Morality is a person’s internal assessment of the norms of his behavior and his actions from the point of view of goodness. Moral is what a person sees in his actions not just as acceptable, but good and good. Immoral — bad, unacceptable, harmful, ethically ugly and unworthy of a person.
Morality is not characteristic of children: the concept of “good” is very vague for them, and they are not interested in looking at their behavior from any point of view. Children often live from the position of «like» — «dislike», and not all, growing up, become moral people.
An ethical person treats morality as a guiding star: all our earthly turns make sense only insofar as we are on the right path. The moral meaning of any word and deed is the first thing such a person thinks about, what he is guided by, regardless of whether anyone looks at him or not.
But there are not many ethical people among ordinary people.
Are there many people among us who are interested in this, who choose to be decent? We are forced to disappoint: in Russia today there are fewer of them than in other European countries. See Moral state of modern Russian society
Ordinary people treat morality like a fence: let it be, until it gets in the way. We ourselves remember morality when someone violates our borders, and we are quite ready to climb over the fence when we really need or want to, but no one sees. Not every adult person is a moral person, depending on his awareness and development of positions of perception, a person looks at his behavior with different moral depth. With little awareness, a person can do bad deeds and not consider himself immoral precisely because he does not see or think about what he is doing↑. A person with stereotyped thinking instead of constant searching and trying on “is it good or not?” mindlessly accepts common formulas sometimes of not the highest quality.
What is «moral» and what is not — it can be very difficult to decide. Is lending moral or immoral? Good deed or not? Is sex before marriage acceptable or immoral? Can a man have four wives? In different cultures and at different times, these issues are resolved in very different ways.
The first position of perception prompts a person to formulas of morality such as: “Good is what is good for me. And everything that is against me is immoral.”
Bushman’s view: “If I took the cows away, that’s good. If they took away my cows, it is evil.”
The more developed a person’s position of perception, the more a person in his morality thinks about the good for others. The following can be accepted as a general formula: “It is moral that makes a person healthy and happy without causing significant harm to others. And that which deprives a person of happiness and harms his health is immoral.”
Don’t forget about other people. For example, if your behavior concerns not only you, then you need to take into account the interests of your partner. If what is happening concerns not only the couple, then the interests of others must be taken into account. Your freedom ends where another person’s life begins. «The freedom of my fist ends in front of another person’s nose.»
Conflicts are very difficult when individual freedom collides with the conservative views of others. Frank, long and heartfelt kisses of a loving couple in a subway car seem to them their free right, but for an elderly lonely woman sitting next to them, it seems like wild promiscuity. It seems that mutual correctness is needed in these conflicts. Let people be brought up in your opinion wildly, but it is not necessary to beat their moral (moral) feelings with your freedom (in their perception — promiscuity). But also, no one needs to call obscene, immoral everything that goes beyond your usual and rigid limits, it is immoral in this case to be aggressive and stick offensive labels.
Morality is opposed not so much by pragmatism as by narrow-mindedness. A pragmatist can be a person of high morality if he realizes that this is beneficial to him, at least from the point of view of prospects. A pragmatic leader can instill morality if he sees that it gives an increase in profit over time. If the pragmatist is not accustomed to and does not know how to look far, he is decent only in the area of observation of a policeman or out of habit.