A thousand times you do the right thing and receive no praise. But the one time you do the wrong thing you are harshly blamed. This is the way it ought to be. Praise should be reserved for the supererogatory. To praise people for doing what it is their duty to do shows that moral decline has set in. If memory serves, Kant makes this point somewhere in his vast corpus.
Dennis Prager once said that wives should praise their husbands for their fidelity. I don't think so. Being married entails certain moral requirements, and fidelity is one of them. One should not be praised for doing what one morally must do; one should be blamed for failing to do what one morally must do.
And yet we do feel inclined to praise people for doing the obligatory.
A related point has to do with expressing gratitude to someone for doing his job. I took my wife in for a minor medical procedure this morning. As we were leaving I thanked the nurse. I would have been slightly annoyed had she said, "I'm just doing my job." Was my thanking her out of place? Maybe not. Maybe my thanking was not for her doing her job, but for her doing it in a 'perky' and friendly way.
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