who were radical innovators in this domain. They did not establish a particular sect as the confession which received the imprimatur of state approval. Many of the states did have an established church, so this was somewhat an innovation from even American norms. But on pragmatic grounds it was justifiable; the United States of America was characterized by extreme religious pluralism. There was no Church, but churches. No doubt some of the Founding Fathers were influenced by the Enlightenment secularity, and had personal suspicion of clerics and their institution. But just as important was the reality that the new nation had no preponderant sect. Patrick Henry and some confederates attempted to craft a compromise where Christianity more generally was given a particular place in the federal structure, but in the end even this was rejected.
Over time this situation has become an attribute of the American political order. The United States of America was long implicitly a Protestant nation, but the fact that this was not an explicit reality certainly shaped tensions with the rising Catholic immigrant communities in the 19th century. Even radical religious conservatives who reject church-state separation seem to lean toward a solution in keeping with the ideas of Patrick Henry, a state conferring of privilege to Christianity more generally, and not any sect.
Here’s another example:
As a libertarian, I love the Federal Constitution. It lays out a series of narrow enumerated powers, and then the 9th and 10th amendments make it very clear that any power not enumerated isn’t the federal government’s business. (Of course, today courts pretty much ignore this, but that isn’t the Founders’ fault.)
However, I am willing to recognize that most of the Founders were not libertarian. They wrote the constitution that way because they wanted state governments to have lots of power, not because they wanted overall limited government. Once again, the right thing was done for the wrong reason.