CONSCIENCE
Conscience
• When your intelligence don’t tell you something ain’t right,
your conscience gives you a tap you on the shoulder and
says ‘Hold on’. If it don’t, you’re a snake.
Elvis Presley, American rock ‘n’ roll icon
(1935 – 1977)
• Conscience is God’s presence in man.
Emmanuel Swedenborg, Swedish-American spiritualist
(1688 – 1772)
• Reason often makes mistakes but conscience never does.
Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), American writer and
humourist (1818 – 1885)
• When considering the nature and function of conscience
there are four questions to keep in mind:
• What is conscience?
• Where does conscience come from?
• Is conscience innate or acquired?
• What is its function in ethical decision making?
What is conscience?
• A moral faculty or feeling prompting us to see that certain actions are morally right
or wrong.
• Conscience can prompt people in different directions.
• We consider it to be a reliable guide but it lacks consistency and can lead people to
perform terrible actions.
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Timeline
• Augustine of Hippo (334 – 430)
• Thomas Aquinas (1224 – 1274)
• Joseph Butler (1692 – 1752)
• John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890)
• Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
• Jean Piaget (1896 –1980)
Jean
Piaget
• Erich Fromm (1900 –1980)
Sigmund
Freud
• Lawrence Kohlberg (1927 – 1987)
Augustus of
Hippo
300
Thomas
Aquinas
John
Newman
Joseph Baker
Erich
Fromm
Lawrence
Kohlberg
1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000
Religious Views
• Biblical teaching
•Augustine
• Thomas Aquinas
• Joseph Butler
• John Henry Newman
Secular Views
• Jean Piaget
• Erich Fromm
• Lawrence Kohlberg
• Sigmund Freud
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Religious Views
• These views rely on an intuitionist approach – conscience is innate and comes from
God
• The Bible – ‘the law written on the heart’
Biblical Teaching
• It is assumed by some biblical writers and early Christian teachers that our
conscience is God-given.This view is put clearly in Paul’s letter to the Romans:
• ‘When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these,
though not having the law, are a law to themselves.They show that what the law requires is
written on their hearts…’ (Romans 2:14 – 15a)
Augustine
• Conscience is the voice of God speaking to us
1. Influence of Plato’s Form of the Good
• Augustine was influenced by Plato’s Form of the Good.
• God is the source of all goodness.
• Goodness is a sign of God’s divine love.
•The conscience results from this outpouring of God’s
divine love.
•It is when God speaks to the individual in solitary
moments.
2. Conscience as a tool to help us know God
• A tool to observe the law of God within human hearts.
•“Men see the moral rules written in the book of light which is called Truth from
which all laws are copied.”
• Conscience is the voice of God talking to us.
• It is intuitive, bringing us closer to God.
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3. Divine Command Theory
•Humans have an innate capacity to know the
difference between right and wrong.
•Every person has a conscience, however this
alone is not enough to make a person virtuous.
• Humans need God’s grace as well as conscience.
•Pelagius v. Augustine –
Pelagius held that humans have the ability within
themselves to decide for or against the good.
Augustine insisted that God’s grace was necessary for moral goodness.
If God’s grace is needed in order to do good, only Christians can do good.
Therefore, Augustine claimed 3 things:
1. God implants knowledge of right conduct in humans and this can be known through
conscience.
2. A person cannot rightly act (as opposed to knowing what is right) without the grace
of God.
3. The motive also has to be right – this is to draw close to God.
• Two people could each do a good act, e.g. giving money to a beggar, but only the
person whose motive was love of God performed a praiseworthy moral act.
• Conscience is given by God and discovered by humans.
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Aquinas
• All people aim for what is good and sin is falling short of
God’s ideals, but sometimes even following conscience we
will get it wrong.
Conscience for Aquinas has 2 essential parts:
Synderesis – the use of right reason by which we learn
basic moral principles and understand that we have to do
good and avoid evil.
Conscientia – the actual judgement or decision we make
that leads us to act.
• Does Aquinas’ rationalistic approach consider revelation that comes directly from
God?
Aquinas – Reason Seeking Understanding
Accept
general
principles
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Apply
these
principles
With the
help of
conscience
To
particular
situations
Butler
• Wrote that the most crucial thing which distinguished
women and men from the animal world was the possession
of the faculty of reflection or conscience.
• So being human involves being moral.
• Conscience is a person’s God-given guide to right conduct
and its demands must therefore always be followed.
Conscience comes from God and must be obeyed
Conscience will harmonise self love and
benevolence
• The consequence of an action is not what makes it right or wrong as that has already
happened
• The purpose of conscience is to guide a person into a way of life that will make them
happy
• Conscience will harmonise self-love and benevolence – this may take some sorting
out and so in moral dilemmas we may be uncertain what to do
• Conscience controls human nature
Joseph Butler – Conscience comes from God
Conscience
Principle of
reflection
Self-love and
benevolence
Basic
drives
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Newman
• Conscience is the voice of God
• ‘If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are
frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies
there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are
ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.’
Freud
The human personality consists of three areas:
• The superego – the set of moral controls given to us by
outside influences. It is our moral code or conscience and
is often in conflict with the Id.
• The ego – the conscious self, the part seem by the
outside world.
• Id – the unconscious self, the part of the mind containing
basic drives and repressed memories. It is amoral, has no
concerns about right and wrong and is only concerned
with itself.
• Conscience is most clearly connected with the sense of
guilt that we feel when we go against our conscience.
Conscience then is simply a construct of the mind.
• In religious people this would be in response to perceptions of God.
• In non-religious people it would be their responses to externally imposed authority.
• The content of our consciences are shaped by our experiences
• The superego internalises the disapproval of others and creates the guilty conscience
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Piaget
• A child’s moral sense develops and the ability to reason
morally depends on cognitive development.
Two stages of moral development:
• Heteronomous morality (between the ages of 5 and
10 years) when the conscience is still immature, rules are
not to be broken and punishment is expected if a rule is
broken.The consequences of an action will show if it is
right or wrong.
• Autonomous morality (10+) when children develop
their own rules and understand how rules operate in and
help society.The move towards autonomous morality
occurs when the child is less dependant on others for
moral authority.
Kohlberg
• Identified stages of moral development which he believed
individuals had to follow in sequence.
• People move from:
•Behaving in socially acceptable ways because they are
told to do so by authority figures and want to gain
approval,
• To keeping the law
• To caring for others
• And finally respect for universal principles and the demands of an individual
conscience.
• Kohlberg felt that most adults never got beyond keeping the law.
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Fromm
Authoritarian Conscience
• All humans are influenced by external authorities which
apply rules and punishments for breaking them
• These are internalised by the individual
• A guilty conscience is a result of displeasing the authority
•Disobedience produces guilt which makes us more
submissive to the authority
Humanistic Conscience
• Fromm’s views changed over time
• He saw the humanistic conscience as being much healthier as it assesses and evaluates
our behaviour.
• We use it to judge how successful we are as people.
• We use our own discoveries in life and the teachings and example of others to give us
personal integrity and moral honesty.
• This is the opposite to the slavish obedience and conformity of the authoritarian
conscience.
Other Views of Conscience
• Vincent MacNamara – conscience is an awareness or attitude – seeing goodness
and truth as important
• Richard Gula – conscience is a way of seeing the world and responding through the
choices we make
• Daniel Maguire – conscience is discerning the best moral choice.This involves
reason, but also shared experiences of the past and of culture, as well as our personal
experiences.
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Problems
• For Christians conscience is often regarded as the voice of God. However, this raises
some serious questions:
•If we always knew that what our conscience told us to do was God’s command
then we would never make mistakes
• However, we do make mistakes
• If we can’t hear God properly – whose fault is it?
• Christians often have disagreements over moral issues such as abortion.
• So are things not as clear cut as ‘the voice of God’ definition of conscience suggests?
• Many atheists claim that conscience is important to them.
• Such claims do not rely upon God.
• For atheists, agnostics and humanists, conscience is part of being human and there is
no need to involve God when moral decisions have to be made.
• Conscience appears to be a universal part of human moral living.
Conscience
• Conscience implies personal responsibility:
“And perhaps a little demythologising may be in order, for
conscience is not a still small voice, not bells, nor a blind stab in
the dark; it is simply me coming to a decision.When I say ‘my
conscience tells me’ all I am really saying is ‘I think’.”
(Jack Mahoney – Seeking the Spirit)
• Is it innate or acquired?
• Or both?
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