The Complex Morality of Shopping Carts

Morality can be complicated. I recently had a conversation about shopping carts and how they form a rest of moral character, of "goodness." The idea is that returning the shopping cart is generally considered the right thing to do, yet, there is no law against abandoning the shopping cart in the store parking lot. So, the test is found in whether a person will willingly return a shopping cart, even though there'd be no personal consequences for not doing so. Will the person do the right thing, even without the force of law compelling them to do so?

Yet, I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusions being drawn. Returning the shopping cart is a good, altruistic act, but it is also a "lawful" act, in that the act is expected by society, even if not legally required. People may return the shopping cart, not because it's the right thing to do, but because they want to live up to others' expectations or perhaps even because they feel compelled to yeild to social pressure. It's possible for people to return shopping carts for purely Lawful reasons, rather than Good ones.

In fact, returning a shopping cart can even be done for Chaotic and Evil reasons. If someone asks "Hey, are you done with that shopping cart," and you are, but you return the cart to the storage area instead of giving the cart to the person who asked for it, that's at least Lawful Neutral, if not Chaotic Evil. If a child is playing in the cart collection area, and returning the cart now would hurt the child, doing so would almost certainly be an Evil act, and if one is told by an authority figure to just abandon the cart and get in the car because we're already late for something, and one painstakingly returns the shopping cart to the receptical anyway, then returning the cart could even be a Chaotic act, motivated by defiance of the authority figure.

That's why I'm not sure if any given act is inherently good or bad. It seems to me that the goodness or badness of a act is based more on the actor's attitude and motivation, and since people tend to have complex feelings and motivations, morality can be complex as well. I returned a shopping cart recently, before this conversation, but I'm not entirely sure why I did it, so I'm not sure whether it counts as a "Good" act. Returning the shopping cart now would be even more uncertain, as my action may now be motivated by a self-serving desire to perceive myself as being a good person.

Naturally, I'm strongly overthinking this. Some acts are generally Good, and "generally Good" is generally good enough. Besides, the kinds of people who worry about whether they're Good or not are typically good enough that they don't actually need to worry. Still, for those of us who are concerned about getting morality right, whether an act or person is moral or not can be a complex, convoluted, and situationally changing question.