Conscience the Subject of the Moral Judgement

• One of the mental processes leading to action is a sense of duty, and the level at which an individual judges right or wrong is called the level of conscience.

• Current discussion focuses on descriptive science, asking how conscience works in the human mind, not on the validity of its decisions.

• Conscience is defined as the faculty or principle that pronounces on the moral quality of actions or motives, approving the right and condemning the wrong.

• Popular opinion views conscience as a separate faculty, but modern psychologists see the mind as a unity, with the whole mind making moral judgments.

• The word conscience (Latin con- = knowing together) and its link to consciousness suggest that the mind as a whole is responsible for moral judgment.

• Butler distinguished two aspects of conscience: cognitive/reflective and imperative/authoritative.

• Cognitive/reflective conscience considers characters, actions, intentions, motives to determine their goodness or badness.

• Butler saw this as mainly intellectual, comparing actions to an ideal nature of man, and judging pain as appropriate to wrong-doing and happiness to right-doing.

• Conscience is also intuitive, directly seeing rightness/wrongness without reasoning; judgments vary from logical conclusions to direct intuitions without explanation.

• Similar variation exists in other areas, such as religion, where some judgments result from reasoning and others are self-evident truths.

• Imperative/authoritative conscience not only argues for an action but decides in favour of one, acting like a judge rather than an advocate.

• Although human weakness may limit decision-making ability, the right to decide is always present.

• Conscience involves judgment, direction, superintendency, and ideally should govern human behaviour.

• In daily life, conscience does not decide on every action due to the role of habits.

• C. D. Broad added a third aspect: the executive/active function, where conscience initiates or checks actions.

• Judgments of conscience may have ideo-motor tendencies, naturally leading to action or preventing it.

• The sense of duty works as a motive for action, sometimes overridden by other human tendencies.

• Socrates observed his inner daemon gave mainly negative guidance, telling him what not to do.

• Negative intuitions are common—wrongness is often seen without reasoning, while positive guidance usually requires reflection.

• It is generally easier to state prohibitions (e.g., “do not steal”) than to define positive duties (e.g., what honesty requires).

• Conscience can also give positive intuitions, such as feeling that a particular act is the only right one to do.

• The feeling of remorse is closely connected to conscience, producing a peculiar, unpleasant pain when we judge an action as wrong.

• Pains of conscience are emphasised as a reason to avoid wrongdoing, showing the affective aspect of mind in moral life.

• Remorse is more common than pleasant moral satisfaction because conscience deals more with the negative aspect (what ought not be done) than the positive aspect (what ought to be done).

• It is often claimed that conscience is infallible and its judgements are final, with no appeal from them.

• From one viewpoint, if at the moment of acting a person has the intuition that an action is wrong, it cannot be right for him to do it, even if approved by ethical theory, public opinion, or revealed religion.

• In this sense, it can never be right to disobey conscience, and the idea that “an erring conscience is a chimera” may hold truth, though not in Kant’s original meaning.

• Religious belief may hold that God never allows a man’s conscience to lead him astray.

• In practice, conscience can give decisions contrary to accepted moral standards, and even contrary to what the same conscience will direct at a later stage of mental development.

• An extreme case is the fanatic who sincerely obeys his conscience but is led to actions almost universally considered wrong.

• Conscience can be educated and trained in both individuals and groups to become more sensitive to certain evils.

• Example: In Britain, sensitivity to cruelty to animals has increased over time.

• A person raised where moderate drinking is customary may initially see no evil in it, but later experience may lead his conscience to demand total abstinence.

• There can also be a deadening of conscience or hardening of the heart, a negative education where repeated disobedience makes conscience less clear until it stops bothering the individual.

• Psychology holds that conscience varies over time for most people, and judgements may change under outside influences.

• A person may have what Ruskin called the “conscience of an ass”, but if he associates with saints, follows their example reflectively, and practices what conscience directs, it may develop into the conscience of a saint.

• Phrases like “the conscience of the whole nation” suggest a shared conscience, arising because individuals in the same environment and moral influences often have similar conscience-led decisions.

• Examples include the “Nonconformist conscience” or “the conscience of the British people”.

• These phrases are figurative, as conscience is essentially the faculty of an individual.

• Conscience becomes most prominent when an individual disagrees with his society and feels he ought to act differently from what the group has always done.

• A conscientious objector resists the accepted code of his group.

• Using conscience to mean a generally accepted moral principle instead of the individual act of moral judgement leads to confusion in language and confusion in thought.