Action-moral sense connection

Why am I not sorry at sin? We ought to have feelings commensurate with our actions. Our feelings should match our actions. When we do something very bad, we ought to feel very bad; when we do something very good we ought to feel very good. Feeling here refers to the deep moral sense and not to physical sense, although the moral sense affects the physical sense. A hard day's work may be the right thing to do, and when we have done it our bodies may feel very bad but we feel very good about our work. In contrast, gluttonizing a large piece of cake may be the wrong thing to do, but our bodies still enjoy the pleasure of the cake while our moral sense aches for having eaten it. Whatever the mechanism that ties our actions to our moral sense actually is, at least we can say its proper function is this: to give us feelings commensurate with our actions. We can call this mechanism the "action-moral sense connection."

(Note on the "action-moral sense" connection: it is not logically necessary. Why should we have any "feeling" at all about any action we have done? Why are we affected emotionally by our bodily actions? There is an implied fused duality here. "We" feel bad about "our" actions. "We" refers to our inward self - the man in the machine. "Our" refers to our bodily actions - the machine. This is a duality. We can observe and react to our own actions in the third person. Yet the duality is fused; "we" feel bad about "our" actions because we are our. There is an ontological connection between the body and soul on which the "action-moral sense" rides.)

On what scale then is rightness and wrongness measured? If we should feel "very bad" about "very bad" actions, what constitues a "very bad" action? Here we need to explore the nature of true evil. A thought on it: justice is the best theme for exploring true virtue and evil. That which is most evil is that which is most unjust; that which is most right is most just. Perhaps the word "fittingness" is a better, though colloquial, term for the idea. How do we determine what is just or fitting? (insert dissertation on virtue here)

So, when we sin and do not feel bad for it, what is happening? How has the action-moral sense tie been broken? An action against God, any action at all, must be more unjust than even the most heinous crime against any created thing. And yet we find the opposite in our feelings for our crimes: we feel worse for sinning against man than we do for sinning against God. We are morally and physically disturbed when we sin against a fellow being, yet we seem to be very little affected by our sin against our Maker and Lord. In some cases the action-moral sense connection is broken even with crimes against humanity. Guilty criminals sometimes never repent and never allow remorse to spring up and show that justice has been met in their hearts as well as it being forced on their bodies by prison or execution. Is there anything so disturbing, so maddening, so contemptible as an unrepentant murderer or rapist? Their unrepentance is as great of a crime as their first. Their unrepentance may actually be the greater crime; it feels fitting in some cases to pardon the original crime if the criminal repents, but it never feels fitting to pardon unrepentance.

We are not naturally born with a hardened action-moral sense connection. Children are very soft and usually repent of their sin far more quickly than do adults. This observation suggests that losing our action-moral sense connection is a gradual process. Then what makes up that process and how can we reverse it?

A theory: we are not sorry for sin for one of two reasons - 1) we have not learned that some action is sin, or 2) we have resisted our guilt-making mechanism to the point of damaging it (1 Tim 4.2).

Is "conscience" synonymous with "action-moral sense connection"?

DJB