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wnoise comments on Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants - Less Wrong
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I find evolutionary-psychological reasoning always a bit suspect because it seems a bit too good to explain just about anything. Having said that -- sometimes dogs seem to have a sense of guilt -- does that imply they have a kind of morality too(*)? Or is it just some kind of 'act' due to co-evolution with humans?
(*) De Waal in Primates and Philosophers argues that some animals have a certain degree of morality (Robert Wright slightly disagrees with De Waal, in the same book).
I'm not sure there's that strong a difference between these scenarios. What's the difference between an act that is usually followed and a morality that is occasionally breached? Couple this with self-deception and the description of a mind as multiple interacting agents...
I usually interpret the intended difference to have to do with the relevance of belief in observers.
That is, when my X is described as "merely an act," I understand the speaker to be suggesting that if I believed myself unobserved, I would not demonstrate X. (There's also a related implication having to do with sincerity, but that's much trickier to express in a succinct coherent way.)
Of course, as you point out, in reality it's more complicated than that, and something can be in some meaningful sense "an act" while also being something I do for my own benefit.