Moral Science; a Compendium of EthicsBain, Alexander
Philosophy
Moral Science; a Compendium of Ethics
Bain, Alexander
Ethics; Ethics -- History
His account of _Compassion_ is similar. In the young, the signs and
appearances of distress excite a painful feeling, by recalling their
own experience of misery. In the old, the connexion between a feeling
and its adjuncts has been weakened by experience. Also, when children
are brought up together, they are often annoyed by the same things, and
this tends powerfully to create a fellow-feeling. Again, when their
parents are ill, they are taught to cultivate pity, and are also
subjected to unusual restraints. All those things conspire to make
children desire to remove the sufferings of others. Various
circumstances increase the feeling of pity, as when the sufferers are
beloved by us, or are morally good. It is confirmatory of this view,
that the most compassionate are those whose nerves are easily
irritable, or whose experience of affliction has been considerable.
2.--_The Moral Sense_. Hartley denies the existence of any moral
instinct, or any moral judgments, proceeding upon the eternal relations
of things. If there be such, let instances of them be produced prior to
the influence of associations. Still, our moral approbation or
disapprobation is disinterested, and has a factitious independence. (1)
Children are taught what is right and wrong, and thus the associations
connected with the idea of praise and blame are transferred to the
virtues inculcated and the vices condemned. (2) Many vices and virtues,
such as sensuality, intemperance, malice, and the opposites, produce
_immediate_ consequences of evil and good respectively. (3) The
benefits, immediate or (at least) obvious, flowing from the virtues of
others, kindle love towards them, and thereafter to the virtues they
exhibit. (4) Another consideration is the _loveliness of virtue_,
arising from the suitableness of the virtues to each other, and to the
beauty, order, and perfection of the world. (5) The hopes and fears
connected with a future life, strengthen the feelings connected with
virtue. (6) Meditation upon God and prayer have a like effect. 'All the
pleasures and pains of sensation, imagination, ambition (pride and
vanity), self-interest, sympathy, and theopathy (affection towards
God), as far as they are consistent with one another, with the frame of
our natures, and with the course of the world, beget in us a moral
sense, and lead us to the love and approbation of virtue, and to the
fear, hatred, and abhorrence of vice. This moral sense, therefore,
carries its own authority with it, inasmuch as it is the sum total of
all the rest, and the ultimate result from them; and employs the whole
force and authority of the whole nature of man against any particular
part of it that rebels against the determinations and commands of the
conscience or moral judgment.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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