"critically Assess The Claim That Conscience Is A Reliable Guide To Ethical Decision Making."

"Critically assess the claim that conscience is a reliable guide to ethical decision making."

Conscience is widely defined as the inner sense of right and wrong that affects our behaviour or reflects upon the goodness or otherwise of our actions. The exact nature and origins of the conscience are disputed by thinkers from a range of religious and secular traditions, and these disagreements are key to determining whether or not the conscience is to be considered a reliable guide to ethical decision making. In the Christian tradition the conscience is predominantly considered to have its origins in God or through discovering God`s will - if this is done correctly, the conscience is therefore to be considered a reliable guide. Most secular theories about the conscience see it as something developmental or socially conditioned and therefore recognise that it is not always a reliable guide to right moral choices.

St. Augustine (354-430) was an early Christina theologian whose theories about the origin of conscience draw on biblical accounts of the conscience found in Paul and earlier Old Testament writers. Augustine believed that conscience was an innate sense of right and wrong that comes from our awareness of God`s love. God demonstrates his virtue and divine love to us which highlights our own failings and evokes a sense of our own inadequacy which we use to judge our actions. Because God is benevolent and the source of all virtue, comparison with God the most reliable moral guide we can have. The implication of this theory is that the conscience is fully authoritative and should always be followed (even if Augustine did realise this was difficult due to our sinful human nature). Because conscience is effectively God speaking to us we must consider it to be fundamentally reliable. This view of the conscience that Augustine puts forward has strengths in that it seems to recognise the strength of feeling that can be evoked by the conscience for some people, suggesting that the conscience is an awareness of our own inadequacies (and the associated guilt) when compared to God`s ultimate virtue is a very fitting image. However, what Augustine does not account for are people who appear to act with no conscience at all or incidences where two people may wrestle with the same ethical dilemma and, following their consciences, reach different decisions - which ought to be impossible if God`s moral code is the source of the conscience.

Another theory of conscience is put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas which tries to explain not only the origins and nature of the conscience but give some account of why it appears to fail some people. For Aquinas conscience was a rational and intellectual response to the laws of God revealed in nature and through scri pture - it amounts to, as he puts it, "the application of knowledge to activity" and comes in two parts. Aquinas uses the terms Conscientia and Synderesis to describe the two parts of the conscience involved in ethical decision making. Conscientia is the actual act of applying right reason to moral dilemmas, and is the active part of ethical decision making synderisis is a kind of inherent knowledge of moral principles which are God given. Aquinas fully accepted the notion that conscience was something that can develop over time and had to be informed by reason and education - it is not the direct voice of God working within us - but he believed that because it was founded on a base of innate knowledge of God`s will it had binding authority. For Aquinas, if we follow our consciences to the best of our ability having properly educated ourselves and applied correct reason, we will do good - and even if that does not turn out to be the case we will not have committed any crime that we are blameless for because we followed our conscience.

Aquinas` view gives weight to the role of reason and education in the development of the conscience and so recognises that it can develop over time, but maintains that its founding principles are God-given. The theory Aquinas puts forward tries to cover all bases at once conscience is reliable if combined with proper education and reason, binding even if we lack those things, but also potentially unreliable given that we can be misinformed. What Aquinas adds to the debate around conscience as a reliable guide to ethical decision making is the notion that education  and the application of reason plays an important role, and that we must ensure we spend the time properly considering the situation before we act. However he gives no satisfactory answer to the dilemma that comes about when he says that conscience is binding in all situations but can also be misinformed, which suggests that we should always act according to our conscience even if we know it might lead us to commit unethical actions.

Other Christian scholars such as John Henry Newman have suggested, like Aquinas, that conscience is innate and authoritative, as the voice of God acting within us, but also that it develops over time. According to Newman the conscience is an "impulse of nature" which is found in all people and, if properly examined and developed, will almost always agree with scri pture and the religious authorities of the church - but he does not rule out the possibility that sometimes it may. In these instances he says it is essential that we spend serious time considering whether or not it is truly our conscience that is telling us to rebel and that we fully understand the situation we are presented with but that, if after all of this our conscience still rejects the laws of the church or scri pture, we must follow our conscience because it is the most authoritative guide we have. For him the conscience definitely has the potential to be a reliable guide to ethical decision making as long as it is subjected to proper education and scrutiny.

However, the potential for development and education of the conscience proposed both by Newman and to an extent Aquinas has a negative side. If we accept the notion that conscience can be informed and change over time, we must also accept the counter-notion that conscience can be misinformed and stunted by lack of proper education. In this sense the conscience would still be present in a person but would not act as a reliable guide to ethical decision making.

This idea of development and conditioning is the basis of most psychological ideas about the development of the conscience, including those put forward by Freud, Fromm and Piaget. Freud`s theory centres around the conscience acting as the voice of guilt that stems from the internalised judgements and condemnation of society that are engendered into us as we develop through childhood. Freud believed that the human psyche was split into three distinct parts the Id, which is responsible for the unconscious `animal` drives of the human creature such as the need for sex which we largely repress the ego, the notion of self which we present to others and that is often at odds with the drives of the id and the superego, the part of the mind that internalises the judgements of society in order to balance the two competing components of the Id and the Ego. It is the superego that we take to be conscience, and our feeling of right and wrong is nothing more, says Freud, than guilt and pre-emptive fear of punishment or condemnation.

This view differs wildly from the previous Christian notions of conscience that I have talked about in that it does not attest any reliability nor authority to the conscience because it does not see it as corresponding to any form of objective morality at all. All Freud believes the conscience does is provide us with an emotional - not a rational - sense of guilt at actions we fear we will be condemned by society for, which is not an objective standard of morality. If Freud`s conception of the conscience is true then it cannot be considered a reliable guide to making ethical decisions. This view of conscience as unreliable has its benefits in that it allows us to account for cultural differences in morality or between people with different consciences if we remove any sense of attachment to an objective standard of ethics.

Jean Piaget proposed another psychological account for the conscience which was not so guilt-centric as Freud`s but retained the notion of a development over time. Piaget theorized that the conscience develops over time as we grow up and is, in its later stages, reasoned - part of the process of it developing is the application of reason to moral laws that we learn when we are young. He proposed two stages of development for the conscience Heteronomous morality and Autonomous morality. Heteronomous morality for Piaget is characterized by the constraint of moral laws imposed on us when we are young, is based on rules and the anticipated consequences of our actions - in contrast to Autonomous morality which is more developed and comes about through rules we reason and impose upon ourselves for the benefit of society because have matured to a point where we realise that cooperation and respect are beneficial to all.

Piaget`s conception challenges the notion that it is always either reliable or unreliable, as he recognises that the conscience can develop from a state of unreliability when we are young to become more reliable as a guide to ethical decision making as we grow older and develop. He does not believe it is always going to be reliable, and so does not place the same emphasis on the commands of conscience that some theorists have, but equally does not see it as fundamentally unreliable at all times either and so does not discount it offhand as Freud and his followers seem to.

Piaget`s ideas about conscience - particularly the notion that it becomes reliable as we develop and begin to take into account the needs of society around us - raise some interesting questions about what we mean when we consider `reliability` in the first place. If by reliable we mean that the conscience refers to some external standard of incontrovertible goodness (as proposed by those who claim it stems from God) or otherwise then the issue is quite clear cut some, mostly the religious perspectives, argue that it must be, and others disagree and so discount conscience as unreliable. This response from the secular theorists can be quite unsatisfying as it seems to want to discount what is for many a fundamental part of their character and is unavoidably a part of the human condition - there is, however, a third option. Theorists like Piaget, Fromm and Kohlberg - and to a lesser extent Freud - do not suggest that the conscience refers to an external standard of goodness and so cannot be `objectively reliable` but are open to the belief that the conscience  as a tool for telling us what society expects of us can be reliable. In this way - and this appears to be true of religious thinkers too - all notions of conscience lead back to this. The conscience is, if we follow our particular social group`s notions of it (be that informing it properly or submitting to the idea that it is composed of society`s collective judgement of us) then it will prove to be a reliable guide for what that social group wants from us, and is therefore useful if only on a pragmatic level.