I spent Monday morning at a speed awareness course, whither I had been dispatched for failing to notice a speed camera on the other side of a dual carriageway. It was an interesting opportunity for the examination of the emotional mechanisms underlying moral conduct.

Driving a car is almost certainly the most dangerous thing that any of us do in our lives. Certainly, it's the most dangerous to other people. Even the ghastly Mexican drug wars (60,000 killed since 2006) are not more lethal than the traffic there, which kills about 17,000 people every year.

So there's no doubt that regulating drivers is part of any kind of utilitarian concept of morality, and certainly part of the essential functions of a state. Bad driving is wicked and antisocial under any recognised scheme of morality. I suppose you can argue that some speeding is entirely safe but in a country where the speed cameras are painted bright yellow anyone who fails to notice one is guilty at the very least of driving without proper concentration.

So how does all this look in practice?

One interesting thing is that there was no attempt by our lecturers to make explicit the moral dimensions of what we had done. I'm not saying there should have been. It wouldn't have been effective. But the emphasis was entirely on self-interest and the unpleasant social and financial consequences of being caught again.

Related to this was the extraordinary lack of remorse or even interest shown by some of the participants. I was sitting next to a man who ran a minicab company and consistently guessed that the speed limits on various classes of roads were anything up to 20mph lower than they actually are. This did not mean that he drove at 20mph below the limit, only that he assumed that he was speeding all the time and everywhere.

One woman arrived late and claimed to have been busted for doing 42mph in a 40 limit. The teacher expressed polite incredulity. She rummaged in her handbag and discovered from the summons papers that it had in fact been 58mph. The discovery didn't seem to embarrass her in the slightest: perhaps 42 was her safe answer to all numerical questions, but I doubt this. She acted as if speeding and lying about it were perfectly normal and socially acceptable.

The only time there was an outbreak of moral outrage was when one of our number confessed that he sometimes rode a bicycle. Cyclists, we rapidly learned, were vile, dangerous outlaws who shot red lights, paid no tax, rode on the pavement and behaved with utter disregard for the safety of anyone else on the road.

While this noise was going on, I had a small epiphany. The cyclists were hated because they are cheats. They are getting away with something that car drivers cannot. Especially in London traffic, the cyclist appears as a figure high above all laws and duns. The motorist is born free, but everywhere he is in queues. The courier burning through a red light, even the quiet law-abiding cyclist like me who only rides very slowly through red lights, demonstrates the freedom that car drivers have traded for comfort.

The resentment of cheats is an interesting emotion. According to evolutionary accounts of morality envy and "spiteful punishment" are absolutely necessary emotions if our more selfless and co-operative instincts are to flourish. The problem of defectors and free riders (and who could ride more freely than a cyclist in London traffic?) is central to game theory. Co-operative strategies can only flourish, and co-operative instincts spread through evolution, so long as no one cheats and gains the benefits of co-operation without the costs.

I'm sure this is why Scandinavian societies were so conformist when they were egalitarian.

Car drivers, then, are an interesting example of a society, or a social game, where this mechanism does not apply. Like Russians under communism and after its fall, they have become anarchic individualists, held in line only by fear of punishment. They don't see anything wrong in cheating, nor in other drivers cheating. Only in their hatred of cyclists is a vestigial mark of any moral sentiment.

The point is that it's wrong to look at the unpleasant emotional compost around the roots of morality and conclude that nothing worthwhile grows from spite or smugness. Morality isn't just a matter of overcoming our instincts, but of bending them towards justice and sometimes we succeed. There is such a thing as moral progress, whether or not we manage to make any, but it doesn't make us effortlessly nicer and better.

As for me, for the moment, I am driving more slowly.