conscience

Question 1

freud

Answer 1

mind was divided into the Id (our unconscious animalistic desires), Ego (Our conscious decision-making self) and the Super Ego (the part of us that “stores” the values we introjected ((unconsciously adopted)) from authority figures during childhood and is the source of our moral feelings).

Freud was influenced by Nietzsche who argued that human conscious mind (what Freud called the ego) developed by necessity when humans underwent the radical change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Our natural animalistic instincts (What Freud called the Id) were of less use to us in the new environment of society, in fact they were a hinderance as they called on us to behave in ways that would make society fall apart. Consciousness emerged as the space in-between our instincts and the outside world as a mediator which had to decide which instincts to act on and which not to.

emerges as a reflection of the values and prohibitions introduced during one’s upbringing. In essence, conscience, according to Freud, is the manifestation of what society expects from individuals

Question 2

freud criticisms

Answer 2

Karl Popper criticised Freud’s theory for being ‘unfalsifiable’ as it could not say what would prove it wrong. This means it is not true empiricism - difficult to see what would falsify the claim that the superego acts in the way that freud suggests

almost as if freud has constructed these past events as an explanation which seemed to fit the data - insufficient attention to the possibility of other explanations

he wasn’t saying there was absolutely nothing of value in Freud’s ideas – just that they needed to be subjected to proper scientific experiment and testing.

Piagetwas a contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud but came to similar conclusions

the claim that conscience is the result of conditioning/socialisation is scientifically accurate according to Piaget
- moral development as evolving from obedience to autonomy in moral reasoning

work on the developmental stages of reasoning suggests conscience is not an innate faculty but something acquired

Freud concludes that society would be much better off if it could admit that the purpose of its social rules is the maintenance of social order, rather than their “pretended sanctity”.

Question 3

aquinas

Answer 3

Conscience is the whole process of synderesis and conscientia together.

• Reason has a power called synderesis which allows us to first know the synderesis rule (or ‘key precept’) and then the primary precepts.
• The ‘synderesis rule’ is that we have the tendency to do good and avoid evil - universal, infalliable desire which is a part of gods will
• The primary precepts are to protect and preserve human life, educate, reproduce, live in an orderly society and worship God.
• It also has a power called conscientia, which allows us to apply the primary precepts to moral actions/situations and figure out what we should do.

We always have a duty to inform our conscience.
Banner - ‘To train it through habit and experience in the virtue of prudence, to be wary of being misled’, and to listen to the voice of the eternal moral law within us.’

Question 4

aquinas criticism

Answer 4

doesn’t actually fit in with our conscious experience as we usually act intuitively and rationalise later
- also fails to take into account environmental and social factors

Aquinas is overly optimistic about human nature when he claims that it has an orientation towards the good.

Thomas Hobbes, who lived through the English civil war and saw Parliament execute the King, saw human nature as dangerous and murderous
Protestant theologians also questioned the faith that Aquinas’ Natural Law placed in the moral reasoning of fallen beings, arguing that human beings are sinners, as taught in Calvins doctrine of total depravity, and are corrupted by pride and self interest

there are vastly different moral beliefs across cultures; this is called descriptive moral relativism.Fletchermade the argument that this could be taken as evidence that there is not an innate God-given ability of reason to discover the natural law, since then we should expect more moral agreement - what Aquinas thought was human nature was really just his culture.

Bonhoeffer - Discusses conscience as an awareness of God and the call of responsibility towards others.
Augustine - Believed that conscience is the voice of God speaking within us, guiding our moral choices.
Newman - Emphasised the personal, intuitive aspect of conscience as the voice of God in the soul of each individual.

Question 5

fromm

Answer 5

freud only focusses on guilt and doesn’t explain why some people are driven to disobey authority and others aren’t-this could perhaps be explained by Fromm
+ Oedipus complex is contradicted by matriarchal
cultures.

• authoritarian conscience submission to external authority, often leading to blind obedience ( link to how aquinas is too optimistic - nazism)
• The humanistic conscience is not external - ‘Con-scientia’ refers to self- knowledge: to listen to oneself over the noise of authoritarian voices and to develop authentic values that lead to flourishing and avoid failure by learning from past experience
  it is possible to reject the authoritarian conscience and develop a mature, ‘humanistic’ conscience that reflects one’s own considered values.

conscience is not a rigid, fixed entity but a fluid process that evolves with self-awareness and ethical growth.

Freud, in other words, has a reductive and pessimistic view of conscience, seeing only the authoritarian option and refusing to accept that we can develop our own, mature humanistic conscience.