Endowing our moral impulses with a bogus aura of objectivity

Our instinctive moral judgments:  arise not from outward facts or dispassionate calculations but from our capacity to ‘sympathise’ with the feelings of our acquaintances, real or imagined, and from inward sentiments of approval and disapproval; 
 the mind ‘likes to bestow upon objects the same emotions, which it observes in itself’, and it beguiles us by endowing our moral impulses with a bogus aura of objectivity.

Kindness and constancy come to be regarded as immutable obligations rather than the

personal preferences, or social hygiene  they really are; but on the whole the illusion serves humanity well, encouraging us to be nicer to each other than we might otherwise be.