Most people believe the way to lose weight is through willpower.  My successful experience losing weight is that this is not the case.  You will lose weight if you want to, meaning you effectively believe⁰ that the utility you will gain from losing weight, even time-discounted, will outweigh the utility from yummy food now.  In LW terms, you will lose weight if your utility function tells you to.  This is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy (the effective kind of therapy), which tries to change peoples' behavior by examining their beliefs and changing their thinking habits.

Similarly, most people believe behaving ethically is a matter of willpower; and I believe this even less.  Your ethics is part of your utility function.  Acting morally is, technically, a choice; but not the difficult kind that holds up a stop sign and says "Choose wisely!"  We notice difficult moral choices more than easy moral choices; but most moral choices are easy, like choosing a ten dollar bill over a five.  Immorality is not a continual temptation we must resist; it's just a kind of stupidity.

This post can be summarized as:

1. Each normal human has an instinctive personal morality.
2. This morality consists of inputs into that human's decision-making system.  There is no need to propose separate moral and selfish decision-making systems.
3. Acknowledging that all decisions are made by a single decision-making system, and that the moral elements enter it in the same manner as other preferences, results in many changes to how we encourage social behavior.