'conscience Is A Reliable Guide For Human Decision Making'

The concept of the 'conscience' is one so subjective that it is difficult to give an accurate universal definition. Almost every person has an individual idea of a conscience's components, its origins; even its very existence is challenged. This diversity is mainly due to the fact that many who believe they have a conscience feel it is so intimately part of them that no one can quite describe it as well as they can. Etymologically the word 'conscience' derives from the Latin conscienta, meaning 'with-knowledge' . The English word implies 'a person's moral sense of right and wrong' as well as consciousness of one's own actions. Expressions such as 'gut feeling' and 'guilt' are often applied in conjunction with conscience. In this sense the conscience is not necessarily a product of a rational deduction but is something that can be influenced by the indoctrination of one's parentage, social class, religion or culture. If we assume that the conscience does exist its reliability presents an entirely different problem, this too is something very controversial and has been contested for many millennia. Perhaps the earliest descri ptions of a conscience appear in the Bible, yet as is often the case there are a number of different perspectives within the Bible on it. Early Christian writers such as St Augustine of Hippo and St Jerome appear to sincerely agree with the idea that one's conscience is a responsible arbiter between right and wrong and is therefore reliable for making decisions. They believed that it was divine, that it was God's voice within humans, this belief stemmed from the words of Romans 2:14-15 '... when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law for themselves, ... they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness ...'. St Augustine also felt that the conscience was the characteristic of humans that set them apart from God's other creations and represented their formation in imago dei, in other words the conscience is what gives us our dignity. Simon Soloveychik, the Russian philosopher and publicist likewise felt that truth in the world which gives humans our dignity and forms the affirmation of the boundary between good and evil lives in people's consciences. However, the Bible also infers that if the conscience is ignored for a prolonged period of time there is a possibility that it can be dulled, 'To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and their consciences are corrupted' Titus 1:15. Therefore perhaps the conscience, especially one that is not 'maintained' can be misleading in decision making and Christians would conclude that the only source on which they can completely rely on is the Bible. Later theologians developed these early Christian ideas with Philosophy. St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas amongst other medieval scholars distinguished between conscience and synderesis. In the Questions of the intellectual powers of his Summa Theologica St Thomas attempted to deduce, through the analysis or various arguments first 'whether synderesis is a special power of the soul distinct from the others' and secondly, 'whether conscience be a power'. The ideas of conscience and synderesis are incredibly close in their implications on human action, conscience outlines the choice between right and wrong and synderesis provides the reason towards right. The origin of synderesis can be found in the commentary of St Jerome on Ezekiel in which syntéresin is described as one of the powers of the soul and as the spark of conscience, scintilla conscientiae. An alternative interpretation was proposed by St Bonaventure, who considered synderesis as the natural inclination of the will towards moral good , which when denied becomes a source of inner torment that materialises its self as guilt. Of synderesis Aquinas wrote '...Augustine says that in the natural power of judgement there are certain rules and seeds of virtue, both true and unchangeable. And this is what we call synderesis... '. Synderesis, according to St Augustine therefore is the natural capacity of human reason to apprehend intuitively the universal first principles of human action . According to theologians such as St Jerome all action propels the subject nearer to possession of 'goodness'. Hence the first principle of practical reason states "good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided". Synderesis is also the capacity to judge each step of the practical discourse in light of those principles. Some argue however, that synderesis only provides the universal premise of practical syllogism. Each human action is contingent; it takes place under specific circumstances. To complete the practical discourse and reach a conclusion regarding what has to be done other faculties are needed besides synderesis and reason namely dispositions and acts such as conscience, desire and will. John Locke argued that the conscience was proof for the concept of innate principles but deliberated whether these principles provide moral absolutes, whether they are objective or subjective "if conscience be a proof of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid." Thomas Hobbes likewise pragmatically noted that the conscience can be potentially mistaken therefore opinions formed on the basis of conscience, even with full honest conviction should not always be trusted. Aquinas, like his predecessors regarded the conscience as God given, but that it had been corrupted by education and culture and was therefore imperfect since relativism in ethics results in the fallible nature of the conscience. He also described it as reason trying to make the right decisions. In his analysis of Aristotle's Nichomacean Ethics Aquinas claimed that the prioritisation of pleasure above moral constraints was a human weakness. Similarly John Selden said that a conscience could be "like a horse that is not well wayed, he starts at every bird that flies out of the hedge" if it was ill-trained the conscience could hinder resolve in particle action. Another philosopher with similar ideas despite being Jewish and not Christian was Erich Fromm who believed that the conscience was something that developed under the influence of authority, it was acquired. For Fromm a guilty conscience came from displeasing those that represented the authority. A good authoritarian conscience, Fromm argued provided a sense of security, where as a negative one can allow people to participate in dreadfully immoral things for example the bad authority of the Nazi party allowed the German people to turn a blind eye to the treatment of the Jews during world war two. The other side to Fromm's conscience was the humanistic conscience. This enables us to moderate our success against others. It is a much more positive and hopeful angle than that of the authoritarian conscience. According to Fromm it is 'a reaction of ourselves to ourselves; the voice of our true selves' that guides us to achieve our full potential' For many Christians Aquinas' rationalistic approach did not sit very well with their beliefs about God's divine revelation. One such Christian was Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic who despite agreeing with Aquinas that conscience is the ability to appreciate and apply moral principles, felt that when someone is following their conscience they are in fact following God's voice guiding them. During his imprisonment in a concentration camp in Nazi German the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian came to realise that there was more to conscience than practical reason, he wrote that it comes from a "depth which lies beyond a man`s own will and his own reason and it makes itself heard as the call of human existence to unity with itself." A guilty conscience for Bonhoeffer is the result of the loss of this unity and provides the minds warning of the loss of one's self; this would for him have been a particularly important ability during his time in the concentration camp. He surmised that a conscience aims to make moral decisions in 'overwhelming forces of inescapable situations' despite the risk of adverse consequences. Another Christian, Joseph Butler argued that people are influenced by the need for self preservation and a natural benevolence towards others. As a Christian he believed that the conscience was God given should never be disobeyed and is intuitive and instantaneous. He described it as the 'constitutional monarch', the 'universal moral faculty' and went on to say that 'conscience does not only offer itself to show us they way we should walk in, but likewise carries its own authority with it' . He further affirmed that the human self forms something of a hierarchy (a Platonic idea) but unlike Plato he believed priority was given to self love and then benevolence in the hierarchy of the conscience. Therefore the conscience is continually attempting to establish a balance between the self and other people. Adam Smith argued that the conscience was the mechanism that allowed us to make comparisons between ourselves and other people. Sigmund Freud and other secular philosophers believed that conscience was acquired through experience and that it was the part of the human mind that seeks to make sense of disorder and to deal with the internal conflicts caused by guilt. He believed that the conscience was influenced by both early and later life beliefs. In an expansion of this idea Jean Piaget carried out a number of experiments to investigate the mental development of children in order to ascertain what it is that makes up the cognitive framework. A sense of justice according to Piaget forms the basis for this framework. He thought that the conscience formed after cognitive development and did not accept the idea that the conscience was a separate entity from the body, for him it was just a development of the brain, like Freud he did not believe it was given by God. However, Piaget's work was heavily criticised, his conclusions were drawn from insufficient exploration of the factors that make up one's morals and therefore conscience. According to his critics Piaget would have needed to extend his testing to people beyond the age of eleven for his work to be valuable. Kohlberg later developed Piaget's work and extended his hypothesis to six stages of moral development, he emphasised the idea that some people never get beyond the mental level of keeping the law of the land, and they feel the security of beaurocracy and do not think to challenge any laws despite the fact that they may be overwhelmingly immoral. Since some people are not morally mature enough to just go with their instincts one can draw the conclusion from both Piaget and Kohlberg's work that the conscience is not a reliable means to make ethical decisions without. Immanuel Kant formulated the idea of the critical conscience which was rather like a court of law in our minds where the prosecutors or conscience excuse or accuse thoughts and actions. He also argued that although moral people feel contentment within the soul after following the instruction of one's conscience, they should not do good deeds for the sake of experiencing this inner peace, rather they should do it as part of their duty. Rousseau expressed a similar view that conscience somehow connected man to a greater metaphysical unity. Rousseau defined conscience as the feeling that urges us, in spite of contrary passions, towards two harmonies: the one within our minds and between our passions, and the other within society and between its members; "the weakest can appeal to it in the strongest, and the appeal, though often unsuccessful, is always disturbing. However, corrupted by power or wealth we may be, either as possessors of them or as victims, there is something in us serving to remind us that this corruption is against nature." Emmanuel Levinas, the 20th Century French philosopher saw conscience as our minds resistance to our selfishness which through the questioning of our naive sense of freedom develops morality. In other words, it encourages our ego to accept the fallibility of assuming things about other people, that selfish freedom of will "does not have the last word" and that realising this has a transcendent purpose: "I am not alone...in conscience I have an experience that is not commensurate with any a priori a conceptless experience." People often appeal to their conscience in order to silence personal opposition, even that which is factual and logical. According to William Holland, this is an abuse of the 'authentic' conscience which always affirms a concrete reality. Reliance on conscience is dependent upon one's freedom. 'Moral freedom and personal dignity are implicit truths that inform and shape one's approach to the world as a whole. If a person doesn't accept the value of conscience, or the importance of moral authority, then he abandons the capacity to acknowledge and shape a future.' Conscience for Holland therefore is never relativistic, it is a unique kind of objectivity, an extrinsic world that is experience by each individual that provides independence and shapes identity and freedom. 'If conscience goes, then everything collapses' (Cierco), conscience is central to our identity and it is as component in the moral decisions making process, however, failure to acknowledge and accept that conscientious judgements can be seriously mistaken on account of their relativistic nature, may only promote situations where one`s conscience is manipulated by others to provide unwarranted justifications for non-virtuous and selfish acts; indeed, insofar as it is appealed to as glorifying ideological content, and an associated extreme level of devotion, without adequate constraint of external, altruistic, normative justification, conscience may be considered morally blind and dangerous both to the individual concerned and humanity as a whole. Therefore, the neglect of conscience by virtue ethicists must come to realise that once conscience is trained so that the principles and rules it applies are those one would want all others to live by, its practise cultivates and sustains the virtues; indeed, amongst people in what each society considers to be the highest state of moral development there is little disagreement about how to act. Bibliography Aquinas, S. T. Question LXXIX of the interlectual powers. In Summa Theologica. Bonhoeffer, D. (1963). Ethics. (E. Bethge, Ed., & N. H. Smith, Trans.) London: Collins. Butler, J. (1896). The Works of Joseph Butler (Gladstone WE ed., Vol. II). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, B. (1992). The Thoughts of St Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dictionary, O. E. (1989). Hippo, S. A. De Libero Arbitrio. Hippo, S. A. De Trinitate. Hobbes, T. (1837). Leviathan. London: J. Bohn. Holland, W. (n.d.). The Weight of `Conscience` in Ethical Descion Making. 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