This is a very interesting topic, since a moral sense and identity are indistinguishable, practically. You are what you choose to do, and why you choose to do it.
Most modern students have undergone the basic indoctrination process whereby you are taught that we are a seething vat of negative emotions–all tinged with sexuality and aggression–and that civilization is at best a facade, and that “honesty” consists in the frank expression of more primitive impulses. Sexual activity becomes almost a sort of ersatz morality.
Typically, what is tied to this–in the ideationally amorphous blob that is modern Political Correctness–is a sort of Romantic understanding of the state of nature, before the sorts of values that Conservatives like to talk about were in play. Surely, the argument goes, only social dysfunctions like Capitalism and Christianity prevent all of us from getting along and spending all our time humping and dancing around fires.
Thus, we can see easily how being a hippie, free love pot smoker dovetails nicely into an anti-Conservative outlook, in a cultural way. What I want to emphasize here, though, is that Freudian notions of the Unconscious enable a pseudoscientific patina to be laid over this, so that Conservatism becomes not just a different viewpoint, but definitionally stupid and anti-scientific.
Added to this periodically are “findings” by evolutionary biologists that we are in fact “adapted” for compassion, or altruism, or religious sentiment. None of these “findings’, of course, do more than restate that our internal experiences of altruism, compassion, and religious sentiment are now scientifically acceptable, as if men and women of courage needed to be told any of those things.
Freud, it should be remembered, was simply taking the logic of Darwinian natural selection to its logical conclusion, in positing our fundamental drive as sex–which is the procreative drive–and a fundamental amorality as our nature, outside of the imperative of generating offspring to perpetuate our genetic material, which is who “we” really are.
Thus, the contents of consciousness, for practitioners of the intellectually very wrong, very dull doctrine of Scientism, are irrelevant until they can “derive” them biologically. Yet, our best minds in Physics–which has become owner of the domain of what is really real for us advanced moderns–believe that what we see in front of us, the universe and everything in it, cannot be understood without Consciousness, making consciousness the CAUSE of what the evolutionary biologists find, rather than consciousness being an artifact solely of material processes.
They ignore this finding not just consistently, but apparently intentionally. This is a travesty, since their doctrine is a lens through which life is viewed, and it is a doctrine that rejects free will and the possibility of surviving death. Thus we get unpleasant ideas, sold by huxters, and received by those who have been initiated into the Cult of the Expert, guiding all too many of our policies and social institutions.
In my own view, what most characterizes us as both individuals and cultures is not the universality of bestial desires, but rather the restraints we choose with respect to our most primitive impulses. This is your actual identity. You are not a beast that speaks and plans, but a human individual who has moved past being a slave to instincts not foreign to the lowest creatures on earth.
This is a very old idea: that who you are is best shown in the moral choices you make. Now, we are fed a steady diet of the outlying cases, and demonstrable failures of moral codes shown in hypocrisy and mental illness. The simple fact is, though, that a very great many people have done decent jobs at being decent people, following simple moral codes, and THAT IS WHAT WAS REAL ABOUT THEM.
I am a dinosaur, I know, but I choose to believe others are feeling the same way.