Conscience Flashcards
Aquinas viewpoint
Natural law is Aquinas’ theory on how God is the grounding and source of morality. Conscience is about the human psychology involved in understanding and applying natural moral law. Conscience is ratio reason used to understand and apply God’s natural law.
Ratio
Ratio: placed in every person as a result of being created in the image of God. Conscience is practical reason, requiring judgements of the individual situation.
Like Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes between theoretical and practical reason. Practica ratio (Reason in practice) entails not merely being able to know what should be done, but also the practical way of thinking through how that which should be done can be done with the means available.
The Primary Precepts & Synderesis
Aquinas claims that reason is a power of the human soul and synderesis is the habit or ability of reason to discover foundational ‘first principles’ of God’s natural moral law which gives us insight into God’s intentions for human life and thus our telos.
The first principle synderesis tells us is called the synderesis rule: that the good is what all things seek as their telos. This means that human nature has an innate orientation to the good.
In addition to this, synderesis tells us the primary precepts.
Conscience & Prudence
In Aquinas treatment of natural law, he, like Aristotle, insisted on the need for the intellectual virtue of prudence
‘Prudence entails not only consideration of the reason but also the application to action’
Prudence involves 3 intellectual skills, understanding, judgement & good deliberation. Aquinas was insistent on the importance of good judgement of what is right & proper to do in the circumstance. One size does not fit all.
Moral responsibility
Vincible ignorance: Lack of knowledge for which a person is responsible
Invincible ignorance: Lack of knowledge for which a person is not responsible
There is a close relationship between consent & knowledge. It seems impossible to give informed consent without proper knowledge. Aquinas distinguishes between the two forms of ignorance. If someone is vincibly ignorant, he is potentially blameworthy, this ignorance is avoidable and correctable as there are things that people are just expected to know.
Some ignorance is not of this kinds, as it is not reasonable to expect a person to foresee the consequences of their actions, for example a person may be too young to understand something, or have had good intentions (Apparent good)
Guilt
Aquinas claims that the classic features of conscience follow from the application of our knowledge of the natural moral law to our moral actions, in three ways:
This is how the conscience causes guilt. Conscience is our ability to know whether we have done something, whether we should have done it, and whether it was done well. If we have done something wrong, our conscience will accuse, torment and rebuke us – causing feelings of guilt.
Freud and Aquinas
Whilst Aquinas is attempting to ask what conscience is, Freud is attempting to provide a naturalistic explanation of how moral responsibility & guilt occur. For Freud, conscience was essentially the process of internalising parental prohibitions & demands, creating the super-ego (contradicts the id and working on internalised ideals from parents and society tries to make the ego behave morally).
For Freud, there are three parts to the psychic apparatus, the id (instinctive impulses that seek satisfaction in pleasure), the ego (mediates between the id and the demands of social interaction) & the super-ego
Id and libido
The newborn is all about the id, driven to seek pleasure, such as food. The fundamental part of the id is the libido. The child goes through psychosexual development (early childhood awareness of libido). At the latency period, the child ignores his sexual nature, only for it to re-emerge during puberty, where there is a subconscious recollection of parental & authoritative warnings to ignore sexual feelings
Freud was influenced by Nietzsche who argued that human conscious mind (ego) developed by necessity when humans underwent the radical change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Our natural animalistic instincts (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.
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development relates to his theory of the id, ego and superego. Freud thought that the process of being socialised – being inducted into society – required children to learn to control their Id. This process of learning was developmental in that it comes in stages. If self-control is not learned at a particular stage, it can lead to issues later in life.
Ego and super-ego
The ego is rational and capable of controlling the id, Freud gives the analogy of the horse and its rider. The rider (ego) controls the way the horse (id) goes, sometimes it fails to direct the horse however.
The super-ego develops as a result of socialisation & growth, largely through the effects of parents and authority figures. The super-ego is what makes us feel guilt for having sexual urges. It symbolically internalises the sense of a father figure, and the regulations found in society. It tends to oppose the id, & the more the Oedipus complex is repressed, the stricter the control over the ego — resulting in a stronger sense of morality & guilt.
The Oedipus complex
Freuds notion that boys subconsciously wish to sleep with their mothers & kill their fathers. Freud draws on the theory of the Primal Horde, from which we get our taboos against incest. Freud believes that the men’s collective guilt about their sexual instincts & behaviour is the origin of the guilt we feel. If we feel guilt it is not really about ourselves, but a buried memory of primeval guilt.
Freud’s critique of religion’s approach to developing the conscience
Maintaining social order depends on people repressing their anti-social instincts (e.g. for sex and violence). Religion encourages repression and for that Freud thought it had done “great services for human civilisation” in the “taming of the asocial instincts”. Nonetheless, Freud thought that the Christian belief system had long passed its usefulness because a secular society would be far superior at enabling self-control. So, society would be better off outgrowing religion.
Freud evaluates religion and its doctrines not as claims about reality but as strategies for controlling instincts. For example, for Freud, belief in and propagation of the idea that human nature is corrupted by original sin is really just a method of dealing with our natural instincts, but a primitive and childish method that actually causes as much immorality and unhappiness as it prevents. Viewing humanity as inherently sinful and only God as good, who easily forgives sins, does not provide the proper motivation for following religious social rules, causing frequent “backsliding into sin” and seeking of penance.
