Most people, when acting in ways that are subject to moral constraint, do not derive these content of these constraints from first principles, but simply conform to the conventional morality of their society (i.e. the prevailing set of moral norms). When philosophers talk about “morality,” on the other hand, they typically use the term in a more honorific sense, with reference to a more idealized set of constraints. In this paper, I would like to examine the relationship between these two sets of constraints. I begin by developing an informal taxonomy of the way that moral philosophers have conceived of the relationship, suggesting that there are five major “models” of conventional morality implicit (and occasionally explicit) in the literature. I then try to show how each of these models tries to perform a difficult balancing act. Philosophers typically want to give a certain amount of authority to conventional morality – so that they will have “intuitions” against which they can test their higher-order theorizing – but not too much authority, because they consider parts of conventional morality be retrograde, if not simply immoral. I will then try to show that the model of conventional morality that does the best job at achieving this balance is the one with the least following among moral philosophers.