It's just become obvious to most and some are trying to help it along.

I was a strange kid. Late baby-boomer--it used to be that I was born in the last year of the baby boom, but it was later redefined when every generation had to be a label for label-based thinkers to understand them.

Anyway, by the time I was 16 I had noticed that those who were the age of my grandparents where I grew up tended to be overtly religious. They went to church, prayed, read their Bibles, and gave generally religion- or Bible-based reasons for doing things. Their morality was overtly Xian. I emphasize "where I grew up" because it was relatively homogeneous, had been for a while, and was limited in area. Other places would probably have a more mixed response so the age stratification wouldn't be as obvious.

My parents weren't particularly religious. But they adhered pretty much to what their parents' generation said. They had strikingly similar moral codes, but it was morality they were trained into. The reasons they gave was "it's just being nice" or "that's how people should be."

My generation--I'm late baby-boomer--tended to adhere to the coarser, larger areas of our parents' morality. "Nice" is in the eyes of the beholder, to be sure, but things like car theft and beating up small children were certainly not nice no matter how you cut it.

Since then I've seen "nice" stop having that kind of a meaning. Often the Russian proverb, "If you're not caught you're not a thief" is operative. I know a lot of kids whose attitude is very progressive--but only when it either makes their lives easier or makes their lives no harder. Sharing is good when they get to share somebody else's stuff; being kind to those less well off or with some impairment is a good thing; not cheating is important and nobody wants to be called dishonest.

But sharing is bad when they have to share what they have; they aren't about to be kind to those less off, and if somebody with some impairment gets a special set of rules or privileges it's patently unfair because they're first in line for privileges and last in line for having restrictive rules apply to them; cheating is okay when they do it, but they have no problem calling others dishonest.

Problem is, they have no moral basis for it. All opinions are equal; there are no moral truths because culture- and religion-based moral truths are actively undermined in school (unless it suits those setting the curriculum). Utilitarianism doesn't cut through the typical teen myopia, and defining "greater good" really presupposes some sort of values system to begin with. (Most assume that $ and health are the greater good; but if you're concerned about karma or equal distribution of wealth or your immortal soul, the greater good won't just be maximizing the amount of wealth in some reasonably fair system but karma, ensuring equal distribution of wealth not just "reasonably equal," or sin and salvation. You define the terms and then bury the definition, decreeing your terms universal; which is what hardcore Islamists, Xian fundies and even some Hindu fundamentalists do.)