‘everyone Has A Conscience’. Assess This View.

Newman and Butler, following from Augustine, both assert that the conscience is a gift from God to man as a means to discerning right action. Butler believed the conscience to be an infallible and innate moral guide, accessed intuitively, which one could follow or choose to ignore. Newman believed the conscience to be the direct line through which God speaks moral guidance to man. We do mostly recognise a voice which appears external to ourselves that speaks to us when we feel we have done wrong. However, to believe this to be the innate God-given conscience is problematic. Firstly, individuals such as psychopaths appear to have no conscience and it would be unfair for God to make this omission, especially when this is our only means of moralising. More compelling is the variety of moral disagreement within communities of Christians. There is wide ranging conscientious belief around issues such as abortion or euthanasia, for example. Augustine does respond by arguing that we are sometimes misled by our bodily desires but this makes the conscience seem too weak and ineffectual to support its existence in the form that Butler and Newman propose: if God wants to be heard, he would surely not partially or intermittently conceal his instruction.

Aquinas model does solve this issue. The Thomist view is that conscience is reason making right decisions. Aquinas believed in a bipartite conscience comprising innate capacity to apprehend first principles (synderesis) and the capacity, through reason, to apply these to specific situations (conscientia). This means that psychopaths and the immoral, or unorthodox, are simply reasoning incorrectly. As such, they have the capacity (and possess a conscience) but much like a underused muscle, it is underdeveloped. Here the influence of Aristotle s ethic of practice and education as a means to moral development is clear. We might suggest that we do all seem to adhere to generally accepted primary principles, though in reality this element of his thinking causes problems. Not everyone, for example, agrees that we should all worship God, nor necessarily live in a society.

Perhaps there is a better explanation for the diversity and changing nature of views that better account for the cultural relativism in ethics. Freud argues that conscience is not built on innate knowledge but that we internalise societal and cultural values that become our conscience. He suggests that the super-ego, responsible for shaping and restricting the action of the ego in its regulation of the id, manipulates us through guilt. In this way, everyone will form a conscience over time. Freud did admit that the psychopath does not possess a tripartite psyche and thus lacks a conscience but this does not pose a problem to Freud s theory, unlike the theological models.

One problem here is the fact that Freud reduces our conscience to a simplistic shame-based conformity tool: we feel guilt that presses us into line. We experience a much more complex conscientious process than this in reality and often we recognise our guilt is misplaced. Someone may feel guilt for being homosexual, even though they rationalise that there is nothing to feel guilty for in a modern society which holds libertarian values.

The development in psychological models of the conscience perhaps helpfully addresses this. Piaget and Kohlberg set out models where we move from a more Freudian form of heteronomous conscience towards the capacity to moralise autonomously: from conforming due to fear of punishment through to upholding individual moral principles and standing against society as necessary. lt;/p>

For Piaget this development is inevitable and age-linked so, like Aquinas, he believes the conscience will inevitably become more capable over time. Kohlberg disagrees, however, and argues that only 10-15% of people will reach the final level of conscience development. In both cases, their method of enquiry was flawed. For example, they both used cross-sectional instead of longitudinal studies. However, we do generally accept that age and experience improve our ability to moralise.

How, though, might such a model explain the variety in an individual s moral practice? In both cases they seem to focus overly on moral capacity instead of actual moralising.

Fromm presents a position that marries both Freud and Piaget/Kohlberg in a way to articulate the complexities of the inner workings of the moral agent. He supposed that humans have two consciences, the authoritarian and the humanistic. The authoritarian resembles Freud s thinking, it shames us into conforming, it is that which led Nazi officers to complicity despite their misgivings. He regrets how the paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most . It is perhaps unreliable but undeniably a feature of our experience. Guilt is perhaps not irrational, as Aquinas believes, but non-rational and subconscious, as in the case of the shameful homosexual. However, in his later work, Fromm identified that humans have a unique ability to reason right disobedience - in fact he argued that Adam and Eve became human with the fall, that before this they were not fully man, echoing a Kantian view of moral agency as the distinctly human quality. In this case, we might argue that all people have a conscience, but not all people have two, or at least have not developed the second sufficiently.

In conclusion, as our model of the conscience becomes more sophisticated, we acknowledge that it is more than a simple moral plumb line, as Butler proposed, or the super-ego that pushes us to conform. It is a mixture of the rational and non-rational and everyone seems to engage in both to a greater or lesser extent.