Karma
Paul Burton writes the following on Karma in his book "What is Karma?" (this is a translation from a translation and not the original text):
"It [Karma] is simply the law that holds each one of us responsible for his own actions and places us in a position to accept its consequences. We could call it the 'law of own responsibility'. [...] The literal translation of Karma is 'acting'; in practice this means that Karma is one's own acting. We have made ourselves to what we are now, by our actions - the original term Karma also covers mental actions. Karma is the power of the Universal Spirit to bring about settlement and compensation, to restore balance. In the sphere of human behavior this will lead to the fact that one way or the other, that what we do at some moment in time will return to us. No single action stands on itself: the fruits of every action will in the end inexorably return to the one who has done the action. Karma is a self-moving power. No-one, human or superhuman, has to manage it."
The consequences of your actions will always return to you, but maybe so only in the form of thoughts, conscience, feelings or dreams. You will remember what you have done, and this will influence your mind and your life from that moment on.
The Universal Spirit could be read as the system of the universe as a whole, not necessarily as a self-conscience super-being.
Karma is the guide for a respectful morality, because responsibility is a central item. A Buddhist society therefor is always a society with respectful ethics.
An important aspect of Karma as explained here is conscience, since immoral actions have a tendency to come back to you in the form of a bad conscience, which could be a heavy burden on your shoulders. So conscience actually is the key to finding rational reasons not to steal, to murder or to do other immoral acts.
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The precise form of this behavior is formed by culture and by reason. But the potential of the conscience is probably already there genetically. Those people that don't have a conscience are in psychiatry typed as sociopathic of psychopathic. During the social development we have as a child, this conscience develops itself. In this phase confusion can cause an underdeveloped conscience, or an underdeveloped mindset to be in touch with your conscience. 
Charles Darwin
It prevented our ape-like ancestors from murdering, or mistreating others and being expelled from the group. But with the expansion of humanity, and the complexity of modern society, lots of people are raised not being in touch with it. But most of the times, this is not a good thing for these people who will often be put to prison and lead an unhappy life. So actually the function of our conscience is to prevent us from behaving asocial, to prevent ourselves from being rejected from society. Most criminals will, when they think again what they have done, experience a bad conscience.
It also happens that criminals do have a conscience, but it doesn't trigger during or after the crime they have committed. This is because in some cases the criminals don't recognize the victim as being a fellow man, a member of the same group. This happens for instance to soccer hooligans, war criminals, people causing racial conflicts and people who feel that they are an enemy of society.
It depends on culture and reason who is regarded as belonging to your group. I would say it would be rational to regard the whole of humanity to one and the same group. This would, if followed up, lead to a world of peace and freedom, in which people would have better chances to be happy (because of not being a victim of a war or other conflict between members of different groups). But unfortunately there are subcultures who have other feelings about this issue.
The rules for conscience are formed during our childhood by reason and by culture. Based on both rationality and human feelings, I would say that human rights and property rights should play a major role in this process. And probably it needs more attention from parents and teachers than it mostly gets nowadays.
Sometimes people comment on this with: "I understand from this that respect for other people is a good thing, but why define property rights and have respect for that as well?"
Not going into much detail, I could just add the following example: I wait until you leave your house, room or whatever place you live in, and I burn it down. Next I follow you and steal your wallet from you when you don't watch your back. Next I hack into all banking systems (supposing I'm a brilliant hacker) and take care that you have not any access to money.
I would say that this example would make it clear that without treating your body disrespectful, I could do a lot of other immoral things to you that are all related to property rights. It doesn't answer yet which property rights. Do we have a right on our own properties just like that? Or do we have a right to what we need (and how or by who is that defined)? The answers depend on culture and rationality.
It is popular in philosophy and science, to make claims that the laws of nature as we know them, and especially the law of cause and effect, would be untrue, could not be known, or would be questionable. These kind of claims I see as attempts to escape from the concept of responsibility, which the law of cause and effect is implying. I added three articles to this site to defend the nature of reality as an independent reality, of which we can obtain scientific and objective knowledge, and in which the law of cause and effect is the key factor.
There is also an article added on politics from the perspective of responsibility.