Conscience Flashcards
Conscience
- a moral sense of right and wrong as felt by a person and affecting their behaviour
- 5 possible sources of conscience
1) God-given: is given to a child either at conception or at some later stage of development.
2) innate within us: part of how the person was created, genetic predisposition or how the brain is wired by genetics due to evolution
3) instilled by society: the product of society’s expectations, reflects values and rules of society
4) instilled by authority figures: the product of all authority figures around us (family, teachers etc)
5) instilled by our parents: the product of the person first moral teachers (parents)
The Bible and conscience
- St Paul states conscience is God-given
- he used the word syneidesis, which is often translated as conscience
- suggests there is a human ability to know and choose what is good
- also suggests conscience is not our only way of making a decision
- Paul says, whilst conscience is a measure of your own behaviour and that conscience is valuable he is saying that the ultimate judge of behaviour is Christ
Conscience is God-given
St Jerome:
- conscience is intuitive and he defined syneidesis as “gleams of conscience by which we discern that we sin”
- Jerome translated syneidesis from Greek into Latin as conscientia - a word that included the idea of ethical discernment and also behaviour as a reflection of public expectation
St Augustine:
- understood conscience as the voice of God speaking to the individual
- when we listen to it we are actually hearing the word of God whispering to us about right and wrong
- fits with the story of Augustine’s conversion, one day he listened to a “sing-song voice of a child” instruct him to “pick up a bible and read”
- believed humans have an innate capacity to know the difference between right and wrong, but he believed this alone was not enough to make a person virtuous; God’s grace is needed as well as conscience
- his understanding rests on 3 main ideas:
1) God implants the knowledge of right conduct in humans and this can be known through conscience
2) a person cannot rightly act without the grace of God
3) the motive to act also has to be right, so giving money to charity is only a good act if the motive was to help the less fortunate
- he made conscience the most important element of moral decision making, even more than the teachings of the Church
Conscience is God-given: Aquinas
- he saw conscience as the natural ability of people to understand the difference between right and wrong
- he held reason (ratio) in the highest esteem and necessary to understanding your conscience
- he believed ratio was something that distinguished humans from animals
- he said a persons conscience could go err (go wrong), either ‘invincibly’ (not their own fault) or ‘vincibly’ (through their own fault)
- he said conscience is the process of reasoning, moving from the primary precepts to secondary precepts
- when he says its always right to follow your conscience he means you should always apply your moral principles to each situation as best you can, not that your conscience is always right
- therefore, conscience is a God-given ability, not the voice of God
problems:
- is conscience only available to theists
- too rational? For most emotions rather than reason provide the starting point for moral choices
- makes the concept of direct revelation from God difficult to rationalise
Conscience is God-given: Butler
- believed we have a God-given ability to reason
- we must listen to our conscience because it allows us to act as a moral judge
- its not an intuitive feeling, but the ability to use reason to weigh up factors in moral decisions
- conscience should have ultimate authority over all our instincts
- saw human nature as a hierarchy, with: conscience at the top, then the principle of reflection (makes us approve or disapprove our actions), benevolence, self love, and finally basic needs
- conscience is a persons God-given guide to right conduct and must always be followed
- believed in instances of the conscience being wrong, people would instinctively see the correct action
- did not consider the consequences of an action if its right or wrong
- conscience should harmonise self-love and benevolence, but this can be difficult which is why moral dilemmas can arise
Ultimately thought conscience was the drive of human nature
problems:
- if we are motivated by self-love is this not selfish?
- did God give the same guide to everyone, would seem some peoples conscience is better then others
Conscience is environmental: Freud
- for Freud, conscience is nothing more than the voice of guilt
- parents encourage good behaviour and punish bad behaviour which leads to the moral development of children
- this means that the child will be anxious to avoid displeasure of parents. This anxiety is felt when the child/adult ever considers immoral acts
- the result is powerful feelings of guilt which manifest themselves as a conscience
- key to understanding human behaviour was to understand peoples desires and instincts:
- ID: behaves instinctively
- ego: rational self
- superego: controls behaviour
- therefore a persons experiences impact on the development of the superego and as a result each individuals conscience is shaped by a persons experiences
- for Freud, religious people integrated their guilt in response to their ideas about God, “Catholic guilt” refers to the Christian tendency to feel bad for anything that may contradict “the law”
- non-religious believers recognise this guilt and blame other sources of external authority (govt, family)
problems:
- doesn’t explain a united sense of moral awareness
- many of his ideas are now discredited due to lack of empirical evidence
Conscience is environmental: Fromm
- persons moral centre comes from those around you who exert authority
- their authority involves rewards or punishments
- two types of conscience:
1) authoritarian conscience is “the voice of an internalised external authority”, development of conscience begins with childs experience of its parents - Fromm felt from being in Nazi Germany, he witnessed a whole nation who felt guilt as the prospect of disobeying the government, saw it as no surprise they became submissive
2) humanistic conscience argues by developing our virtues and following the example of good role models we moderate our behaviour, conscience can then become not the voice of an internalised authority, but “our own voice”
problems:
- is humanistic conscience too idealistic
- what about conscience objectors like Bonhoeffer who rose up against the Nazi’s
Conscience as an evolutionary advantage: Dawkins
- argues we have an evolved intuitive sense if right and wrong, what he calls a “lust to be nice” which has been “hardwired into us from the time we lived in close kinship groups”
- this is close to Aquinas’ view that we have an innate tendency because of our nature, it just Aquinas argues God put it there and Dawkins that evolution created this gene of niceness
- animals display reciprocal altruism, where if you groom my back ill groom yours, nature is basically self-interested
- so reciprocal altruism can easily be explain as a survival strategy
- he calls the moral sense, the desire to sacrifice self for strangers, “a misfire of our selfish gene”
- he argued humans transcend the survival battle through conscience and the moral sense, we are the only species that demonstrates non-reciprocal altruism
- ultimately argues goodness is innate to human kind and the selfish and self-promoting gene has given us both reciprocal and non-reciprocal altruism
problems:
- does this mean we used to be less moral
- does that mean some people are more evolved then others
Should the conscience be obeyed?
- law and religion not always right and doesn’t always reflect changing society
- e.g. many Catholics use contraception even though the Church is against it as their conscience tells them protecting themselves from unprepared pregnancy is the right thing to do
- religious people believe conscience is the voice of God, so to disobey it could lead to hell
Should we ignore our conscience?
- even Aquinas said the principles that guide a conscience might be misleading if the person did nit have the correct faculty of reason
- Catholic might argue Bible is more important when making moral decisions
- as its existence is not proven, conscience should not be relied upon
- if conscience really is the voice of God, then why do people get torn when making moral decisions
