Most of us know how to distinguish moral right and wrong. The moral sense also enables us to account for our approval and condemnation of actions and characters as following from our being pleased or pained by them. I am sick of being around a lot of old, mentally immature adults, who think life is a game and money and status is all that matters. Their motives are not clear nor assignable. When someone slips to the street and falls, instead of offering assistance or asking is the individual is okay, these people laugh because they think the calamity of others is a comical situation. The infantile corresponding displays an inferior mental and moral development, and perhaps even childish pain. However, these mentally immature people, many of them have adult children and grandchildren, who tend to be more mature than they are. Nevertheless, I think children find their behavior amusing because few things can afford the child greater pleasure than when the grown-up lowers himself to his level, disregards his superiority, and plays with the child as its equal. The alleviation which furnishes the child pure pleasure is a debasement used by the adult as a means of making things comic and as a source of comic pleasure. As for unmasking, we know that it is based on degradation. 

We have heard that the release of painful emotions is the strongest hindrance to the comic effect. Just as aimless motion causes harm, stupidity mischief, and disappoint pain; –the possibility of a comic effect ends, at least for one who cannot defend oneself against such pain, who is oneself affected by it or must participate in it, whereas one who is unconcerned shows by one’s behavior that the situation of the case in question contains everything necessary to produce a comic effect. Humor is this a means to gain pleasure despite the painful affects which disturb it; it acts as a substitute for this affective development, and takes its place. If we are in a situation which tempts us to liberate painful affects according to our habits, and motives then urge us to suppress these affects in statu nascendi (in the case of being formed or developed), we have the conditions for humor. The person affected by misfortune, pain, excreta, could obtain humoristic pleasure, to ease the hardships he suffers from, while the disinterested party laughs over the comic pleasure.  The deliverances of this faculty are feelings or sentiments; hence, it is counted as a sense. If people do not mature by the time they are 50, it is likely they never will.  

It is disheartening to be stuck in a place with a lot of adults who are more immature than teenagers. It could be because of the political atmosphere. When we have leaders than are immature, show a lack of restraint and family values, it spills into the community. However, instead of firing immature adults who are ruining a business and harassing and annoying others, many employers choose to ignore the mentally unwell behavior, and when they see a decrease in revenue, instead of firing the older person(s), who often has seniority and is the reason for the decline in business, they law off younger, more talented individuals and reduce everyone’s work hours to make up for the loss of revenue. And even though management is aware that senior employees are engaging in hostile and often illegal behavior, they tend to ignore it. For instance, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, Don Neubacher, age 63, announced, on 29 September 2016, he is stepping down amid an ongoing federal investigation into allegations of a hostile work environment in which employees, particularly women, are bullied, sexually harassed, intimidated, and belittled. 

Our observation of an instance of virtuous action is the occasion for a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction, which enables us to distinguishing that action as honorable. Similarly, our observation of an instance of vicious action is the occasion for a feeling of pain or uneasiness, which enables us to distinguish that actions as malicious. It took a federal investigation by a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform examination of misconduct and mismanagement at the National Park Service to get Don Neubacher to step down, so it is likely that this unethical and possibly illegal behavior had been going on unpunished for many, many years. The moral sense is generally an influencing motive in our pursuit of virtue and our avoidance of vicious behavior, and it plays a part in our bestowal of praise and blame. Sometimes as people age, they experience a haunting fear and it turns into a full-blown nightmare in senility. On occasions around the age of 50, 60, or 70, a few people experience a mental decline and in their pathetic condition they have lost their centeredness, and they realize they are not oneself.  

Senility is a reality that comes to some. It symbolized the most exaggerated pain of the oldness that can come with aging. It is all too obvious, all too limiting, all too tragically pathetic. And to age is to have to face the prospect of possibly being senile. Age now divides people into good versus bad. When people become senile, their abilities go away; memory decays, and instead of being on the saddle, the saddle is on them.  Many can recognize their proneness to pain by looking at the kind of reactions they are hoping to elicit from others by choices and behavior. By constantly letting go of our negative feelings about someone who is going senile and annoy us, we thus cure present pain and prophylactically prevent the occurrence of future pain. People who have a mind that is deteriorating often get confused and say and do unusual things, so if it is bothering you so much just avoid them. The many faces of fear are familiar to us all. We have felt free-floating anxiety and panic. We have been paralyzed and frozen by fear. When it is more severe, we become scared, cautious, blocked, tense, shy, speechless, superstitious, defense, and distrustful. We have all been there and can turn it off, but a senile person cannot. 

Good and evil are relative to the person who uses these words; and when people are joined together in a commonwealth, then good and evil are subject to the determinations of the commonwealth. As for our motives for pursuing good and avoiding evil, they may be summed up as self-interest. Were it to our own interest to pursue what others, or the commonwealth have designated as evil, we certainly would; but, for the most part, our appreciation of the convenience which follows from everyone’s following the same rules and, at the worst, our fear of punishment on being caught deter us from the practice of evil. Knowledge consists of perceptions, which must arrive in the mind by one of two routes, either sensation or reflection. Whatever can be known must be accounted for in the way is not knowledge. The proponents of the moral sense accounted for our knowledge of moral right and wrong as reflexive perceptions. When someone observes a given action or considers a certain character trait, these first perceptions are immediately followed by a secondary set of feelings either pleasure or uneasiness, according to whether the action or character is virtuous or vicious.  

By consulting these secondary perceptions, we can make our moral judgments. The proponents of the moral sense make it clear and are careful to point out that actions are not virtuous because we are pleased in a certain manner. Thus, moral pleasures and pains are distinctive feelings. And always distinguish different kinds of pleasure, for example, some may be pleased both by a good musical composition and by a good bottle of wine, and their goodness is determined merely by the pleasure they give; but we do not say on that account that the wine is harmonious or the music is a good flavor. Besides accounting for our knowledge of right and wrong, the moral sense closes the gap between moral knowledge and moral behavior by providing motive for moral behavior. Since moral knowledge consists of feeling of pleasure and uneasiness, the prospect of enjoying or avoiding these feelings is a sufficient motive for pursuing virtue and avoiding vice. If moral knowledge were not ultimately a matter of feelings, it would be possible for someone to know that a certain kind of action is virtuous but still have no motive for doing it.  

Economy of sympathy is one of the most frequent sources of humoristic. People talk about moral sense as talking about an extra organ of sense, a moral nose or a moral ear. How acute they were to have discovered a new human organ which no one had noticed until they came along! Merely to mention the possibility was enough to show the nonexistence of such an organ and to render the doctrine of a moral sense laughable. However, God determined us to be pleased by benevolent actions; and when nothing interferes with the moral sense, we count benevolence a virtue and malevolence a vice. We do have a good reason for preferring one sort of action to another, namely the action’s tendency to maintain society. Should someone ask, “And why should I prefer the maintenance of society to its destruction? Society exists because, as a matter of fact, by far the greater number of people have the kind of feelings to make it possible. Our moral knowledge comes from reason; reason alone can never be an exciting motive of action. A person may know that a certain way of acting may have a certain result, but in order for him to act to achieve that result, he must first find it pleasing.  

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the low $700s

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No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.  Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single-story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more! Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand-new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/