proper conduct

Viewed this way, minding our p’s and q’s is less about proscriptive notions of correctness, and more about mindfulness, self-discovery and proper conduct.

One does not need to reach back to the 18th century to find leaders who had a strong sense of proper conduct in public life.

In the 1990s, the scholar and former New York Sen. Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe how societies tend to accept once-intolerable behavior, thus lowering the standards for what is deemed proper conduct going forward.

They will say there are "important issues of principle at stake" affecting the rights of individuals and "the proper conduct of government".

According to Gagnon and Simon, these sexual scripts train people in what counts as proper conduct or allowable sexual behavior in any given time and place.