Osirienth's page

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, heck one could even argue Karl Marx, all built some of their thought/philosophy from this concept of a basic "law written on the heart" that each and every human (barring developmental issues in the mind and body) can comprehend. This Natural Law is the basis for conscience, for much of the legal structures in Western culture, etc.

I'll add one of C. S. Lewis's points, somewhat paraphrased, on this:

Let's say you are getting off a bus, and you trip over someone's foot. they apologise. You come to believe it was an accident. You therefore react certain ways. If you notice that person suddenly display a gloating expression out of the corner of your eye, or see them trip people so often that you come to believe no one could be that apparently clumsy by accident, you have a very different reaction and, likely, a very different opinion of what needs to be done.
If intentions don't really matter, just results, we should be willing to use great force against a person who is genuinely not trying to hurt other people, but seems to inadvertently cause a lot of accidents that have strong potential to harm or kill others, and we should shrug off a homicidal maniac who declares his intention to slay in advance, if we are just convinced he is so incompetent at murder that he will be unlikely to succeed. Lewis would argue that there simply aren't any real examples of societies working that way. I can think of a few partial counterexamples, but if it's not a universal natural expression of divine will, adjusting the responses to take intentions into account (as best we can) is still overwhelmingly the way almost everybody does it.