The moral conscience in ethics and the contemporary crisis of authority.
DATE: July 22, 2008

TIME: 9:00 AM EST

Last week I applauded the bishops for publishing Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship. While I was delighted to see their brief catechesis on the nature of conscience and the need to form one’s conscience, I also noted that many if not most Catholics will arguably find their explanation of the nature of conscience, and the very notion of “forming one’s conscience,” not only foreign, but perhaps even off-putting. Let me endeavor to explain why I am afraid this is the case and also to elucidate these topics in more detail.

My experience as a teacher, counselor and confessor has repeatedly confirmed that there is a tremendous amount of confusion, especially among Catholics, about the nature of moral conscience. That experience has also taught me just how sensitive a topic this is. Want to make a group of people immediately uncomfortable? Start talking about conscience—and worse, suggest that the idea they have about conscience is perhaps mistaken.

I also write fully aware that the next few weekly columns I will dedicate to the topic of moral conscience will not only fail to do justice to the complexity of the issue, but will also run the risk of over simplifying the topic—or worse, of causing further confusion. That, however, is a risk I will take.

To lessen the risk, and for those who would be interested in greater detail and a bit more scholarship on this vital subject, I would direct you to an extremely helpful exposition on conscience written by Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, Australia for the March 2007 meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life and titled “The moral conscience in ethics and the contemporary crisis of authority.” Well worth an attentive reading, this discourse is a wonderful synthesis of the perennial, Catholic, natural law (NL) understanding of conscience. I will try to get at the same notion in a more hands on and less scholarly fashion in what follows.

Most would agree that conscience is not the angel on my shoulder countering each and every evil suggestion of the little devil on my other shoulder. Nearly all of the descriptions of conscience that have come down to us historically from different schools of moral philosophy, psychology and related fields generally fall into one of the following broad categories:

(a) Conscience is nothing more than an emotive response conditioned over time by genetic factors, environment and other socializing factors, in addition to psychological forces deep at work in our own psyche. In many respects, conscience—particularly manifest as guilt—is to be overcome or ignored or otherwise integrated into our own autonomous self-projects.

(b) Conscience is a kind of faculty or power given to us. It directs our actions either as the voice of God directly, or it responds to the external dictates of moral authority in the manner of an internalized moral GPS: ‘do this’; ‘avoid that’; ‘too much more and you will cross the line’, etc.

(c) Conscience is a kind of intuition which transcends rational consideration. Sometimes called the ‘moral sense’, conscience in this view must be developed much like developing a taste for good wine, a sense of personal etiquette and good manners, or in the manner of those things we call a “sixth sense” like the uncanny ability to pick a winning race horse or to assess a person’s character or to keep a group of school children well behaved and attentive.

(d) Conscience is simply that process by which I give consideration to moral matters and come up with my best judgment—essentially my opinion—about what I or others ought to do or not do. When I am convinced of this judgment, it enjoys primacy over all other moral points of reference and trumps any other considerations. As such, it is basically infallible: my conscience—that is, my best formed opinion on moral matters—is my moral compass, period.

Now, some readers might be surprised by my suggestion that none of these definitions is a good fit for the notion of conscience that has come down to us from the NL tradition. So I will work my way toward the tradition’s understanding of conscience by first offering a brief critique of each of the preceding accounts of conscience. Let me also mention as an aside that a point of agreement between these versions and that proposed by the NL tradition is this, namely, that conscience is something very personal, and very much contained within the realm of one’s own subjectivity. Beyond that common element, we have here some strikingly diverse conceptions of what moral conscience actually is.

I would also hope not to be accused—in rejecting each of these notions of conscience—of setting up and knocking down a straw man. Granted, I have limited myself to sketching out four brief caricatures of how moral conscience is sometimes conceived. But each of these certainly has its unique intellectual history and a theoretical apparatus to go with it. Time and space don’t allow here that kind of exhaustive explanation.

To begin then, and for the sake of brevity, I will discard notion (a) as grossly inadequate. Notwithstanding the importance of psychology and upbringing in the overall task of conscience formation, this account of conscience is highly problematic from the moment we consider how poorly it accords with our shared human experience of moral obligation. While the experience of conscience can indeed be accompanied by emotional responses (both positive and negative, both guilt at doing wrong and delight at doing the good), moral conscience itself is not simply reducible to those emotions. Furthermore, we would have to reject the negativity of this notion of conscience. The NL tradition conceives of conscience as a profound aid to a healthy and fulfilling existence, not as an onerous quirk of human psychology that one must essentially learn to ignore.

Notion (b) is often taken to be the true NL or Catholic understanding of conscience. This notion entails a kind of legalism and the sense that conscience—whether innate or internalized through experience—is like an interior voice that would direct our every action, that can even be the voice of God. Granted, even within the NL tradition we get strands of this thought; even the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes speaks of conscience as our secret core and our sanctuary, where we are alone with God whose voice echoes in our depths. That notwithstanding, notion (b) falls very short of the mark and constitutes an impoverished notion of what the NL tradition has genuinely maintained. As bishop Fisher explains:

Many people think [conscience] is a sort of angelic voice distinct from our own reasoning which comes, as it were, from outside us, even if we hear it in our heart; it is generally trustworthy, but we must decide to obey it or not. There is more than a hint of this at several points in our theological tradition. But whatever these texts mean, they clearly do not mean a divine or diabolical voice intrudes into our ordinary reasoning processes, commanding or complaining, a rival with our own moral thinking… Were conscience really a voice from outside our reasoning it would play no part in philosophy and there might be some kind of double truth in the moral sphere. Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic legalism took moral theology down just such a blind alley. [The Church’s] Magisterium became the satellite navigator and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors are heirs to this. For some the solution to the crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for submission to the navigator. Moral tax lawyers, on the other hand, try to find ways around the moral law, or ways to "sail as close to the wind as possible" without actually breaking the moral law. Can you do a little bit of abortion or embryo experimentation or euthanasia without breaking the moral law?

Notion (c), though very popular over the past hundred years and enormously influential, is also problematic. Consider among other things that notion (c) leaves no room open for appeal to objective criteria on which basis I could challenge someone’s ‘moral sense’. A member of a Sudanese Janjaweed militia might argue that his moral sense tells him that dark-skinned African inhabitants of the Darfur region should be exterminated. I would want a theory of conscience that leaves me grounds to challenge such a claim. Notion (c) doesn’t afford me that, however. This notion presupposes, moreover, that morality is essentially something non-discursive, indeed, non-rational—hardly the notion of conscience we discover in the NL tradition.

Notion (d) requires more sustained consideration for the several valid elements it contains, for its degree of overlap with the NL notion of conscience, but moreover for the predominance of this view and the remarkable degree of confusion such a view has engendered especially among Catholics. I would go so far as to assert that notion (d) is, by and large, a kind of default understanding of conscience in our contemporary setting. Its highly problematic reduction of conscience to the level of moral opinion, however, sets it deeply at odds with a more perennial Catholic, natural law understanding of conscience. And that is where I will pick things up again next week.

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Cf. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 16.

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