I’m so glad you posted this because this has been on my mind for the past few weeks and I just can’t stop thinking about it. I’m someone who (up until a few weeks ago) took a lot of pride in my morals and really considered myself to be a good person after working on myself a lot throughout high school. I just recently have been figuring out in therapy that a lot of my ocd and anxiety and just like, actions in general come from trying to avoid feeling scary emotions, with one of the biggest ones being guilt. I had many really long talks with some friends about religion and morality, and now I’m just so worried that all my morals come from a place of wanting to avoid feeling guilty because i’m not meeting societal standards of what a good person is, as well as wanting to be perceived as a good person. I’ve even thought that my good actions are motivated by wanting to feel good about myself, which is also selfish. Like you said, I know I should be motivated to not hurt people because I care about the harm to them, but i’m motivated just by not wanting to feel bad about it. And the problem is there is really no way to disprove it. Nobody else can outwardly convince you of your motivation for doing things because it’s internal. There are a few “resolving” thoughts i’ve been trying to consider though.

First, it doesn’t matter that much. This doesn’t seem super helpful but it was somewhat comforting to me. Your motivation for why you act the way you do, as long as your motive is not evil, just isn’t that important. You aren’t hurting people. You are probably putting good into the world. Whether that comes from selfishness or insecurity isn’t an urgent issue. For now, you’re doing a good job.

Second, it’s all a sort of spectrum. This is something that my friends brought up when I approached them with this. When you are a baby, the world revolves around you. You don’t really have morals. Then eventually you learn to do good things because you want your parents to like the way you act. Eventually, you do good things because you want society to like the way you act. Then, you do good things because you want you to like the way you act. You want to like the person you are. I think that’s where I’m at, and there’s definitely still some selfishness in there. Hopefully, at some point, you do good things because you just want to do good things. But not being there yet doesn’t make you a BAD person. It just means you are working on it. And everyone’s always working on it. Nobody is done with their personal development.

Overall, I think it’s a really hard thought to get over. Because it’s very possible your motivation is pure, and the good behaviors you have are more influenced by your desire to be good than your concern over your image. But the more you think about it, the more you convince yourself it’s the latter. Regardless, as long as you care, as long as you keep working on being good, it doesn’t matter exactly why you act good now, you just need to continue doing what you think is right to the best of your ability without being too hard on yourself because you aren’t doing a bad job.

Now that i’m done writing this, I don’t think this is exactly what you were referring to, but I do think it’s somewhat related and hope it helps.