essay about conscience

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Through our individual conscience, we become aware of our deeply held moral principles, we are motivated to act upon them, and we assess our character, our behavior and ultimately our self against those principles. Different philosophical, religious and common sense approaches to conscience have emphasized different aspects of this broad characterization. The resulting more specific understandings of conscience will be presented in the sections below. On any of these accounts, conscience is defined by its inward looking and subjective character, in the following sense: conscience is always knowledge of ourselves, or awareness of moral principles we have committed to, or assessment of ourselves, or motivation to act that comes from within us (as opposed to external impositions). This inward looking and subjective character of conscience is also reflected in the etymological relation between the notion of “conscience” and that of consciousness . Only after the 17 th Century did “consciousness” start to be used with a distinct meaning referring to the psychological and phenomenal dimension of the mind, rather than to its moral dimension (for an account of the terminological shift, see Jorgensen 2014).

The term “conscience” translates the Latin “ conscientia ”, which refers to sharing “knowledge” ( scientia ) “with” ( con -), and which in turns translates the equivalent Greek term suneidenai (see Pierce 1955 and Sorabji 2014 for an etymological analysis of the term). The literal meaning of the term does not specify the type of knowledge involved and whom that knowledge is shared with. However, the concept has traditionally been used to refer to moral knowledge (we talk indifferently of conscience and moral conscience) that is shared with oneself . This reference to the self does not rule out that the source of the morality in question be external to the self. For example, it might be God, as in the Christian tradition, or the influence of one’s culture or of one’s upbringing, as in the Freudian theory of the Super-Ego. Reference to the self indicates that, from a psychological point of view, conscience involves introspection, awareness of one’s behavior, and self-assessment. As we shall see, although these aspects often overlap, they are psychologically and conceptually distinct functions.

“Sharing moral knowledge with oneself” might mean and imply different things. As for the object of knowledge, for example, it might refer to knowledge of one’s own conduct in view of an assessment of it against a certain moral standard, or it might refer to knowledge of moral standards or principles themselves. As for the “self” with whom knowledge is shared, it might mean sharing knowledge with a part of the self, as if we were split into two persons (Sorabji 2014: 12), but it might also mean sharing knowledge with an imaginary witness, such as an ideal observer (for instance a god, an imagined moral model, an impartial spectator). Unfortunately, debates in which appeals to conscience are often made—for example the debate about conscientious objection in health care—are often characterized by a lack of clarity as to what it exactly is that we are talking about when we talk about conscience, and therefore about what exactly people are claiming when they put forward a “conscientious objection” to, for example, abortion. In what sense does abortion violate the conscience of a committed Catholic doctor? And is conscience amenable to reason and public discussion, or are appeals to conscience ultimately based on intuitions and private morality? In what sense is a conscientious choice different from a mere moral preference? The notion of conscience is in need of conceptual clarification.

This entry will expound the main features of the notion of conscience as it is used in philosophical discussion, religious teaching and in common language alike. The perspective adopted here will theoretical, rather than historical. The entry focuses on the Western tradition and some examples are drawn from Christian source. The entry is structured around four possible, but not mutually exclusive, ways of conceptualizing conscience. These will be preceded by an introductory section outlining the pluralistic, morally neutral and subjective nature of the concept of conscience. The four main aspects of conscience that will be described are the following. Section 2 discusses conscience as a faculty for self-knowledge and self-assessment. Section 3 presents the epistemic aspect of conscience that allows the formation of moral beliefs, distinguishing the different possible sources of moral principles that inform such beliefs. In section 4, conscience will be described as a motivational force or as the source of our sense of duty, which already presupposes a body of moral knowledge or of moral beliefs. Finally, section 5 will focus on conscience understood as the body of personal core and self-identifying moral beliefs which is often taken to be the basis of moral integrity (Fuss 1964; Wicclair 2011) and of our sense of personal identity (Childress 1979). As discussed in section 6, this last approach to conscience is often used with a political function to advocate freedom of thought and action in liberal democratic societies, for example, as explained in subsection 6.1, through conscientious objection to practices that one would otherwise be professionally or legally expected to perform.

1. Conscience as pluralistic, neutral and subjective

2. conscience as self-knowledge and self-assessment, 3.1 conscience as a faculty for indirect moral knowledge, 3.2 conscience as a faculty for direct moral knowledge, 4. conscience as motivation to act morally, 5. conscience, self-identifying moral commitments, and moral integrity, 6.1 freedom of conscience and conscientious objection today, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

The concept of conscience does not bear any connection with any particular substantial moral view (Broad 1940). The voice of conscience might suggest different principles and different behaviors to different people. In other words, there is no psychological or conceptual relation between conscience and any particular moral belief. However, as will be explained below, in the Catholic tradition the idea of an erroneous conscience is sometimes used to refer to conscience that fails to recognize the true moral laws which it is naturally predisposed to “witness” within our heart. As for secular accounts of conscience, the independence of the notion of conscience from any substantial moral content can be understood in three senses.

First, conscience is a pluralistic notion. To say that a person acted with conscience or that something violates someone’s conscience does not entail anything about what this act consists of or what this person’s moral values are (although it might tell us that conscience is itself a value this person holds dear). To use a metaphor, conscience is like an empty box that can be filled with any type of moral content. As put by Strohm,

conscience has what might be called an “identity problem”—that it possesses no fixed or inherited content of its own, and that it can be hailed and mobilized in defence of one position or equally in defence of its rival. (Strohm 2011: 120)

For example, while some health practitioners raise “conscientious” objection to abortion and refuse to provide the service, someone’s conscience might demand the exact opposite, i.e., to perform abortions in order to respect what is conscientiously believed to be a woman’s right (Joffe 1995).

Second, conscience is typically a morally neutral concept. Appealing to conscience does not usually add anything to the moral justification of any particular conduct or principle. Unless one is committed to the relativistic idea that your belief (or your conscience) about x being right or wrong is what makes it right or wrong for you to do x (Foot 1979), something is not made morally better or worse, acceptable or unacceptable, simply by being a matter of conscience. For example, the morality of abortion has nothing to do with abortion being conscientiously opposed by some health practitioners or conscientiously supported by others. This neutrality does not exclude, however, that an appeal to conscience can represent itself a reason for respecting someone’s moral views, for example a reason for granting someone a right to object to carrying out certain activities. While appeals to conscience do not typically provide any moral reason in defense of a certain moral stance (unless one is a relativist), they might ground political reasons for respecting individuals’ moral beliefs, such as for example tolerance or pluralism.

Finally, conscience only concerns the subjective dimension of morality. Even assuming that there are ethical values that, in some sense, can be considered objective, conscience only refers to what individuals believe , independently of any external, objective proof or justification. And when people state what they subjectively and conscientiously believe, they acknowledge that other people might (and probably will) subjectively and conscientiously hold different moral views. Thus, when I say that abortion violates my conscience, I am not saying (although I might be thinking) that abortion is morally wrong by some objective standard, and I’m not necessarily trying to convince others that abortion is wrong by some objective standard. I am simply stating what I deeply believe and what I want others to respect as my conscientious belief, regardless of how good or bad the moral reasons I can provide to defend my claims are or appear to be to others (McGuire 1963: 259). In fact, when health practitioners claim conscientious objection to some medical procedures, they are usually not interested in preventing other doctors who hold different moral beliefs from performing the procedure. They are usually only interested in, so to speak, keeping their hands clean according to their subjective moral standard.

These three aspects related to the independence of conscience from particular substantial moral views explain why appeals to conscience to justify one’s behavior are usually made with the expectation that no further reason for the behavior in question be required. As put by Childress, when an agent appeals to her conscience,

[u]sually the agent has given up the attempt to convince others of the objective rightness of his act and is content to assert its subjective rightness. (Childress 1979: 329)

When we talk about conscience, we often refer to reflection about ourselves as moral persons and about our moral conduct. Through conscience we examine ourselves, as if we were our own inner judge. The image of an individual split into two persons, one who acts and the other who observes the former’s conduct, reflects the original conception of “conscience” in the Greek world, at least from the 5 th century BCE (Sorabji 2014: 12). But such self- knowledge may also be thought of as shared with others inside of us , such as God(s) or other imaginary witnesses (for example an admired philosopher according to Epicurus (Sorabji 2014: 24), or an impartial spectator according to Adam Smith (1759)). The god(s) in question might be the god(s) of a particular religion, such as the God of Christianity, or a postulate of the practical reason, such as in Kant, according to whom reason, in order to be “practical” in the sense of informing moral conduct, needs the idea of a higher authority who sanctions individuals for their actions (Kant 1797).

The role of conscience in this sense is not that of merely gaining knowledge about our behavior or character. The knowledge in question is typically (though, as explained below, not always) the ground for a moral assessment by conscience. When observing one’s behavior, conscience is more like a judge (or sometimes it is identified with the judgment itself) than like a disinterested observer. Thus, for instance, the impartial spectator with which Adam Smith identified conscience, inspired by the Stoic’s notion of conscience as an imagined admired philosopher judging one’s conduct, is not a morally and emotionally neutral observer, but generates a sentiment of approval or disapproval of oneself (Smith 1759 and discussion in Raphael 2007: 34). Even in the Catholic view, where the main characterization of conscience is that of a witness of God’s law in our hearts (as described in section 3 ), conscience is also presented as “a moral judgment about man and his actions, a judgment either of acquittal or condemnation” (John Paul II 1993: 59). Analogously, in the Kantian view, conscience is conceived of as an inner court (Wood 2008: 184): it is moral self-awareness that allows to apply the moral law suggested by practical reason to our moral conduct, and to judge whether we have complied with the moral law. As Kant defines it in the Metaphysics of Morals , conscience is

practical reason holding the human being’s duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under a law (Kant 1797 [1991]: 160)

consciousness of an internal court in man. (Kant 1797 [1991]: 189)

This understanding of conscience as an inner court is well illustrated by the story of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s famous novel (Twain 1884; Bennett 1974). In a well-known episode of the novel, Huck feels guilty and blameworthy for having helped his slave friend Jim to escape from his owner Miss Watson. Blame does not come from some external moral authority, but it is a verdict issued by conscience according to its moral laws. The bites of conscience in Huck’s case were caused by a tension between his feelings supporting what he did and the principles he had inherited from his social environment. At the time when the novel is set, slave-owning was considered a natural type of possession and helping slaves run away meant depriving someone of her private property. This was the “law” (metaphorically speaking) against which Huck’s conscience assessed his behavior.

This story illustrates another interesting feature of conscience as a faculty for self-assessment, i.e., the asymmetry between our confidence in the validity of the moral standards provided by our own conscience and our confidence in the validity of the standards provided other people’s conscience. Huck thinks that what he did was wrong and that it rendered him blameworthy in spite of his feelings, because he thinks that his own conscience provides a correct moral standard, i.e., a standard that he endorses even if some of his feelings or beliefs indicate otherwise. This seems to reflect our common way of relating to our own conscience: we try to adjust our feelings and judgments to our conscience’s standard, rather than vice versa . However, the same does not hold when we talk of other people’s conscience, which is usually taken to indicate their subjective moral standard and does not imply that we are endorsing it. This asymmetry suggests that there is no conceptual relation between the notion of conscience per se and the notion of an objective or correct moral standard; rather, it stresses once more the fact that conscience has merely to do with one’s private morality and one’s commitment to her own morality.

Consistently with this understanding of conscience as self-knowledge and self-assessment, it has been suggested by some that psychopaths—i.e., pathological subjects who display antisocial behavior and systematically act without regard to what they consider to be right or wrong—can be said to lack conscience (Hare 1999). For instance, according to Vujošević (2015), in psychopaths the link between moral knowledge or beliefs and self-directed feelings of condemnation (e.g., guilt) is broken: psychopaths cannot feel the remorse that normal functioning agents feel when they perceive the discrepancy between their moral beliefs and their behavior, and as a consequence psychopaths do not consider themselves accountable for their actions (Gudjonsson and Roberts 1983; Aharoni et al. 2012), although their moral beliefs are often “normal” (Schaich and Sinnott-Armstrong 2013)

As mentioned above in this section, when expressing itself through self-evaluative feelings, conscience might be conceived of as either constituted by such feelings (Fuss 1964) or as occasioning them (Broad 1940).

In the former sense (conscience as constituted by self-evaluative feelings), the feeling is an essential part of conscience. Conscience in this case is better conceived not as a judge who issues sentences, but as a feeling with cognitive content—where the cognitive content concerns the adherence of one’s behavior to a certain moral standard; in such cases, the negative feeling informs me that what I am doing or am contemplating doing is wrong (according to my own moral parameters). In the latter sense (conscience as occasioning self-evaluative feelings), the inner judge, when in tension with one’s conduct, generates negative self-directed feelings (Mill 1861: ch 3). For instance, in Freud the “Super-Ego”—the part of our personality that attends to prohibitions, inhibitions and moral constraints—takes “the form of conscience” to exercise its control over one’s impulses and instincts by producing negative evaluative feelings towards the individual, such as aggressiveness towards the Ego and guilt (Freud 1929 [2000]: 30). As we shall see below in section 4 , these self-directed negative feelings play an essential role in fulfilling the motivational function of conscience.

As the characterization of conscience as self-assessment here presented suggests, conscience has most often been associated with negative feelings (Arendt 1971), such as shame, guilt, fear, contrition. While these feelings are typical of the Christian understanding of conscience, they need not be tied to a religious view: for most of us, even in our common language, conscience is something that yields negative feelings more often than not—for example we often talk of the “bites of conscience” or of conscience as causing us “remorse” (which derives from the Latin “ remordere ”, i.e., “to bite again”). However, a joyful conscience that praises and takes pride of one’s own moral merit can be conceived as well. Examples of joyful conscience can be found for instance in Cicero and some Latin Stoics, most prominently Seneca (Sorabji 2014: 25–30). Also in the Protestant tradition started by Luther we find the idea of a joyful conscience, where joy springs not from pride or self-praise, but from awareness of God’s future remission of sins (Luther 1535; Calvin 1536).

The contrast between the Protestant joyful conscience and the Catholic conscience burdened by negative feelings of guilt and fear was emphasized by Luther when he denounced the “terrorization of conscience” by the Roman Catholic Church. According to Luther, with this terrorization the Roman Catholic Church aimed to reinforce its authority and control over people’ conscience. In fact, conscience in the Catholic tradition can only be relieved from its burden of negative feelings through the confession of one’s sins to a priest and the penitence decided by that priest.

3. The epistemic function of conscience

Along with the previous, non-epistemic conception of conscience, we can also understand conscience as having an epistemic function. In this sense, conscience brings us some form of moral knowledge or moral beliefs—either in an absolute sense, e.g., knowledge of divine laws, or in a relative sense, e.g., knowledge of social norms in one’s culture.

The epistemic role of conscience does not necessarily coincide with the role of epistemic faculties or functions such as reason, intuitions, or senses. In particular, that conscience “brings” us moral knowledge or beliefs does not necessarily mean that it gives us direct access to the source of this knowledge or of these beliefs, as might be the case with reason, intuitions, or senses.

The knowledge we get from conscience, understood as possessing an epistemic function, is often conceived as mediated knowledge. This is not surprising, since, as we have seen, conscience is mostly understood as inward looking, which presupposes that the knowledge to which it gives us access is already within us and that we acquired it through some other process not involving conscience. In fact, on many accounts, conscience does not generate its own moral principles. For example, the moral contents we discover within us can be acquired through divine intervention, as is the case with the laws of nature which, according to Christians, God infuses in our heart. As we are going to see in subsection 3.1 here below, the understanding of conscience as having an epistemic function and as the recipient of mediated knowledge is not exclusive to religious views.

On other accounts of conscience, however, conscience does give us direct access to moral knowledge, for example as an intuition about what is good and what is bad.

Let us examine the two accounts of the epistemic role of conscience in more detail.

In the Christian tradition, starting from Paul, the inward looking character of conscience is emphasized by the metaphor of the witness (Romans 2: 14–15). Conscience does not allow us to acquire the knowledge of the moral law directly from an external source (God in this case), but only to witness the presence of God’s laws within us. Conscience cannot directly contemplate God. The idea of a faculty that gives us indirect, and therefore imperfect knowledge of some external moral authority suits religious traditions very well. For example, the idea that through conscience we discover the true divine laws can also be found in Islam (Geaves 1999: 164).

It is important to note that also in this case, as in the previous understanding of conscience as self-awareness and self-assessment, conscience can be conceived as fulfilling an introspective function, i.e., as being directed towards the self and towards one’s own mental states. Introspection allows one to gain self-knowledge (Schwitzgebel 2014), but since the self which is observed contains the moral law, it is possible to say that the law itself, as part of our self, becomes the object of introspection. Thus, for instance, in his theological writings before his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger said that “something like an original memory of the good and the true (the two are identical) has been implanted in us”, and conscience is

so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. (Ratzinger 1991: 535)

The Catholic Church also makes reference to “the voice of the Lord echoing in the conscience of every individual” (John Paul II 1995: par. 24).

On this account—since conscience is only a witness and does not have direct epistemic access to the source of knowledge, i.e., to God—conscience is considered fallible and actually often erroneous (1 Corinthians 4:4; Aquinas 1265–1274; Butler 1726: sermon 3 (3)). In particular, conscience might fail to correctly interpret the divine laws when applying them to real cases. According to some 13 th Century Catholic theologians, such as Philip the Chancellor, Albert the Great and, most notably, Thomas Aquinas, conscience is the act of applying universal principles (i.e., divine laws) to real situations, i.e., it is the conclusion of the practical syllogism whose first premise is a universal principle provided by a separate faculty called “synderesis” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae , 1 q79; Langston 2000 and 2015; Sorabji 2014: 62–66): as such, conscience can be erroneous in deriving moral conclusions from first principles (Aquinas, On Truth , q17, art. 2, and discussion in D’Arcy 1961: 100–103).

On a secular account, the external source of moral knowledge that instills moral principles in us is not God, but one’s own culture or upbringing. In this case, the moral knowledge in question is typically understood in a relativistic sense: our conscience is the faculty through which the social norms of our culture or the norms of our upbringing are evoked and exert their influence on our moral psychology. These norms explain our moral feelings and our moral choices, but what conscience tells us in this case is the product of social and cultural dynamics over which we have little control. As the case of Huckleberry Finn’s conscience demonstrates, hardly can conscience so understood be credited any moral authority, since our educators or our culture might be highly immoral (for example our conscience might end up drawing on racist or discriminatory principles, such as the ones which supported slavery in Huck’s social environment). And in fact, unsurprisingly, many are rather skeptical or dismissive of the moral authority of conscience, since they see it as mere opinion about moral principles influenced or even determined by one’s own culture (Montaigne 1580: book 1, ch. 22; Hobbes 1651: ch. 7). In this sense, conscience is a merely relativistic notion whose content changes according to social, cultural, and familial circumstances.

Contrary to what Montaigne and Hobbes had claimed, Rousseau argued in Emile, or Education that good education can free conscience from the corrupting influences of societies. Actually, one of the aims of education is to render the young autonomous moral thinkers and agents by teaching them how to critically examine and, if necessary, replace received norms (Rousseau 1762; see Sorabji 2014, for a discussion). The idea here is that conscience is what remains of our innate moral sense once we free it from “childish errors” and “prejudices of our upbringing” (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 253). As Rousseau presents it,

There is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil; and it is this principle that I call conscience. (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 253)

According to Rousseau, then, conscience has a natural tendency to perceive and follow the right order of nature, and a good teacher should help the young’s conscience to do what it is naturally predisposed to do. In Rousseau’s words:

Too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body; he who obeys his conscience is following nature and he need not fear that he will go astray… Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience. (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 252)

This understanding of conscience as a deeper form of moral knowledge brings us to the second sense in which conscience can be said to have an epistemic role. As well as merely witnessing received opinions or divine laws, conscience can also be conceived as a moral sense giving us direct access to moral principles. Understood in this way, conscience is typically seen as intuitive and influenced by emotions, rather than a reason-based faculty. In particular, 18 th Century sentimentalist philosophers often (e.g., Shaftesbury (1711) and Hume (1738–1740)) identified conscience with a moral “sentiment” or moral “sense”. According to Hume’s psychological theory, for instance, “reason is wholly inactive and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals” (Hume 1738–1740: book 3, part 1, section 1). Also on more recent accounts of conscience and of private morality, the dictates of conscience can be understood as expressions of our moral intuitions. According to Thagard and Finn (2011), for instance, “conscience is a kind of moral intuition” (p. 168) that is “both cognitive and emotional”(p.156).

Once again, there are reasons to doubt the epistemic and moral authority of conscience so understood. A lot of work in recent moral psychology aimed at understanding moral disagreement has suggested that there are seemingly irreconcilable differences in fundamental moral intuitions and emotions among people with different worldviews (e.g., Haidt 2012; Greene 2013). These differences in fundamental moral intuitions seem to undermine the epistemic status of conscience and, with it, conscience’s moral authority, not least because most of our moral intuitions seem, according to these recent developments in moral psychology, not to be amenable to revision in light of new evidence or new good reasons. Reasoning, on any plausible account, should be an important part of morality; however, what our conscience tells us may have little to do with reasons and evidence. Theoretical work in moral psychology (e.g., Haidt 2012; Graham et al. 2009; Haidt 2001), supported by evidence from neuroscience (Greene 2013), suggests that our most fundamental moral beliefs might be based on intuitions and emotions over which our rational capacities have little control. If this account is correct, then we have reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of affecting, let alone changing, people’s conscientious beliefs through dialogue, public discussion and reason giving. Psychological research has focused particularly on the differences between liberal and conservative thinking. For example, it has been suggested that conservative moral and political views are often founded on certain specific emotions, e.g., disgust or fears, and specific intuitions, e.g., intuitive opposition to perceived violations of purity and to authority subversion, whereas liberal views are often driven by other specific emotions, e.g., anger, and intuitions, e.g., intuitive rejection of fairness violations or liberty infringements (Haidt 2001 and 2012). If conscience simply is the expression of moral intuition, and if individuals have significantly different and irreconcilable moral intuitions, then individuals also have significantly different and difficult-to-reconcile conscientious moral consciences.

Conscience can also be conceived as our sense of duty. According to this understanding, conscience motivates us to act according to moral principles or beliefs we already possess (e.g., D’Arcy 1963; Childress 1979; McGuire 1963; Fuss 1964). Conscience so understood “establishes a general sense of moral obligation in the individual’s consciousness” (Fuss 1964: 116). The subjective character of conscience implies that the motivational force must come entirely from within the individual, as opposed to sanctions from an external authority.

A powerful motivational source is represented by the feelings that conscience generates in its self-assessment function. As we said at the beginning, the different understandings of conscience presented here are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Conscience as self-assessment and conscience as motivation to act morally constitute a good example of perspectives on conscience which are not only consistent with one another, but which actually complete one another. In Kant, for example, the theory of conscience can be seen as “a motivation theory set in the context of a reflection theory” (Wood 2008: 183): As Wood interprets the Kantian notion of conscience, “conscience is a feeling of pleasure or displeasure associated with myself” that arises when I comply or don’t comply with moral principles and that motivates me to act in one sense rather than the other when the feeling accompanies the contemplation of a certain course of action (Wood 2008: 183–184). Conscience for Kant is therefore not only an inner court, but also the source of our sense of duty in that it takes the judgments of the inner court as motivation to act morally (Kant 1797 [1991]: 161).

More generally, as we have seen in section 1 , conscience’s self-assessment often produces remorse or other negative feelings (guilt, shame, fear, and so on). Our desire or tendency to avoid this form of self-punishment can have motivational force towards acting morally. Thus, for instance, according to Childress the motive for acting morally that defines conscience is “in part, avoidance of a sanction imposed by the self on itself” (Childress 1979: 328).

Consistent with this philosophical view are studies in developmental psychology suggesting that the emotion of guilt, which is typically seen as one of the products of conscience as self-assessment, is “the motivational engine that infuses misdeeds with negative personal valence” (Kochanska and Aksan 2006: 1589). Transgression generates anxious feelings in most children, and these negative feelings help children suppress future wrongdoing and internalize the relative moral norms (Damásio 1994, as reported in Kochanska and Aksan 2006: 1595).

However, at the same time, the negative self-directed feelings must themselves be generated by previous experience of tension between our action and a pre-existing sense of duty. Although it might seem that we are stuck in an infinite regress, where sense of duty and negative self-directed feelings presuppose one another, this need not be the case. It is possible to conceive of an external or independent source of that most fundamental sense of duty that constitutes our conscience, such as for example our moral education and upbringing (Mill 1861: ch. 3). But the sense of duty that identifies a conscientious person can also be conceived as a primitive function, an innate disposition which is not explained by any other more fundamental mechanism. In Kant, for instance, “every human being, as a moral being, has a conscience within him originally” (Kant 1797 [1991]: 160), and conscience is one of the four “natural predispositions of the mind (…) for being affected by concepts of duty”, the other three being moral feeling, love for one’s neighbors, and respect for oneself (Kant 1797 [1991]: 160).

Negative feelings and sense of duty are not always successful in prompting agents to do what their moral principles require. But the “bites of conscience”, or just the prospect of bites of conscience, act as motivational force towards aligning our future behavior to those norms. Of course, positive feelings associated with conscience might also have a motivational force. For example, as seen above, Kant associated conscience also with positive feelings about oneself when the agent recognizes he has acted according to his sense of duty. Rousseau, alongside the epistemic account of conscience presented above, also provides in Emile a motivational account of conscience based on positive feelings: while reason gives us knowledge of the good, it is conscience, through a sentiment of love for the good, which motivates us to behave morally (Rousseau 1762).

The subjective character of conscience delimits a sphere of personal morality that is an essential part of our sense of personal identity, understood as our sense of who we are and of what characterizes qualitatively our individuality (for instance, our character, our psychological traits, our past experience, etc.). My conscience is what makes me this particular individual in a social and cultural context that I want to keep separate from me .

This private space in which the individual finds her own sense of identity often grounds the political use of the notion of conscience. Thus, many people claim the right to stick to their conscience—particularly by advancing so called “conscientious objection”—when social expectations or legal obligations would demand otherwise. These political appeals to conscience are usually made on the basis of two principles. The first is the principle of respect for moral integrity, which finds its justification in the close relationship between the notions of conscience and of moral integrity on one side (Childress 1979), and the sense of personal identity on the other. The second principle often invoked in the political uses of “conscience” is the principle of “freedom of conscience”. The former will be discussed in this section, and the latter in the next section.

The concept of personal identity in the sense in which the notion is used here—i.e what defines me as this particular person in a qualitative sense—is intimately related to the notions of conscience (Wicclair 2011; Childress 1979) and of moral integrity, and more specifically to the “identity view of integrity” (Cox et al. 2013; Williams 1973 and 1981). According to this view, for people to have integrity means to remain faithful to “identity-conferring commitments”, i.e., “commitments that people identify with most deeply, as constituting what they consider their life is fundamentally about” (Cox et al. 2013). This identity-conferring aspect of one’s morality is exactly what some people call “conscience”. According to Childress, for example,

[i]n appealing to conscience I indicate that I am trying to preserve a sense of myself, my wholeness and integrity, my good conscience, and that I cannot preserve these qualities if I submit to certain requirements of the state or society. (Childress 1979: 327)

Conscience as self-identifying can be understood in two ways. It can be thought of either as a set of core and self-identifying moral beliefs that are “integral to an agent’s understanding of who she is (i.e., her self-conception or identity)” (Wicclair 2011: 4), or as a way of approaching and relating to such moral beliefs, i.e., a “commitment to uphold one’s deepest and self-identifying moral beliefs” (Sulmasy 2008: 138) and “a mode of consciousness in which prospective actions are viewed in relation to one’s self and character” (Bluestein 1993: 294).

Conceived in either way, conscience is an essential part of our understanding of what kind of person we are, and this is taken to be a reason for warranting protection of conscience and conscientious objection in different contexts, particularly in the health care professions (Wicclair 2011: 25–26; Bluestein 1993: 295).

We have seen above that there is a sense in which, according to some, psychopaths can be said to lack conscience (Hare 1999): psychopaths are not capable of connecting their moral knowledge to their conduct through the feelings of guilt and disapproval which conscience, on some accounts, produces. Interestingly, according to some psychologists, psychopaths are also less likely to base their sense of personal identity on moral traits than normal functioning individuals (Glenn et al. 2010). More recent psychological studies have suggested that people tend to link the identity of others not so much to their memories, as traditionally believed, but to their morals: it is the loss of one’s moral character and moral beliefs, rather than of one’s memory, that leads us to say that a certain individual is not the same person anymore (Strohminger and Nichols 2015). These findings provide empirical support to the idea that conscience is essential to one’s sense of personal identity and to attributions of personal identity

6. Freedom of conscience

Some people have suggested that appeals to freedom of conscience tend to be more vigorously put forward and more effective in contexts where political or religious structures lose power or moral authority. Thus, for instance, according to C.A. Pierce:

conscience only came into its own in the Greek world after the collapse of the city-state. The close integration of politics with ethics, with the former predominant, was no longer possible: there was no sufficiently close authority, external to the individual, effectively to direct conduct. Consequently, as a pis aller , men fell back on the internal chastisement of the conscience as the only authority. (Pierce 1955: 76)

The same can be said for 17 th Century England, with its crisis of religious authority and the frequent appeals to freedom of conscience in the philosophical and political literature of that time (Childress 1979: 326).

There are three main arguments that can be used to defend a principle of freedom of conscience. Two of them are frequently found in the 16 th and 17 th Century philosophical literature: they are the “argument from ineffectiveness or hypocrisy” and the “argument from ignorance” (Sorabji 2014: 139). A third argument, which might be called “argument from legitimization”, was put forward by John Stuart Mill. Let us examine them in order.

a) The argument from ineffectiveness or hypocrisy is based on the relevance of the distinction between beliefs and acts for the definition of conscience. According to this argument, it is not possible to compel someone to believe or to not believe something, i.e., to change one’s conscientious beliefs. All we can do is compel people to act as if they believed something, which would be a hypocritical behavior. Therefore, if some authority aims to convert people or to change people’s moral views, prohibiting the free expression , through actions, of one’s conscience would not serve this purpose.

This line of argument was often put forward by early Christians, most notably Christian apologist Tertullian, to defend their freedom to practice their cult in a time where they were persecuted by Roman governors: their claim was that forcing them to abandon the Christian cults would have no effect on their conscience. The same line of argument can also be found in Locke’s works on toleration, the Essay Concerning Toleration of 1667 and A Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689.

However, Christians did not seem to believe in the force of this argument, and more generally in the principle of freedom of conscience, when, later on, they attempted to justify the violent persecution of heretics (those who revise their religious dogmas) and apostates (those who abandon their religion) and their forced conversion (Clarke 2014: 118–123). Two main justifications have been given by Christian theologians for the forced conversion of heretics and apostates.

One can be found, among others, in Aquinas and Calvin, who thought that violent persecution is justified because heretics’ mistaken views would exert great influence on many ordinary people. By departing from the Christian doctrine, these people would be condemned to eternal damnation in the afterlife, and Christians have a duty to save as many people as possible from eternal damnation (Clarke 2014: 120–121).

A second type of argument in defense of violent persecution is the one offered by Augustine (5 th Century). He argued that compelling people to follow the true religion—by which he meant persecuting heretics—could open their eyes to the truth (Sorabji 2014: 49–50). This thesis implies that sometimes conscience, even if we confine it to matters of inward conviction and not to behavior, can be influenced by some external imposition.

This latter approach based on the idea of bringing the truth to conscience by “freeing” conscience from error is consistent with the Catholic peculiar understanding of the notion of freedom of conscience. Philosophically speaking, “freedom of conscience” is typically understood as an individualistic concept that allows for a plurality of moral and religious views (Strohm 2011: 90). For the Catholic Church, however, authentic freedom is inseparable from the notion of truth. Inspired by the works of the English theologian and cardinal John Henry Newman, Joseph Ratzinger writes that in the Catholic view “truth” is the middle term that reconciles authority of God and subjectivity of conscience: the latter, when authentically free, cannot but reveal the truth established by the former (Ratzinger 1991). Since, as we have seen above, in the Catholic view reason alone can’t create its own values, which are instilled by God into humans’ hearts, “human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law” of God (John Paul II 1993: par. 35). So when practical reason is free to exercise its “participation” (John Paul II 1993: sec. 40) in the divine law, then “in the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience” (Paul VI 1965: par. 16).

In any case, it is not necessary to dismiss the argument from ineffectiveness in order to justify imposing norms and practices that might violate individuals’ conscience. Actually, the same argument from ineffectiveness can be used to support the imposition of policies that might conflict with individuals’ consciences. On the basis of the idea that conscience is merely a matter of private beliefs, not of action, some authors have argued that compelling people to follow certain rules even against their conscience would not constitute a violation of their freedom of conscience, and is therefore justifiable. This was the line of argument pursued, for example, by Thomas Hobbes (1651: chapter 40), Baruch Spinoza (1670: chapter 20) and John Locke (1660), who argued that the State has the power to enforce certain practices even when citizens claim that it would violate their conscience, in order to protect social order.

b) The “ argument from ignorance”, which might be better labeled “ argument from humility ”, is based on a skeptical approach to the content of conscience. The possibility exists that what we conscientiously believe is wrong and that those holding conscientious beliefs opposite to ours are right. Therefore, there is a reason for not forcing anyone to believe in something or to engage in behaviors that might turn out to be morally wrong. The argument from ignorance or humility started to be put forward quite frequently, and most prominently by Pierre Bayle (1686–1688), after the Catholic Church lost a significant proportion of its religious and moral authority following the Protestant reform in 16 th and 17 th Century—which was defined by Keith Thomas (1993) as “the age of conscience”. It was at that time that we assisted to the “secularization of conscience” in the modern era (Strohm 2011), although the phenomenon would be better conceived of as a “re-secularization”, since conscience was not related to the voice or the authority of God in the Greek world.

The same argument from ignorance or from humility is also put forward by John Locke in his Second Letter Concerning Toleration . Locke had to rely on this argument as an alternative strategy to defend freedom of conscience after the Anglican priest Jonas Proast pointed out that compulsion can actually change personal beliefs (as Augustine had argued), and that therefore the argument from ineffectiveness that Locke had used in his first Letter fails (Sorabji 2014: 151).

A version of the argument from ignorance can also be found in contemporary defenses of conscientious objection in an age where pluralism of worldviews is acknowledged and actually supported. For example, Sulmasy appeals to epistemic humility as “true basis of tolerance” (Sulmasy 2008: 144) in his arguments in support of a right to conscientious objection in health care.

c) Finally, the third argument in defense of freedom of conscience is what I have called above the “ argument from legitimization ”. John Stuart Mill (1859) defended freedom of conscience by appealing to the idea that allowing the free expression of any opinion, and particularly mistaken opinions, would allow truth to emerge more clearly and would provide us with a justification for acting upon our own beliefs, once they have been assessed against others’ opinions. As put by Mill,

[c]omplete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. (Mill 1859: ch. 2)

Freedom of conscience is today protected by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” (art. 18).

According to Strohm, this article should not be taken to imply freedom to act according to one’s conscience, but it only refers to “matters of inward conviction” (Strohm 2011: 88). If this interpretation is correct, article 18 does not seem to raise any interesting philosophical or practical problem today, as very few people today would deny freedom in matters of inward conviction. More problematic is the moral and political debate about the freedom to act , or to refrain from acting , according to one’s conscience, especially where there are professional roles or legal obligations that would demand otherwise. In fact, appeals to conscience and freedom of conscience are often deployed to claim and justify “conscientious objection” to certain activities that someone would otherwise be required to perform.

One example is conscientious objection to the military service where conscription is in place. Although originally conscientious objection to war was mainly a religious issue (the Quakers were the most famous group of conscientious objectors to war), in more recent times the objection to war has been put forward and granted without explicit reference to any religious justification (Moskos and Chamber 1993).

As most States have now abolished conscription, appeals to freedom of conscience and to conscientious objection today can be found mainly in debates in medical ethics with regard to health practitioners who conscientiously object to performing medical procedures they morally oppose, such as abortions (for overviews of the debate in medical ethics, see Wicclair 2011; Wester 2015).

According to those who are against a right to conscientious objection, professional obligations trump any value conscience might have and any principle that might justify conscientious objection qua conscientious (e.g., Savulescu 2006; Giubilini 2014 and 2017, Savulescu and Schuklenk 2017); according to defenders of conscientious objection, professionals’ conscience must be protected to the largest extent possible, i.e., up to the point where respecting conscience would significantly jeopardize physical or psychological health of patients (e.g., Sulmasy 2008; Wicclair 2011), a compromise that, depending on circumstances—for example a too high percentage of objecting practitioners which would make it nearly impossible to refer patients to non-objecting doctors—might be very difficult to achieve (Minerva 2015). Between these two stances, there are positions that are neither for nor against conscientious objection in principle, but pose tighter restrictions to those who advance conscientious objection (McLeod 2020), for example the requirement to provide reasons for the objection, and to submit such reasons to public scrutiny or experts’ assessment of the reasonability of one’s objection (Card 2007, Card 2020), or the qualification that objection can only be justified if consistent with the internal values of the profession (Wicclair 2000; Deans 2013).

However, if it is the validity or the soundness of the reasons provided which is considered relevant for the justification of conscientious objection, it seems that the value of conscience and the principle of freedom of conscience are no longer at stake. What makes an objection good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, has nothing to do with its being conscientious, unless we add a “genuineness requirement” (e.g., Meyers and Woods 1996) to an assessment of the legitimacy of a conscientious objection, whereby professional need to demonstrate that the moral beliefs at stake are deeply and sincerity held. The interesting question in this case would be whether a test can be devised that can reliably track genuine conscientious objections.

There is no such a thing as the notion of conscience, both in a philosophical and in a psychological sense. As we have seen, the concept of conscience has been given different interpretations throughout history, sometimes on the basis of underlying systematic philosophical theories of the mind and of morality, and sometimes serving religious or political purposes.

This lack of uniformity is not only a problem for historians and theoretical philosophers. Because it cannot be immediately clear what we are talking about when we talk of conscience, of freedom of conscience, or of conscientious objection, it is important that clarity is made every time conscience is appealed to in different branches of applied philosophy (particularly medical ethics) and in public debates alike.

This entry has presented a conceptual map, rather than a historical account, of conscience, which can provide some guidance for those engaged in this clarificatory task. One of the benefits of clarifying concepts, and clarifying them in the different circumstances in which they are used, is their subsequent demystification.

Conscience needs to be demystified, since it is one of those concepts that tend to elicit reverence rather than questions or an interest in further inquiry. As seen above, appeals to conscience often replace reason giving and are made with the expectation that no further reason for one’s decisions and positions is requested. This attitude is also displayed in many legislative approaches dealing with the notion of conscience; in particular, legislations about conscientious objection in health care typically grant doctors a right to object to performing certain professional activities (e.g., conscientious objection to abortion) without requiring them to provide reasons for their objection, let alone submitting reasons to some form of assessment.

This entry has distinguished four main understandings of conscience, drawing on the philosophical tradition of the concept. Whether the concept is to be understood as a faculty for self-knowledge and self-assessment, or as having an epistemic function in the sphere of morality, or as a motivational force, or again as a set of self-identifying moral beliefs, or a combination of any of these characterizations, it is important to have clear in mind what exactly we are talking about when we talk of conscience and of freedom of conscience in each circumstance.

Far from being a conversation-stopper, conscience can only find its proper place in philosophical and in public discussion if its philosophical and psychological aspects are teased out, defined and assessed. Appeals to conscience can only be part of philosophical, political, and legal discussion if they are seen as the start, not the end of discussions.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics YouTube Channels , with some interviews to philosophers and ethicists about conscience and conscientious objection in healthcare

Aquinas, Thomas: moral, political, and legal philosophy | conscience: medieval theories of | consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of | ethics, biomedical: privacy and medicine | integrity | moral epistemology | moral sentimentalism

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I. Definition

Conscience is a faculty of the mind that motivates us to act morally—or at least according to our most deeply held values.  Most say it is a form of intuition and uses emotion, although others have argued that it should be shaped by reason.  It is a private experience, and a form of self- knowledge ; from one’s conscience one can learn one’s own values and morals.  This is the root of the word, from the latin con-scientia , perhaps translatable as “together-with-knowing” – to be together with one’s knowledge (of morality).

Yet, conscience has been thought by many to be informed by an objective morality, with divine, transcendental, or natural sources.  Even in our society, where we ostensibly recognize the cultural and personal relativity of morality, conscience is granted a special status, with laws protecting the rights of doctors and others not to violate their consciences.  So, conscience is private, subjective, and culturally relative, but carries legal and political weight.

There are many different ideas about conscience—religious, philosophical, scientific, legal, and popular:

• Religious: in most religions, the morality that informs conscience does or should come from either God, or an enlightened mind. Religions differ as to whether conscience is thought of mainly as a punisher (e.g. Catholic) or as a virtue to be cultivated (e.g. Protestant, Buddhist).
• Philosophical: many philosophers have written that a truly moral conscience requires the exercise of reason; others have claimed that it is an intuition of objective moral truth. Pre-modern philosophers tended to believe in a natural and objective morality informing conscience—something like a truly moral instinct.  Modern philosophers tend to recognize the cultural and individual relativity of morality, and many present arguments based on scientific theories about mind, evolution, and society.
• Scientific: such as theories in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and sociology.
• Legal: Our society seems to recognize “freedom of conscience” – that we should be free to obey our consciences – within limits. Considering that we don’t have a clear or unified philosophy of conscience, this raises legal, political, and social issues.
• Popular: Our everyday notions of conscience are philosophically interesting. Consider that conscience is a part of us opposing actions that we ourselves apparently already consider immoral, but are in danger of doing anyway.  It seems a little paradoxical.  Why do we need a conscience? Evolutionary theory most likely has the answer (see “History” section)

Thought about conscience is so diverse and complex that a comprehensive treatment is not possible. This seems another paradox about conscience; we know it most intimately in ourselves, but there is no consensus about where it comes from, or how much it should be respected.

II. Controversies about Conscience

Freedom of conscience is part of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights , and the laws of many nations.  Yet we have reason to question the idea.  Former Nazi generals have told interviewers that they acted with a clear conscience, because their actions were sanctioned by their leadership and society.  This would be consistent with ideas about conscience as a social instinct, but not necessarily an altruistic one as Darwin thought—perhaps conscience merely urges us to conform with the mores of our society or belief-systems.

Freedom of conscience is problematic because it’s perfectly possible for people’s consciences to insist on actions that most of consider harmful to other human beings—such as refusing to vaccinate their children.

There are several traditional arguments in favor of freedom of conscience:

• The argument from hypocrisy or ineffectiveness : Most people agree that it is impossible to change a person’s conscience from the outside; therefore, not granting freedom of conscience means requiring people to act contrary to their beliefs, which seems wrong. This was a reason to consider persecuting heretics ineffective from the medieval Catholic point of view; but Aquinas and others then justified it for other reasons.

However, the argument from hypocrisy can be turned around; if you can’t change a person’s conscience, then they still have freedom of conscience, even if you force them to behave in a certain way.

• The argument from ignorance : This is based on the recognition of relativism and subjectivism. If our consciences don’t give us objective moral guidance, then you can’t assume that yours is right and another’s wrong, therefore you don’t have a right to deny them freedom of conscience.
• The argument from legitimization : John Stuart Mill argued that it is best for society if all people express their convictions freely, for that will make it possible, through comparison and debate , to better approach truth.

However, none of these arguments completely addresses the conflicts between freedom of conscience and public well-being.  Some might say that a doctor who refuses to perform a life-saving operation out of conscience should be charged with negligence or even manslaughter.  While others might feel that performing the operation is murder. The precise limits of freedom of conscience are still an open debate with profound consequences.

III. Quotes about Conscience

Quotation #1:.

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

This quote seems to represent the way most of us naturally think of conscience—assuming that conscience is always right, as if it’s a direct line to God or some other source of objective moral knowledge.  This also implies that it is right to obey conscience even if opposes one’s social and legal environment.  One the one hand, these could be incorrect and dangerous assumptions; on the other, we could never change injustice in our society, like Dr. King, without sometimes trusting conscience over social norms.

Quotation #2:

“[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.” ― Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays

Bertrand Russel cuts to the heart of the problem with everyday notions about the sacred truth of conscience.  People who were certain they knew the moral truth and followed their conscience have included members of the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusaders, the Nazis, and most terrorists.  Such people did indeed invent hell!

Quotation #3 :

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” ― Mark Twain

This one speaks for itself!

IV. Types of Conscience

There are no ‘types of conscience’ recognized by philosophers except ‘critical conscience’ which means the application of critical reasoning to ethical decisions.  Many religious web-pages list their own types of conscience, in light of their beliefs.

Conscience versus Sociopathy

Sociopaths are, arguably, individuals with no conscience.  They are also defined as incapable of feeling empathy, guilt, fear, or shame at hurting others or violating any notion of morality.  Interestingly, psychologists say that sociopaths understand morality and may even agree with the moral values of their society.  They lack only the brain connection between those values and the emotions that would prevent them from hurting others, enabling them to act without remorse.  Most experts claim that it is an incurable condition and neuroscientific research shows concrete differences between normal and sociopathic brains.  Ironically, then sociopaths seem to be evidence that a capacity for conscience is innate in normal humans.

V. History of Conscience

Before cultural relativity and subjectivism came into vogue during the 20 th century, conscience was considered a source of objective moral knowledge by almost everyone, however in different senses in different cultures.  In ancient Hinduism, Buddhism , and Taoism , knowledge of good and evil was thought to be the natural long-term result of practicing moral action and correct contemplation–in Hindu thought, through the accumulation of good karma, in Buddhist and Taoist thought, through purification of the heart and mind. Moral knowledge in these belief-systems was an aspect of enlightened mind—true knowledge of the nature of self and reality. Ironically though, each belief system had different ideas about the content of this truth, and morality.  In Hinduism, it was primarily about self-sacrifice, in Buddhism compassion, and in Taoism, harmony with society and nature.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam represented a very different conception, arguably.  All three religions are supposed to accept the story of Genesis which says that man’s acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil was a fall from grace, ‘original sin.’  Therefore, according to some interpretations, following one’s own intuitions is more likely a source of sin than morality.  Instead, obedience to God’s law is thought the only true morality.  This would mean that true conscience is knowledge of God’s law, whether that comes directly from God, or through obedience to scripture or clergy; all these possibilities—direct revelation, scripture, and obedience to authorities–have been claimed as the source of moral knowledge in these religions.  However, in practice, these religions also teach purification of the mind to attain true conscience; where Eastern religions teach that a pure mind allows the truth to emerge from within one’s own consciousness, most versions of the Abrahamic religions see a pure mind as a prerequisite for receiving God’s truth.

Greek and Roman thought emphasized reason and knowledge in making moral decisions, a tradition beginning with Aristotle ’s ideas about the development of virtuous character and wisdom through reason and practice.  This is also true of Judaism, known for its Talmud , a body of writing devoted to interpreting scripture and applying it to ethical issues through rational analysis and debate.

Despite the emphasis on blind obedience in Christianity, medieval Christian philosophers developed a theory of conscience with a strong role for both intuition and reasoning.  St. Bonaventure and St. Aquinas wrote of synderesis – a divine spark of moral knowledge – which could only come to a mind which had been cultivated by reason and contemplation to overcome the distortions and corruption of social conditioning.

In the 17 th century, Spinoza similarly wrote that it was necessary to practice and develop reason to transcend socially conditioned emotions and perceptions.  However instead of positing a diving spark as the source of moral truth, Spinoza said that if you view problems from the perspective of eternity, with a peaceful mind, you will perceive moral truth.   Kant also regarded critical reasoning as an important element of conscience, believing that moral truth could be evaluated objectively in light of his ‘ categorical imperative .’  Other 18 th century philosophers believed that conscience was purely intuitive, excluding reason, but like Kant, many of them also believed in the objectivity of the moral truth informing conscience.

From the 18 th century on, increasing numbers of philosophers spoke for pragmatic and relativistic ideas about conscience.  John Locke wrote about how a moral conscience might oppose the laws of the state, and Thomas Hobbes insisted that opinions based on conscience could easily be wrong or in contradiction to other people’s consciences.  So, these and other philosophers also advocated for a ‘critical conscience’–and some skepticism about the dictates of conscience in general.

In the 19 th century, Darwin hypothesized that conscience evolved to resolve conflicts between instincts, such as between instincts for self-preservation and instincts to protect and cooperate with other human beings.

In the 20 th century, Freud analyzed conscience as an effect of the super-ego; as we grow up, natural instincts such as aggression and sexual desire must be frequently frustrated, and even punished, by parents and peers, in order for us to develop into well-adjusted members of society.  This process creates the super-ego, where we internalize the beliefs, implicit or explicit, about right and wrong in our culture and the super-ego causes us to feel guilt or anxiety when we violate them.

Where Darwin said that conscience evolved to resolve inner conflicts, other more recent evolutionary psychologists suggest that it evolved to motivate altruistic behavior, which is now thought to be evolutionarily adaptive for social creatures.

Few today would claim that conscience is a source of objective morality, divine, transcendental or otherwise, since it is obvious that two people’s consciences or religions can dictate opposing moralities—such as pro-choice and pro-life.   Therefore, philosophers today are more concerned with exploring the consequences of this relativity of conscience, especially since people still seem to think of conscience as objectively true, sacred, and inviolable. Which leads naturally to our controversy – “freedom of conscience.”

VI. Conscience in Pop Culture

Example #1: pinocchio.

In this clip from the old Disney Pinocchio film, Jiminy Cricket gives the boy who would be human a lecture and song about conscience with the message “always let your conscience be your guide.”  Although that message implies relying on intuitive conscience, it’s interesting that the Cricket first tries to explain something like ‘critical conscience’ to Pinocchio before giving up in confusion and falling back on a traditional Christian notion of conscience—resistance to temptation.

Example #2:  Emperor’s New Groove

This scene from the Emperor’s New Groove nicely dramatizes one of the most popular conceptions of conscience in our society—the devil and angel on your shoulders.  This colorful and compelling image seems to imply that true morality consists of righteousness. While following the one that “rocks” is the evil one.  However, instead of emphasizing good vs evil, they both just confuse the guy and he ends up dismissing them both.

a. That it gives objective moral truth.

b. That it gives self-knowledge.

c. That people must be allowed to follow their conscience.

d. All of the Above

c. Aristotle

a. Always follow your heart?

b. Use intuition to interpret the Bible correctly.

c. Follow the Bible as interpreted by church authorities.

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Ethics Explainer: Conscience

Explainer Relationships

BY The Ethics Centre 17 NOV 2017

Conscience describes two things – what a person believes is right and how a person decides what is right. more than just ‘gut instinct’, our conscience is a ‘moral muscle’..

By informing us of our  values and principles , it becomes the standard we use to judge whether or not our actions are ethical.

We can call these two roles ethical awareness and ethical decision making.

Ethical Awareness

This is our ability to recognise ethical values and principles.

The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas   believed our conscience emerged from  synderesis: the ‘spark of conscience’. He literally meant the human mind’s ability to understand the world in moral terms. Conscience was the process by which a person brought the principles of  synderesis  into a practical situation through our decisions.

Ethical Decision Making

This is our ability to make practical decisions informed by ethical values and principles.

In his writings, Aristotle described  phronesis: the goodness of practical reason. This was the ability to evaluate a situation clearly so we would know how to act virtuously under the circumstances.

A conscience which is both well formed (shaped by education and experience) and well informed (aware of facts, evidence and so on) enables us to know ourselves and our world and act accordingly.

Seeing conscience in this way is important because it teaches us ethics is not innate. By continuously working to understand our surroundings, we strengthen our moral muscle.

Conscientious Objection

In politics, much of the debate around conscience concerns the “right to conscientious objection”.

• Should pro-life doctors be required to perform abortions or refer patients to doctors who will?
• Must priests break the confessional seal and report sex offenders who confess to them?
• Can pacifists be excused from conscription because of their opposition to war?

For a long time, Western nations, informed by the Catholic intellectual tradition, believed in the “primacy of conscience” – the idea that a person should never be forced to do something they believe is against their most deeply held values and principles.

In recent times, particularly in medicine, this has come to be questioned. Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu   believes doctors working in the public system should be  banned from objecting  to procedures because it compromises patient care.

This debate sees a clash between two worldviews – one where people’s foremost responsibility is to their own personal beliefs about what is good and right and another where this duty is balanced against the needs of the common good.

Philosopher Michael Walzer   believes there are situations where you have a duty to “ get your hands dirty ” – even if the price is your own sense of goodness. In response, Aristotle might have said, “no person wishes to possess the world if they must first become someone else”. That is, we can’t change who we are or what we believe in for any price.

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Conscience - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition, or judgment that assists in distinguishing right from wrong. Moral judgement may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). Essays might discuss the role of conscience in moral decision-making, the psychological and philosophical theories of conscience, and the role of social and cultural factors in shaping conscience. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Conscience you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

‘Heroism’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are we all heroes just waiting for that moment in time when we jump into action? When you look into the mirror, do you see a Gilgamesh, an Odysseus, or a modern day hero? What characteristics determine the makeup of a hero? The 19th Century essay “Heroism” from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Emerson Essays and Lectures takes on the task of defining a hero. Emerson’s take on heroism mirrors that of mythological heroes and modern day heroes. The hero must be […]

Macbeth: the Psychological Effects of Guilt

Guilt plays a large role in human society and how humans work. It's a powerful feeling and if it gets put on the back burner, it might just explode. An example of this is Macbeth by William Shakespeare. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth slowly lets her guilty conscience eat at her sanity before she goes crazy. Her insanity causes her to commit suicide. Her experience is shown through words and her actions. She doesn't address her conscience which makes her go […]

Immanuel Kant-The Greatest Thinker

Biography Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was considered by philosophers to have been one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Kant lived in remote province where he was born for his entire life. He was the fourth of nine children but the oldest surviving child to obtain an education. His parents were devoted followers of Pietistic branch of the Lutheran church, which taught that religion belongs to the inner life expressed in simplicity and obedience to moral law. From the age […]

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Discrimination against LGBT

Why is there still so much hate and discrimination against people for being LGBT? I think a lot of this can depend on the culture a person is present in, and the various cultural cues and signals you get that define what is and what is not acceptable. For some people, issues around sexuality and gender challenge their worldview to the point of impossibility. Sometimes, those people lean back on religion, or tradition, but whatever the justification, that’s not the “reason”, […]

Thoreau and Martin Luther King about Society

Letter from Birmingham Jail" was written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was in prison. He composed a letter directed to a priest within the human rights movement. His peaceful yet firm letter is a remarkably persuasive tone that signifies a substantial shift in the human rights movement fighting for the full rights of African Americans. In comparison, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", published in February 1848, discusses justice in relation to government. The writer […]

Debates to Spread Like Wildfire

One of the greatest debates to spread like wildfire amongst humans is the consideration of what exactly comprises morality and moral behavior. The line demarcating right and wrong is not always clear for every individual as it can become blurred with emotion and outside forces. Often "outside forces refer to other individuals presenting their thoughts and feelings on the situation. While people may try to convince others that morality is a set of standards that are universal, morality is often […]

Conscience: the Complex Threads of Moral Compass

In landscape experience spacious man, concept consciousness stands so as taciturn yet powerful direction, navigating ethic country, ethic, and the personal responsibility tangled. Put on an anchor in Latin word "conscientia," that moves despite "knowledge in borders itself," consciousness is a compass, that brings up our decisions, actions, and value right and noncorrectement interns. In his kernel, consciousness is co-operation cognition, tangled emotion, and tilled influences. This dessert moral gouvernail of rule, one lean types through waters dilemmas and alternative […]

Mysteries of Conscience: Illuminating the Moral Landscape

In a mosaic man tangled experience, concept consciousness opens out so as cloudy direction compass the mess tangled through a country our alternatives and actions moral. Consciousness, often pretended to be so as whisper or moral guard interns, outstrips the tilled border, religious, and social, incarnates, suitable any semi contraignent, it gives up self-examination and moral discussion. In his kernel, consciousness stands so as bass judges between a right and noncorrectement repository principles, bring up our relation ethics. This dessert […]

The Moral Compass: Exploring Conscience in Ethical Discourse

This essay delves into the multifaceted concept of conscience within ethical discourse. Examining its historical roots, psychological dimensions, and philosophical implications, it seeks to elucidate the complex interplay between individual moral agency and societal norms. Drawing from diverse perspectives, it contends that conscience serves as a crucial guide in navigating ethical dilemmas, influencing human behavior, and shaping moral communities. Conscience, often regarded as the moral compass of human behavior, occupies a central position within ethical discourse. Rooted in philosophical inquiry, […]

Echoes of Conscience: Unveiling ‘The Butcher’s Tale’

"Within the tapestry of history, 'The Butcher's Tale' unravels a gripping narrative set against the harrowing backdrop of World War II, offering a haunting portrayal of human resilience amidst the chaos and moral turmoil of wartime Europe. At its core lies the story of Jacob, an unassuming butcher in a small town, whose life becomes entwined with the grim realities of the Nazi regime's rise to power. Jacob's journey encapsulates a profound internal struggle, torn between self-preservation and the moral […]

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88 Conscience Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best conscience topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy conscience essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on conscience, ❓ questions about conscience.

• Abolitionist Harriet Tubman and Moral Conscience Harriet Tubman was one of the people who led the abolitionist movement in the U.S. The unethical behaviors of the slave masters led to the death of many slaves and separation of families.
• Surgical Conscience and Its Importance Thus, it is difficult to discuss the importance of the principle without dissecting different elements of the surgical conscience itself. The word relates to the idea of human conscience as it applies to all actions […]
• Role-Taking and Objective Conscience Mead’s concept of the social act is that individuals take on different roles in order to interact with each other. The listener plays an active role in the conversation by responding to what the speaker […]
• The Song of the Arabic Conscience The Arabic Conscience is the song that portrays the spiritual level of Arabs that arouses deep respect for the intentions they have peace and forgiveness.
• Wise Judgment: Ethics, Accountability, and Human Conscience The man, now in a state of dilemma, does not know whether to blow the whistle and lose his job or just maintain a blind eye to his manager’s unethical acts.
• The Arab Conscience: Ahmed Al-Auran View Used to see the world of the Arab people as a constant threat to their well-being and safety, most countries of the world tend to treat the Arab people and the Islam religion as a […]
• The Conscience of a Liberal Thereafter, he develops the theory of movement conservatism that he argues led to the collapse of the New Deal policies. One of the factors that led to the rise of the party was the naturalization […]
• Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us The second message the author gives is that it should be known that the personality of a psychopathic patient is unlikely to change.
• Can Conscience Save Us? The Earth Charter states that only the universal responsibility, membership in the human family, the need for global ethics as the elements of social consciousness may save people from overpopulation which becomes a real problem […]
• What Is the Conscience? How Does “Natural Law” Work to Inform
• The Development of Conscience in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Effects of the Moral Conscience in Oliver Twist, a Novel by Charles Dickens
• The Three Teachings That Helps Develop One’s Conscience
• The Damaging Effects of Conflict of Conscience and Conflict Between People
• The Importance of a Conscience in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Significance Of The Conscience Of Tom In Mark Twain’s The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer
• The Theme of Awakening of Man’s Conscience in Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Macbeth’s Struggle between his Ambition and His Conscience
• The Social and Moral Issues of the Victorian Era in William Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience and Flicien Rops’ Pornokrates
• The Importance of a School Environment in the Molding of the Children’s Conscience
• Moral Conscience and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Portrayal of the Idea of Conscience the Story The Crucible
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Collective Theme of Class Hate, Guilty Conscience, and Redemption
• The Human Conflict with Conscience in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a Novel by Mark Twain
• The Issue of Deterrence and Conscience in the Debate Bout Capital Punishment
• The Management’s Social Responsibility Challenge: The Case of ‘Universidade de Lisboa – Social Conscience’
• The Guilty Conscience of Lady Macbeth From the Play Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Moral Fights with Conscience in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a Novel by Mark Twain
• Imperfect Conscience In Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment
• The Role of Tom’s Conscience in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a Novel by Mark Twain
• The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation in the Case of the United States
• The Conscience of the Court, by Zora Neale Hurston
• William Shakespeare ‘s Macbeth And The Inner Conscience
• The Stench of a Guilty Conscience in The Scarlet Letter, a Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Terry Malloy as a Hero: Individual Conscience Above Community Loyalty
• The Dilemma Of Conscience That Proctor Faces In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
• The Development Of Individual Conscience In Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
• The Power of Conscience in The Scarlet Letter, a Novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Picture of Dorian Gray Conscience Makes Egotists Of Us All
• Without a Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
• The Ostrich and its Conscience: Information in Dictator and Impunity Games
• Reverend John Hale: Authority and Illogic or Conscience and Logic
• Struggles Of The Conscience In Macbeth By William Shakespeare
• The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism Themes
• The Theme of Clear Conscience in William Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet
• The Consequences of Going Against Your Conscience in Pinocchio, a Film by Walt Disney Productions
• The Awakened Conscience and Emotions in the Dead Man Walking
• The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task
• Examining Good and Bad Conscience in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
• Veneration Without Understanding and Freedom of Conscience
• Lady Macbeth’s Struggle with Conscience and Guilt in Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Is Conscience a More Powerful Motivator Than Money, Fame, or Power
• The Unfinished War Vietnam in the American Conscience by Walter H. Capps Reviewed
• Overcoming Society’s Conscience in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Holocaust and the Relation of the Obedience to Authority and Personal Conscience
• The Awakening of a Conscience in Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Milgram Experiment: An Experiment on the Conflict Between Obedience to Authority and Personal Conscience
• What Is Conscience?
• How Can the Conscience Have a Moral Pattern?
• What Kind of ‘Law’ Is Conscience?
• How Does Conscience Affect Decision Making?
• Should One Follow the Law of the Land or Their Conscience?
• How Does Shakespeare Explore Macbeths Struggle With His Conscience?
• Should the Conscience Always Be Obeyed?
• How Did Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration Influence Conscience Speech Against Senator Joseph McCarthy?
• Should Your Conscience Always Be Your Guide?
• How Does Conscience Help You Become a Better Person?
• What Can Martin Luther Teach Us About Conscience?
• How Do You Get a Conscience in Your Life?
• Should Scientists Have a Social Conscience?
• How to Increase Moral Conscience in Nursing?
• Should Make a Moral Decision Based on One’s Conscience Include Cognitive Consideration of the Consequences?
• How Important Is Conscience?
• Is Conscience Always Right?
• Why Is Conscience Reliable?
• How Does the Conscience Develop?
• Why Is Freedom of Conscience Important?
• Is Conscience Linked to Reason or the Unconscious Mind?
• Where Is Conscience Located?
• Is Conscience the Same as Guilt?
• Can Conscience Be Learned?
• What Are the Rights of Conscience?
• Which Part of Brain Is Responsible for Conscience?
• How Can a Conscience Be Erroneous?
• Are Humans Born With Conscience?
• How Is Conscience More Than Just a Feeling You Have?
• What Is Violation of Conscience?
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Why Conscience Matters: A Theory of Conscience and Its Relevance to Conscientious Objection in Medicine

• Open access
• Published: 24 June 2022
• Volume 29 , pages 1–21, ( 2023 )

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• Xavier Symons   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9495-4395 1  

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Conscience is an idea that has significant currency in liberal democratic societies. Yet contemporary moral philosophical scholarship on conscience is surprisingly sparse. This paper seeks to offer a rigorous philosophical account of the role of conscience in moral life with a view to informing debates about the ethics of conscientious objection in medicine. I argue that conscience is concerned with a commitment to moral integrity and that restrictions on freedom of conscience prevent agents from living a moral life. In section one I argue that conscience is a principle of moral awareness in rational agents, and that it yields an awareness of the personal nature of moral obligation. Conscience also monitors the coherence between an agent’s identity-conferring beliefs and intentions and their practical actions. In section two I consider how human beings are harmed when they are forced to violate their conscience. Restrictions on the exercise of conscience prevent people from living in accord with their own considered understanding of the requirements of morality and undermine one’s capacity for moral agency. This article concludes with a consideration of how a robust theory of conscience can inform our understanding of conscientious objection in medicine. I argue that it is in the interest of individual practitioners and the medical profession generally to foster moral agency among doctors. This provides a prima facie justification for permitting at least some kinds of conscientious objection.

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Introduction

Conscience is an idea that has a significant currency in moral and political discourse in liberal democratic societies. The International Charter on Civil and Political Rights —ratified by nations such as Australia, Canada and the United States—recognises a ‘right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ (United Nations General Assembly 1976 , art. 18). This right is also enshrined in the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (European Commission 2000). Indeed, liberal democracy is premised on the conviction that people should be allowed to live and act in accord with their deeply held beliefs, provided that such beliefs do not advocate or condone harm to others. Freedom of conscience has broad-ranging implications for social and political life. In many political jurisdictions, politicians are entitled to vote based on their conscience (rather than along party lines) on socially divisive issues. This is sometimes called a conscience vote (Beard 2011 ). In healthcare, practitioners are often granted a limited right to conscience objection. Medical associations in the United States, the UK and Australia all recognise a qualified right to conscientious objection in medicine (American Medical Association 2022 ; General Medical Council 2022 ; Australian Medical Association 2019 ). This right, however, has come under increasing pressure in recent years (Charo 2005 ; Savulescu 2006 ; Schuklenk and Smalling 2017 ; McLeod 2020 ).

Surprisingly, recent moral philosophical literature on the notion of conscience is sparse (Brownlee 2012 , p. 3). In general, it is only in areas where freedom of conscience has become a source of debate that scholars have turned their attention to conscience as a feature of human moral psychology. Extant scholarship tends to offer a reductionist view of conscience, equating it with deeply held beliefs or a person’s religious or ethical commitments. Savulescu, quoting Shakespeare, has described conscience as a ‘word that cowards use’, warning that it can be an ‘excuse for vice’ or ‘invoked to avoid one’s duty’ (Savulescu 2006 , p. 294). Similarly, Schuklenk and Smalling have argued that conscience claims by professionals are ‘untestable’ and ‘arbitrary’, and that accommodating for conscience claims could have very serious real-world consequences for people wishing to access public services (Schuklenk and Smalling 2017 , p. 236).

In this essay, I intend to lay the moral psychological groundwork for a defence of freedom of conscience in professional life and medical practice in particular. Footnote 1 I contend that recent criticisms of conscientious objection in medicine and other professions have been driven in part by a failure to adequately grapple with the concept of conscience. Scholars either provide a decidedly superficial account of conscience or do not even discuss conscience at all. To this end, this essay offers a detailed account of the role of conscience in moral life and considers why restrictions on conscience do grave harm to moral agents. I then outline how this robust understanding of conscience gives us reason to respect conscientious objection in medicine. It is my hope that this essay will provide a stimulus for a more thorough academic engagement with the concept of conscience and its relevance to professional life.

Section One of this article offers an account of the role of conscience in human moral psychology. I reject the idea that conscience provides us with a source of intuitive moral knowledge. Instead, I argue that conscience provides us with an awareness of the personal nature of moral obligation. That is, conscience leads agents to view morality in relation to their own character and identity and leads them to commit to living up to the requirements of the moral life. In Section Two, I consider how human beings are harmed when their freedom of conscience is restricted. Some theorists note that violations of conscience can lead to severe emotional trauma. Yet I focus on the implications that the suppression of conscience has for one’s character and capacity for agency. In Section Three, I offer a justification for permitting conscientious objection in medicine. I argue that respect for conscientious objection in medicine is a natural corollary of a recognition of the moral significance of conscience and the cost of violating conscience.

The Role of Conscience in Human Moral Psychology: A Source of Moral Awareness Rather than Intuitive Moral Knowledge

In this section I will focus on what one might call a ‘well-developed conscience’. It is true that someone might have a conscience that has been poorly formed, depleted or emasculated such that they may deceive themselves about their actions/intentions/desires or be unaware of their responsibilities and obligations. For the most part, this article will be dealing with a conscience that is well-formed and well-functioning.

Conscience plays an indispensable role in giving agents an awareness of their moral duties and facilitating moral reflection. This section will discuss how conscience gives moral agents an existential awareness of their moral obligations. I will critique the widely held view that conscience provides intuitive knowledge about the rightness and wrongness of actions, and will instead argue that conscience yields an awareness of the personal relevance of moral obligation. I also argue that conscience monitors the coherence between an agent’s self-identifying beliefs and intentions and their practical actions (D’Arcy 1961 ; Blustein 1993 ; Benjamin 1995 ; Velleman 2009 ; Wicclair 2011 ; McLeod 2020 ).

Before commencing our discussion of conscience, it is important to note that this section will not provide an exhaustive discussion of the history of the idea of conscience; there are many ancient and modern philosophers who discussed the idea of conscience who I will not mention. Rather, the following discussion focuses on those philosophers who have been the most notable proponents of an intuitionist account of conscience (an account of conscience that is quite common in the literature today and that is thus necessary to critique). It should suffice to say that there are several traditions of theorising on conscience that are not discussed in this essay as comprehensive discussion of the history of conscience is not possible here.

Several early modern philosophers argued that conscience is a source of moral knowledge and plays an integral role in giving agents epistemic access to moral facts (Shaftesbury 1999 /1711; Hume 1975 /1740; Rousseau 1921 /1762). What we are referring to here is not just the role that conscience plays in motivating agents to deliberate about how they ought to act. Rather, the claim is that conscience also gives agents a grasp of the meaning and importance of morality. That is to say, conscience gives us knowledge of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Conscience, in this regard, is not only a stimulus for obtaining moral knowledge but is actually a source of moral knowledge itself.

The meaning of the term ‘moral knowledge’ is indeterminate, however, and we must clarify what kind of moral knowledge conscience can be said to provide. Conscience is sometimes portrayed as a homunculus that whispers ethical guidance in the ears of moral agents. The commonly used metaphor of conscience as a ‘voice’ is an example of this homuncular view of conscience (Schinkel 2007 , pp. 117–121). It is tempting, based on this caricature, to suggest that conscience gives us an intuitive grasp of moral truth. One might be inclined to describe conscience as ‘a distinct mental faculty, an intuitive moral sense that determines the rightness and wrongness of actions’ (Sulmasy 2008 , p. 136). Footnote 3 Rousseau was a proponent of this view and described conscience as ‘an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which…we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil’ (Rousseau 1762 , p. 253). The idea is that conscience provides us with a clear and unadulterated view of the requirements of virtue and justice. According to Rousseau, conscience frees us from ‘childish errors’ and the ‘prejudices of our upbringing’ and provides a ‘true guide’ for virtuous action (Rousseau 1762 , pp. 252–253).

Related to this, someone might describe the process of ‘searching one’s conscience’ as an introspective means of obtaining knowledge about morality. The thought might be that we have many conflicting ideas that characterise our moral reasoning—ideas that are the product of cultural, religious or political conditioning—and that introspection or soul-searching is required to get at those intuitions that form the true content of morality. One might argue that this process of introspection gives us access to conscience and that conscience is a faculty for moral perception that we discover deep in our consciousness. Bishop Butler, for example, described conscience as a faculty of the mind that ‘pronounces determinately some actions to be in themselves evil, wrong, unjust’ (Butler 1950 /1726: Sermon II). One might think that we discern moral truth by making ourselves more attentive to these pronouncements of conscience deep in our consciousness.

Yet the intuitionist account of conscience does not seem right as conscience can often lead people to adopt manifestly immoral beliefs. If conscience were a privileged source of moral knowledge—a special sensibility deep in our consciousness that gives us privileged insight into morality—then it would seem that all moral reasoning could be concluded with the recommendation that each moral agent should ‘follow their conscience’ (Ojakangas 2013 ). Rather than engaging in moral reflection and dialogue to determine how one should act in particular situations, one could just follow the quiet voice echoing in the depth of one’s heart and use this as a moral guide. Yet experience indicates that the inner voice of conscience can be seriously misguided. Someone might, for example, have racist intuitions and sincerely believe that some races are superior to others. Other agents might have discriminatory intuitions about matters of gender, religion, class and so on. Conscience defined as a source of moral intuition, in this respect, does not seem infallible nor even reliable. Rather, in some cases it reflects a perverse moral logic.

Even if conscience in and of itself is reliable, agents can still face practical problems in trying to discern what guidance conscience is providing to them. The voice of conscience could be drowned out or mimicked by other features of our moral psychology. As Hill ( 1998 ) writes:

Whether or not we believe that conscience itself is infallible, we must still acknowledge that we can make mistakes about whether what we take to be dictates of conscience are authentic. Wishful thinking, fear, childhood prejudices, and indoctrination in false ideologies can imitate or distort the voice of conscience, especially if we have dulled that voice by frequently disregarding it.

The issue, then, is not just that conscience can itself err and lead moral agents astray. Even if conscience in and of itself is reliable, agents can still face practical problems in trying to discern what guidance conscience is providing to them. There are many things that can obscure the voice of conscience. What we might think is the voice of conscience may in fact be some prejudice that we have acquired in childhood or from the cultural or professional milieu in which we are immersed. As such, it is unclear whether conscience, in the intuitionist sense, could function as a useful guide for moral action. Rather, it seems that the voice of conscience would often be muted by other influences that shape our moral psychology.

There are significant problems, therefore, in describing conscience as a source of intuitive knowledge about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts. I do not want to completely disregard this view of conscience, as I do think there is merit to the idea that one must form one’s conscience for it to function as a reliable source of moral knowledge (O’Shea 2018 ). We can educate our own moral sensibilities in ways that will conform them more with moral truth. We can, for example, interrogate our intuitions in the light of widely accepted political or religious principles (such as a commitment to human rights or to the common good) and thus ensure that our intuitions are reliable. This qualification might help to rescue the intuitionist view from some of the powerful objections that it faces.

Yet in the context of debates about conscientious objection, I do not think it wise to focus on the intuitionist account of conscience—at least insofar as we are trying to make the case for ensuring that conscience is respected in law and professional codes of conduct. The intuitionist account of conscience raises too many concerns about the fallibility of our own moral compass. If we want to make the case for respecting consciences, we should be wary of focusing on the substantive content of the beliefs that conscience generates.

Moral knowledge is not limited, however, to substantive knowledge about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts. Rather, it is my contention that conscience gives us meta-ethical knowledge of the requirements of morality. Specifically, conscience provides us with an existential awareness of our moral obligations over and above our grasp of substantive moral truths. An agent can have moral knowledge about how they ought to act in a particular situation without that knowledge engaging them at a personal level. An agent may, for example, believe that theft is wrong without believing that they should refrain from engaging in acts of petty theft or, in a slightly different context, without refraining from unlawfully using another person’s intellectual property. The proposition that ‘theft is wrong’ may not move them in any deep way. Several philosophers (Fuss 1964 ; Blustein 1993 ; Sulmasy 2008 ) have argued that conscience is precisely that feature of our moral psychology that gives us an existential knowledge of our moral duties. That is, their view is that conscience provides an agent with the concrete, existential conviction that they ought to carry out those kinds of actions that practical reason has deemed to be morally obligatory. Footnote 4 As Fuss writes, ‘conscience affords one the ‘existential knowledge’ (more properly, the existential conviction) that he is under obligation to do what he knows to be right and to pursue what he judges to be good’ ( 1964 , p. 116). Similarly, Blustein writes that ‘conscience indicates a particular way of seeing moral and other normative demands, a mode of consciousness in which prospective actions are viewed in relation to one’s self and character’ (Blustein 1993 , p. 294).

Some points of clarification are in order here. First, what we are describing is not a substantive belief arising from practical reason, nor a process of inference from general to particular moral knowledge. I am not arguing for an alternative formulation of the view that conscience provides us with intuitive knowledge about how we ought to act. Rather, the knowledge arising from conscience would be better described as a felt conviction that ‘one must act in accordance with what he knows or believes’ (Fuss 1964 , p. 116). Conscience is a form of meta-ethical knowledge about how one ought to respond to the moral insights provided by practical reason as well as the beliefs that constitute one’s identity. This is a different kind of knowledge from the substantive knowledge that people typically associate with conscience, though it is still vital for living a moral life.

Conscience, according to this view, gives agents a sense that they have a personal stake in pursuing a moral life. This existential awareness provided by conscience leads one to make a commitment to conscientiously observing the requirements of morality. Thus Sulmasy ( 2008 , p. 138) writes:

[Conscience involves] a commitment to uphold one’s deepest self-identifying moral beliefs; a commitment to discern the moral features of particular cases as best one can, and to reason morally to the best of one’s ability; [...] a commitment to make decisions according to the best of one’s moral ability and to act upon what one discerns to be the morally right course of action.

Conscience gives agents an awareness that their flourishing as moral agents is tied up with living a moral life in a conscientious manner and seeking to discern the good in particular situations. Conscience leads agents to ‘assent to the truth that one should act morally’ (Sulmasy 2008 , p. 138).

It is important to be clear that conscience—understood as a form of moral awareness—does not necessarily track true moral knowledge. Conscience can, in some cases, be led astray by practical reason (Anscombe 2005 , pp. 238–241). It may be the case, for example, that a soldier forms the belief that the torture of innocent civilians is morally permissible. The soldier may feel a strong existential conviction, arising from conscience, that they are duty bound to carry out torture if they receive such an order from a commanding officer. Conscience, then, could be said to yield a conviction that the soldier should do what, in the last analysis, is morally impermissible. So we should resist the claim that conscience is an infallible moral guide. This is not to say that conscience itself goes awry—strictly speaking, it is practical reason that errs. But conscience is responsive to practical reason, and as such will be implicated in the errors of practical reason (Fuss 1964 , p. 117). Footnote 5

To be clear, one of the practical functions of conscience is to ensure that there is coherence between our deep beliefs and our actions. Conscience monitors the extent to which our practical actions cohere with those beliefs that form part of our moral identity. As Sulmasy ( 2008 , p. 138) writes:

The activity of conscience is a meta-judgment that arises in particular moral deliberations. It is a judgment that a proposed act (or an act one has already accomplished) would violate one’s fundamental moral commitments, including, importantly, a fundamental moral commitment to act with understanding.

People can, of course, have different fundamental moral commitments. Conscience does not prescribe what sorts of commitments a person must have. But it does monitor the extent to which a person is living up to these commitments, whatever they may be. Conscience is an advocate, so to speak, for the deeply held, identifying-conferring beliefs that a person holds.

It is in this respect that conscience can be said to track moral integrity. The integrity view of conscience has been widely defended in recent literature on conscience (Benjamin 1995 , p. 470; Childress 1979 , p. 322; Blustein 1993 , p. 300; Sulmasy 2008 , p. 138; Lyons 2009 , pp. 488–494). As stated earlier, proponents of this view argue that conscience is concerned with personal integrity understood in terms of inner, psychological unity. Inner unity is valuable, according to these authors, either because integrity contributes to our having a good life (Benjamin 1995 , p. 470; Blustein 1993 ), or because unity and the desire to repair ‘inner division’ are admirable characteristics of persons (Blustein 1993 , p. 297). Conscience is a feature of our moral psychology that is responsible for preserving unity between our deeply held beliefs and our practical actions. It makes us alert to signs of discord between our actions or thoughts and our deep moral commitments; and it inclines us to assuage such discord.

One might question, however, whether it is in fact necessary to posit a level of moral awareness over and above the moral imperatives arising from practical reason. One might argue that practical reason alone is sufficient to explain moral motivation, and that we need not posit the existence of conscience to explain why people are committed to living a moral life. Conscience, on this picture, is redundant, at least when it comes to explaining why people live morally upright lives. Alternatively, one might argue that it is moral virtue, not conscience, that makes us responsive to moral reasons. We might describe virtues as the underlying dispositions that make agents responsive to the right kinds of moral reasons (Audi and Murphy 2006 ; Cullity 2017 ). That is, we might think of virtues as dispositions to act in the right way based on the right moral reasons. If indeed moral and intellectual virtues dispose an agent to respond appropriately to practical reason, then one might argue that it is unnecessary to posit the existence of a moral sensibility such as conscience whereby we become responsive to the imperatives of practical reason.

The trouble with these alternative perspectives, however, is that they focus on our responsiveness to specific moral reasons rather than the existential conviction that one ought to live a moral life. Practical reason tells us what the good is, or what the correct course of action is, and virtue makes us responsive to the right kinds of moral reasons. But neither practical reason nor virtues explain why we are personally invested in morality or why agents commit to living a moral life. Practical reason may very well yield specific moral knowledge in the form of normative propositions about the world. But this does not give an agent the conviction that they ought to act on this knowledge. Virtue may make us responsive to the right moral reasons, but it does not explain why an agent makes a fundamental commitment to living a moral life. Conscience is precisely that aspect of our moral psychology that yields a personal sense of moral obligation. It is that feature of psychology whereby an agent recognises that he is ‘under obligation to do what he knows to be right and to pursue what he judges to be good’ (Fuss 1964 , p. 116).

Indeed, this is one significant way that my account of conscience differs from that offered by Kimberley Brownlee in her 2012 book Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience . Brownlee describes conscience as a principle of moral responsiveness in agents and she links the cultivation of conscience to the cultivation of practical wisdom, virtue and objective moral integrity. Yet it seems that at least some of the descriptions that Brownlee provides of conscience—such as when she describes conscience as ‘a set of practical moral skills’ (p. 52) and ‘a guide to good conduct’ (p. 54)—make conscience sound a lot like practical reason or virtue. This approach runs the risk of rendering conscience redundant in our explanation of human moral psychology. It is this accusation of redundancy that I wish to avoid by describing conscience as meta-capacity which makes an agent aware of his or her personal investment in living a moral life. Granted, Brownlee also describes conscience ‘as a sustained commitment to improving ourselves as moral beings’ (p. 55), which makes her account sound much more like a meta-capacity. But she also at times appears to conflate conscience with lower-order moral psychological functions and I am inclined to reject these aspects of her theory.

This should suffice for a discussion of the role of conscience in moral life. I do not want to overstate the originality of my account of conscience. Ultimately, the position I am advancing is a close cousin of the view advanced by Brownlee as well as Sulmasy and others. The more novel aspect of my argument lies not in the content of the theory of conscience that I wish to advance but rather my discussion of the moral harm that an agent incurs when they act contrary to conscience. It is to this topic that we now turn.

Acting Against Conscience and Moral Harm

This article has as its theme conscience and conscientious objection. In this section I will explore the moral cost of acting contrary to one’s conscience. Some theorists offer a detailed description of the emotional sanctions that agents experience when they act contrary to their conscience (Childress 1979 ; Lyons 2009 ). In this section, however, I will focus on the cost of acting against one’s conscience and the implications that this has for one’s self and one’s character. Indeed, it seems that we ought to focus on the self first and emotions second, at least insofar as we are to get to the heart of why conscience matters. I will argue that moral agents risk losing their basic orienting ideals should they act in a manner contrary to their deep moral and other normative commitments. Specifically, they imperil those life projects that are the very conditions for their existence and that give meaning and purpose to their lives. Agents who abandon their deeply held beliefs and commitments, furthermore, also undermine their capacity for independent moral judgement. Our personal moral ideals are an epistemic standpoint from which we can independently judge the social and professional norms of the communities to which we belong. To the extent that one lacks personal moral ideals, or one allows these ideals to be eroded, one loses the vantage-point from which one can independently critique the norms of professional work and social life.

Some theorists appeal to the notion of inner harmony or psychological integrity when attempting to describe the disvalue of acting contrary to conscience. In the previous section I described this as the integrity view of conscience. Wicclair, for example, refers to the importance of preserving moral integrity, which he defines as consistency between one’s actions and one’s core moral convictions (Wicclair 2017 , pp. 7–8). Similarly, Childress ( 1979 , p. 318) associates violations of conscience with a ‘fundamental loss of integrity, wholeness, and harmony in the self’. The question remains, however, as to why a loss of inner harmony or psychological integrity is of disvalue. Why is it problematic that we act in a manner contrary to our deep beliefs?

To answer this question, we should recall that conscience provides agents with a personal sense of moral obligation. It helps agents to see the requirements of morality in relation to their own self and character. Importantly, what we are focused on here is not an abstract conception of morality—such as a Kantian deontological framework or a utilitarian framework—to which an agent is bound by the force of reason. Rather, what we are concerned with is an agent’s own considered understanding of morality formed and sifted through the filter of their own life experiences (Williams 1981 ). What conscience draws an agent’s attention to is their own way of conceptualising the moral life and their own deep beliefs about their social and professional responsibilities. These beliefs may contingently overlap with a particular universalist conception of moral obligation (be it a Kantian deontological conception of morality, a utilitarian moral theory, or some other moral framework). Yet there is no necessary connection between any one moral framework and how an individual moral agent understands morality. Ultimately an agent’s conception of morality can be as subtly varied as the variety of human experience itself. What makes an agent’s conception of morality normative from the perspective of conscience is that it constitutes a fundamental part of her character and identity. By virtue of her conscience, an agent feels that she is bound—on pain of inauthenticity—to abide by the requirements of morality as she so conceives of it. Besides, conscience also consists of someone’s considered moral judgements about the world, and it makes sense for an agent to act in accord with their best judgement about the right course of action.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not claim that conscience never goes awry. Conscience can be misled by practical reason, or, alternatively, an agent may internalise a conception of morality that is, in the last analysis, fundamentally misguided. For example, it may be that an agent has internalised cultural norms that are manifestly misogynistic or even racist. Conscience, in this respect, could end up enforcing beliefs that are morally reprehensible. But we should not jump from this fact to the conclusion that conscience consists of nothing more than a series of arbitrary likes and dislikes. Quite the contrary, for a belief or commitment to form part of an agent’s identity it must be something that she has reflectively endorsed and held for a sustained period. It must be sincerely felt and shape the agent’s very outlook on life. Nothing is further from a whim than an agent’s deepest beliefs and commitments.

Here we arrive at a bedrock insight concerning the moral harm arising when one acts against one’s conscience. Acting against conscience does not only lead to emotional distress. The moral psychological reality is more profound than this. Agents also experience a weakened sense or total loss of meaning and identity when they transgress their deepest commitments. Bernard Williams ( 1981 , p. 13) offers an insightful discussion of this matter, describing an agent’s basic commitments or ‘ground projects’ as ‘the motive force which propels him into the future, and gives him a reason for living’. Williams writes:

[it need not be the case] that if [an agent’s ground project] were frustrated or in any of various ways he lost it, he would have to commit suicide, nor does he have to think that… but he may feel in those circumstances that he might as well have died...in general a man does not have one separable project which plays this ground role: rather, there is a nexus of projects, related to his conditions of life, and it would be the loss of all or most of them that would remove meaning. (Ibid.)

My claim is that deep and repeated violations of conscience lead an agent to experience a loss of purpose and meaning and a concomitant loss of identity. The cost of acting against one’s conscience is higher where an agent acts contrary to not just one commitment but the very nexus of commitments that makes her life worthwhile. Self-betrayal of this kind would fall into the category of actions that are, from the perspective of an agent, ‘unthinkable’. I am referring to actions so contrary to an agent’s beliefs that he ‘cannot find anything in his self-conception to make it intelligible as something that he would do’ (Velleman 2009 , p. 108). To seriously violate conscience is, in a very meaningful sense of the word, to do violence to one’s identity.

To use one example, we can consider the character of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s stage play A Man for All Seasons . The play focuses on the life and death of More, a Chancellor of England in the sixteenth century who famously refused to endorse Henry VIII’s decision to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon. More was executed for this. At one point in the play, in a tense theological conversation with his friend the Duke of Norfolk, More defends his commitment to the Catholic conception of the indissolubility of marriage, stating: ‘what matters is not that it’s true, but that I believe it; or no, not that I believe it, but that I believe it’ (Bolt 1960 , p. 110). More is here emphasising the fact that the belief is part of his identity, and that he feels bound in conscience to act in accord with the belief. More acknowledges that there may be other views about the permissibility of divorce that fall within the pale of reasonableness. But that is beside the point. He is committed to the Catholic conception, and therefore is bound in conscience to act in accord with this belief. To do otherwise would be to betray himself and to do violence to the ‘ I ’ that is the subject of the belief.

Suffice to say that conscience involves a commitment to acting in accord with one’s deep beliefs, and that a failure to do so can result in a dissolution of one’s own understanding of one’s identity (something that More believes is a moral harm worse than death).

The literature on moral injury is also a useful point of reference when trying to understand the psychology of conscience. Moral injury refers to the strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person’s moral or ethical code. Potentially morally injurious events include a person’s own or other people’s acts of omission or commission, or betrayal by a trusted person in a high-stakes situation (Williamson et al. 2021 ). For example, healthcare staff working during the COVID-19 pandemic might experience moral injury because they perceive that they received inadequate protective equipment, or when their workload is such that they deliver care of a standard that falls well below what they would usually consider to be good enough (Williamson et al. 2021 ).

Moral injury is a much broader concept that has relevance beyond the psychology of conscience. Moral injury can be caused by the actions of others, such as when a trusted friend betrays you, whereas acting against conscience is an act of self -betrayal. Moral injury is thus a concept that ranges beyond betrayals of one’s conscience. But acting against one’s conscience is, nevertheless, a potentially morally injurious event and can produce the same effects as those described in the moral injury literature.

Specifically, violations of one’s conscience can produce a loss of meaning and moral identity akin to that experienced by the morally injured. Fontana and Rosenheck ( 2004 ) found that potentially morally injurious events in war (such as killing, enjoying killing, participating in atrocities, contributing to another’s death and failure to save wounded) positively predicted guilt, the experience of spiritual crisis and a loss of meaning in life. In some studies loss of meaning is deemed to be one of the most common experiences of people with moral injury (Ames et al. 2019 ). Some of the language used to describe moral injury also speaks to the idea of a loss of moral identity. Sherman describes moral injury as ‘global feeling of a sense of shattered moral identity, moral despair and or profound moral disillusionment’ (Sherman 2017 , p. 1). Other authors use terms such as ‘moral affront’, ‘moral disruption’ (Drescher et al. 2011 ); ‘moral dislocation’ (Sherman 2015 ) and ‘moral disorientation’ (Molendijk 2018 ) to capture the notion of a loss of moral identity. These terms acknowledge the disturbance to one’s sense of self and character that moral injury can produce.

Something similar is liable to occur when someone violates their own conscience in a fundamental way. After all, violations of conscience undercut the basic beliefs around which one orients oneself in the morally complex world in which we live. Without such beliefs to orient oneself, it stands to reason that moral agents will experience moral disruption, dislocation and disorientation.

So much for the harm of violations of conscience to one’s sense of meaning and identity. Second, I would like to discuss the impact of acting against conscience on an agent’s capacity for moral agency. It is important to reflect on the criteria according to which we ascribe moral agency to an individual. I would like to focus on two related aspects of agency in particular. First, I would like to focus on the notion of a discretionary space in which a moral agent can make moral decisions in an unconstrained way. Second, I would like to focus on an agent’s reflective endorsement of those desires that motivate action. Both of these elements of agency are undermined when one acts against conscience in response to duress from an external authority. By a ‘restriction on conscience’, I will be referring to a conduct rule issued by an external authority that prevents an agent from acting in accord with her conscience.

First, we should recognise that moral agency requires discretionary space in which an agent is free to make their own moral decisions. It may sound like a truism to say that one requires freedom to make free decisions; yet there seems to be widespread confusion about this in the context of social and professional ethics. Some commentators, for example, believe that it is acceptable to enforce professional standards such that a health professional has no option of dissenting from mainstream practice (cf. Stahl and Emanuel 2017 ). Without the ‘discretionary space’ to choose between different options, however, a moral agent’s ‘choice’ of a particular action can only be said to be free in a highly qualified way (cf. Sulmasy 2017 ). It matters if the moral agent could have chosen otherwise. If someone’s actions were constrained such that she only really had one viable option from which to choose, then she can hardly be said to exercise moral agency in choosing this option. Rather, she would say that her agency has been diminished or distinguished by the constraints that have been imposed on her.

Second—and even if we reject the claim that agency requires that an agent has an ability to do otherwise—a moral agent’s capacity for agency is, at the very least, conditional on her reflective endorsement of the reasons and desires that motivate her actions. That is to say, for an agent to exercise moral agency, she must reflectively endorse the reasons and desires that lead her to act in particular ways. The agent must have pro-attitudes towards the reasons and desires in question, and must desire at a second-order level that the first-order reasons and desires that motivate them actually form part of their will. A failure to do this means that the agent remains ‘wanton’ or indifferent towards the reasons that drive their actions (cf. Frankfurt 1971 ). This is hardly an example of rational and reflective moral agency.

The trouble with a restriction on the exercise of conscience, however, is that it involves agents acting on the basis of coercion or compulsion rather than reflectively endorsed desires. If we force people to behave in particular ways, we are not allowing them to act based on reasons and desires that they have reflectively endorsed. Rather, we are leading them to act on the basis of duress, and there is a very real sense in which they are not exercising their agency—at least, not in the fullest sense of the word. For example, if someone commits a crime in the heat of passion, there is a sense in which her responsibility for that crime is diminished. She has not fully reflectively endorsed their course of action, and so cannot be said to be acting with the full force of her character. I would argue that something analogous is occurring when social or professional norms are enforced in such a way that individual moral agents have no choice but to conform to these norms. Agents’ adherence to these norms is motivated by an external force rather than by a rationally endorsed, interior conviction that one ought to act in accord with these norms.

It is instructive here to return to the idea of integrity, and to consider how this might be related to agency. Part of what it means to be a moral agent is to form an identity, based on one’s considered views of the world. We might think of this as an extended process of reflective endorsement, whereby one steadily acquires a series of identity-conferring beliefs that come to define her character. These beliefs and commitments, in turn, function as the content of one’s moral agency. MacIntyre ( 1999 , p. 317) links integrity to maintenance of a fixed identity, and suggests that maintenance of one’s identity underpins one’s capacity for agency. He writes:

To have integrity is to refuse to be, to have educated oneself so that one is no longer able to be, one kind of person in one social context, while quite another in other contexts. It is to have set inflexible limits to one’s adaptability to the roles that one may be called upon to play.

Integrity, in other words, is precisely about not adapting to community practices that conflict with one’s moral code. If one were to be limitlessly open to adaptation based on social context, then one’s values would ultimately be a mere reflection of social context rather than reflectively endorsed commitments.

Some theorists may argue that adaptability is a virtue, particularly when one is discharging an important social or professional role. That is to say, it could be argued that it is virtuous to make oneself amenable to the relevant conventions that one encounters in one’s social or professional life. I would argue, however, that adaptability is only a virtue when one has manifestly fallen into moral error. In contrast, where one is indeed convinced upon reflection that one has arrived at the correct moral conviction vis-a-vis one’s social or professional obligations, it is a virtue rather than a vice to hold to one’s beliefs rather than adapting to the demands that have been placed on oneself by one’s peers. This is precisely what it means to have integrity. Conscience, for its part, is that aspect of our psychology that leads us to maintain integrity and to persist in our beliefs and commitments when these conflict with prevailing social or professional norms.

Agency follows on from integrity, as agency is about acting in a manner consonant with one’s desires. And those desires that are most truly our own are those that have been sifted through reflection and experience and that we have interiorised to form part of our character. We exercise moral agency, in the fullest sense of the word, when we act wholeheartedly (Frankfurt 1988). This wholeheartedness in turn requires at least some degree of inflexibility (enough inflexibility for us to maintain some grip on our own personal identity).

As I suggested earlier, agents who abandon their deeply held beliefs also undermine their capacity for independent moral judgement. Building on the foregoing discussion, we can say that our personal moral ideals are an epistemic standpoint from which we can independently judge the professional norms and standards that are imposed on us. They are a means by which we can step outside of our professional role and view the world from our own unique moral point of view, which may have been developed on the basis of (or may have been informed by) various moral frameworks or principles. By setting ‘inflexible limits’ on the kinds of social and professional functions that we are willing to perform, we maintain an important degree of epistemic and volitional independence from the social and professional communities of which we form a part. To the extent that we lack personal moral ideals, however—or, to the extent that we allow these ideals to be eroded—we lose the vantage-point from which we can independently critique the norms that characterise our social and professional communities. If the moral content of our character becomes indistinguishable from the moral conventions of these communities—or, perhaps more to the point, if we fail to sift these conventions through the filter of our own capacity for critical reflection—we lose the capacity for impartial and detached judgement that is necessary to externally critique social or professional conventions. If we are endlessly willing to adapt ourselves to any convention that is foist upon us, we will lose the agential independence necessary to externally critique the communities of practice of which we form a part.

A problem with restrictions on conscience, then, is that they undermine those features of moral rationality that are prerequisite of agency and independent judgement. Agents are encouraged to suppress and abandon those beliefs that ultimately form the bedrock of their unique, personal moral point of view. Rather, they are led to make themselves fully beholden to professional moral standards instead of following their own interiorised standards of what is right and wrong. These factors combine to undermine an agent’s capacity for independent moral judgement (which presumably is a core feature of moral agency). Restrictions on conscience, in this sense, greatly diminish an agent’s capacity for considered moral judgement and action independent of the norms of social and professional practices.

An Application of Principles of Conscience to Conscientious Objection in Medicine

In this section I will consider how the preceding discussion of conscience can inform our understanding of the ethics of conscientious objection in medical practice. I have argued that violations of conscience gravely harm one’s sense of identity and one’s capacity for moral agency. If we accept this, then it seems that we ought to afford a prima facie right to conscientious objection to healthcare practitioners. Footnote 6 Indeed, I would argue that the medical profession has an interest in cultivating practitioners of conscience who will in turn maintain and, where necessary, critique the moral standards in the profession. Without practitioners who morally reflect on their work and on the norms that characterise the profession, the institution of medicine would in a sense be left without a ‘voice of conscience’ that could call it to account when it errs. In what follows I will argue that there is a prima facie justification for permitting conscientious objection in medicine, notwithstanding the need to respect patient welfare and autonomy.

A practitioner’s integrity and capacity for moral agency may be harmed if they are obliged to participate in practices to which they have a deeply held moral or religious objection. As I stated earlier, violations of conscience are concerned with the weakened sense or total loss of self and character that an agent experiences when she transgresses her deepest (moral) commitments. At worse, they lead to this fundamental loss of meaning and purpose. When an agent not only violates some particular moral stricture but transgresses her deepest moral beliefs, she is liable to experience a loss of purpose and meaning. That is to say, the impact of a violation of conscience is more serious where an agent violates not just one commitment but the very nexus of commitments that makes their life worthwhile.

The issue with practices such as abortion and euthanasia in medicine is that they concern some of the most fundamental moral and religious beliefs that an agent has about human life (assuming, for argument’s sake, that the agent is a conscientious objector). The kind of moral harm involved concerns not just one belief but the very nexus of beliefs that characterise one’s moral identity and that make one’s life worthwhile. One’s beliefs about the value of human life are related to someone’s view of humanity and their understanding of human dignity. To violate these beliefs is indeed to imperil one’s very source of moral orientation in life. One is liable to experience deep moral distress if one is coerced into violating such beliefs.

On this point, it is instructive to review the social psychological research that has been conducted on conscientious objectors in healthcare. Debra Hanna, a researcher and registered nurse, has written about the visceral pain and cognitive dissonance experienced by nurses forced to participate in elective abortions (Hanna 2005 ). Hanna conducted a survey with ten nurses who had a moral objection to abortion but who had participated in the procedure. One of the nurses described the ‘gut-wrenching’ experience of violating one of her deep moral commitments:

I think the initial distress was that I was doing the wrong thing. That ending a life was doing the wrong thing, and that was the most gut-wrenching for me.

Another participant described a similar experience of distress:

I just burst into tears… It just felt like someone socked me in the gut, and I just thought, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this!’.

From these excerpts one gains a sense of how moral disorienting it is for healthcare practitioners to violate their fundamental commitments. Violation of conscience can have serious psychological and existential ramifications for clinicians. While Hanna’s is just one paper in an extensive and varied literature on moral distress in healthcare, it is nevertheless a reason to be cautious of attempts to downplay the impact of restrictions on conscientious objection.

We should also consider how restrictions on conscientious objection in medicine impact on the capacity for moral agency of medical practitioners. As I stated earlier, one major concern with restrictions on conscience is that they involve agents acting on the basis of coercion or compulsion rather than reflectively endorsed desires. If we force people to behave in particular ways, we are not allowing them to act based on reasons and desires that they have reflectively endorsed. Rather, we are leading them to act on the basis of duress, and there is a very real sense in which they are not exercising their agency—at least, not in the fullest sense of the word. This is not a good state of affairs for the profession of medicine, which ostensibly encourages its members to be morally reflective and conscientious practitioners.

The issue appears most acute when we consider our earlier remark about an agent’s capacity to externally critique the norms of medicine. Personal moral ideals are an epistemic standpoint from which one can independently judge the professional norms and standards that are received from communities of practice. They are a means by which one can step outside of one’s professional role and view the world from one’s own unique moral point of view (a perspective that has been developed over the course of one’s lifetime through moral reflection and that constitutes a unique perspective of the world). To the extent that one lacks personal moral ideals, however—or, to the extent that one allows these ideals to be eroded—one loses the vantage-point from which one can independently critique the norms that characterise social and professional communities. If the moral content of a doctor’s character becomes indistinguishable from the moral conventions of medical community—or, perhaps more to the point, if individual clinicians fail to sift these conventions through the filter of their own capacity for critical reflection—clinicians lose the capacity for impartial and detached judgement that is necessary to externally critique the prevailing norms of medicine.

As is well known, there have been many dark chapters in the history of medicine where unethical practices had become endemic to the profession and for many years went unchallenged by individual medical practitioners. The American Medical Association, for example, indirectly impeded African Americans from access to basic healthcare for over a century by deliberately blocking doctors of colour from entering the medical profession (Baker 2014 ). The medical profession also once sanctioned eugenics and classified homosexuality as a disease (Stahl and Emanuel 2017 , p. 1382).

To avoid a repeat of these episodes, it would seem advisable to cultivate a keen capacity for independent moral judgement in current practitioners in the field. Conscientious objection functions as an important bulwark against these aberrations in medicine. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, there were a small number of American clinicians who, in addition to religious leaders and politicians, spoke out about eugenic practices such as forced sterilisation and other forms of birth control. This resistance—in addition to other factors such as the horrors of WWII Nazi eugenics—contributed to the American Medical Association’s gradual change of position on eugenic policies and practices (Rosen 2004 ).

We undermine the good work of conscientious objectors, however, when we restrict a medical practitioner’s ability to exercise their conscience in their professional work. There is a prima facie argument, therefore, for permitting medical and other healthcare practitioners to opt out of practices that they believe to be immoral. While professional associations in medicine strive to ensure that doctors practise in an ethical manner, history shows that sometimes the majority of practitioners can be misguided on particular moral questions. It is part of a historically informed moral humility that we permit conscientious objection in medicine today.

In practice, a right to conscientious objection would mean that health authorities and senior clinicians should respect the deeply held beliefs of those practitioners under their jurisdiction. Appeals to conscience should be respected provided there is no risk of serious harm to patients. With Sulmasy I would contend that conscientious objection should be permitted provided it is not ‘destructive to society’ in one way or another or that poses a ‘risk of serious illness, injury, or death’ to a patient (Sulmasy 2017 , p. 28). Exceptions would occur when a doctor’s conscientious objection is manifestly unreasonable and cuts against the basic principles of decency that underpin liberal democracies.

These remarks are, however, cursory and not intended to be an exhaustive defence of conscientious objection in medicine. One could, of course, argue that patients have an equal if not stronger claim to doctors on having their consciences respected. Publicly available services such as abortion are necessary to support individual capacities for moral agency. Without these services, a woman would be unable to exercise their autonomy vis-a-vis their own reproductive lives. Patients, after all, find themselves in a position of considerable vulnerability in the medical system, and are dependent on doctors to have their health needs met. A female patient who is unable to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, for example, is limited in her ability to pursue certain career and lifestyle options and, worse, may be at risk of psychological illness because of the pregnancy. It could be argued that respect for conscience requires that a doctor assist the patient in obtaining an abortion.

This is a counterargument that I will not seek to refute in detail, if only because I am not attempting to offer an exhaustive defence of the permissibility of conscientious objection in medicine. I would, however, note that it is not typically the case that a doctor’s conscientious objection would categorically prevent a patient from accessing a service that they sought. Indeed, abortion is, for the most part, readily available in jurisdictions where the procedure is legally permitted (though scholars have highlighted some notable exceptions (Minerva 2015 )). Insofar as a doctor’s conscientious objection did prevent a patient from obtaining the service they desired, then it seems that the above counterargument fails to undermine the case in favour of conscience rights.

In any case, my aim is simply to illustrate how a conception of conscience grounded in identity-conferring commitments and individual agency can provide support for the kind of appeals to conscience that sometimes arise in the context of medical practice. There is real moral harm to acting against one’s own conscience, and restrictions on conscientious objection can precipitate such moral harm for clinicians who hold a conscientious objection to certain medical procedures, notwithstanding countervailing considerations pertaining to patient welfare and rights.

In this article, I have provided an account of the role that conscience plays in moral life. I argued that conscience is a principle of moral awareness in human beings, and that it gives agents an awareness of the personal relevance of moral obligation. I then offered an overview of the loss of character and purpose that agents experience when they violate their conscience. I argued that moral agents risk losing their basic orienting ideals if they act in a manner contrary to their deep moral and other normative commitments. Agents who abandon their deeply held beliefs, furthermore, also undermine their capacity for independent moral judgement. Our personal moral ideals are an epistemic standpoint from which we can independently judge the social and professional norms of the communities of practice to which we belong. To the extent that one lacks personal moral ideals, or one allows these ideals to be eroded, one loses the vantage-point from which one can independently critique the norms of professional work and social life. The final section of this article considered how this account of conscience might inform our attitude towards a doctor’s right to conscientious objection in medicine. We have a prima facie reason to permit conscientious objection in medicine, I argued, on account of the centrality of conscience to an agent’s sense of meaning and purpose in life as well as to ensure that moral aberrations in medical practice do not go unchallenged.

I do not pretend, however, to have provided a comprehensive defence of conscientious objection in medicine. Indeed, there is much more we could say about the moral psychology of conscience. Rather, I simply hope to have laid the argumentative groundwork for other scholars wishing to defend a robust account of conscience and the practice of conscientious objection in healthcare. It is my hope that this article will be the stimulus for a rigorous scholarly discussion of the role that conscience plays in professional life. While many scholars have been quick to criticise the practice of conscientious objection in professions such as medicine, there has been limited engagement with the notion of conscience and its relevance to evaluating appeals to conscience in different social and professional contexts. This article has argued that agents suffer significant moral harm if they are forced to violate their conscience (a harm that goes much deeper than mere emotional trauma). This should be taken into account when evaluating the moral permissibility of restrictions on conscientious objection or the exercise of freedom of conscience. It is high time that we give due attention to what is all too often dismissed as an insignificant feature of human moral psychology.

To be clear, I will not provide such a defence myself. It is my hope, however, that this essay provides important background argumentation for a defence of conscientious objection in healthcare by other scholars.

To be clear, Sulmasy ( 2008 ) rejects this view. His own view is much closer to my own.

It is apposite to clarify how I am using the term practical reason . My understanding of this capacity of the mind leans heavily in the direction of Aristotle and Aquinas. Practical reason, in my view, refers to the capacity of the human mind for reasoning and judgement about human action. It is concerned with how we ought to act and behave, rather than speculative or theoretical matters. Practical reason is responsible for applying the first principles of morality to particular real-world moral situations.

The judgements of practical reason, in other words, form part of the content of conscience. If practical reason errs, then conscience will err, too.

Medical doctors are often asked to engage in practices that they find distasteful or in some other way undesirable. Yet it is not medical practices that one finds ‘distasteful’ that we are concerned with here. Rather, what we are concerned with are those practices to which a doctor may have a moral or religious objection. We might, for example, think of therapeutic abortion or voluntary euthanasia, though our understanding should not be limited to these cases.

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Acknowledgements

This essay draws heavily on material published in chapter 3 of the author’s forthcoming Routledge book Why Conscience Matters: A Defence of Conscientious Objection in Healthcare. The author would also like to acknowledge the research of Alberto Giubilini in helping the author to clarify his understanding of the history of scholarship on conscience.

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Symons, X. Why Conscience Matters: A Theory of Conscience and Its Relevance to Conscientious Objection in Medicine. Res Publica 29 , 1–21 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-022-09555-2

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What Is Conscience?

More By Joe Carter

Conscience is making a comeback among Christians. Over the past few years, the term conscience has been increasingly referenced in debates occurring both in our churches (e.g., appeals to conscience on moral issues) and the public square (e.g., defending the right of conscience). We hear a lot about conscience, but what exactly does it mean? The general concept of conscience can be found in almost every human culture, but it has a unique and distinctive meaning for Christians. The Greek term for conscience ( suneidesis ) occurs more than two dozen times, and serves an important concept, particularly in the Pauline epistles. If we examine the way Scripture talks about conscience we uncover five general themes:

1. Conscience is an internal rational capacity that bears witness to our value system.

A few decades ago, a common trope in comedies and cartoons was the shoulder angel/devil. A person’s inner turmoil was personified by having an angel, representing conscience, on the right shoulder and a devil, representing temptation, on the left shoulder. This type of folklore imagery gave people the false impression that the conscience was like an inner listening room in which a person could hear the voice of God (a “good conscience”) or the devil (a “bad conscience). A more Biblical view is to consider the shoulder angel/devil as representing witnesses to our inner value system. Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize when determining right or wrong. Conscience does not serve as a judge or a legislator; that is a modern take on the concept. Instead, in the Biblical sense, conscience serves as a witness to what we already know. (Rom. 2:15, 9:1) Conscience may induce an inner dialogue to tell us what we already know, but more often it merely makes its presence known through our emotions. When we conform to the values of our conscience we feel a sense of pleasure or relief. But when we violate the values of our conscience, it induces anguish or guilt. John MacArthur describes conscience as “a built-in warning system that signals us when something we have done is wrong. The conscience is to our souls what pain sensors are to our bodies: it inflicts distress, in the form of guilt, whenever we violate what our hearts tell us is right.”

2. Conscience is a trustworthy guide only when it is informed and ruled by God.

A few days before he became a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama sat down with religion reporter Cathleen Falsani to talk about his faith . When Falsani asked, “What is sin?,” Obama replied, “Being out of alignment with my values.” While there is a lot wrong, theologically speaking, with that answer, it does contain a kernel of truth. What Mr. Obama was describing as “being out of alignment with my values” is what we could call “violating our conscience.” To violate one’s conscience is indeed a sin (as we’ll discuss in a moment). But what makes something a sin is not merely being out of alignment with our values but in choosing our own will over the will of God. Our conscience is therefore only trustworthy when it does not lead us to choose our will over God’s will. As R.C. Sproul explains ,

[W]e have to remember that acting according to conscience may sometimes be sin as well. If the conscience is misinformed, then we seek the reasons for this misinformation. Is it misinformed because the person has been negligent in studying the Word of God? “

A prime example of the way our conscience may lead both Christians and non-Christians to sin is when we violate, or advocate for the violation, of creation ordinances. Among the creation ordinances are the clear injunctions to preserve the sanctity of the marriage bond between one man and one woman, the necessity and propriety of godly labor, and the keeping of the Sabbath (Gen. 2:1-3, 15, 18-24). Our conscience bears witness to the reality and truth of these ordinances, and we are guilty of sin when we deny or break them

3. Conscience is to be subordinated to, and informed by, the revealed Word of God.

Conscience cannot be our final ethical authority because it is, unlike God’s revealed Word, changeable and fallible. Too often, though, Christians reverse the order and attempt to use their conscience in order to judge God and his Word. Many Christians claim, for example, “I could not worship a God who would say [a clear statement from the Bible]” or “I couldn’t believe in a God who would do [something the Bible claims God clearly told someone to do].” In making such statements they may be appealing to their conscience. But in such cases, their consciences are being informed by Satan, not by God. A person’s conscience may cause them to question a particular interpretations of Scripture. But our conscience can never legitimately judge a holy God or his holy Word. When we find ourselves thinking “Did God really say?” when Scripture clearly says he did, then we know it is the serpent and not the Savior speaking. (Gen. 3:1)

4. To willfully act against conscience is always a sin.

“The conscience of the Christian is obligated and bound only by what the Bible either commands or forbids,” says Sam Storms , “or by what may be legitimately deduced from an explicit biblical principle.” Our conscience should always be informed by what God has said. But what if we are mistaken about what the Bible commands or forbids? What if, for example, I believe that the Bible forbids any form of dancing — and yet I go square dancing ever Saturday night. Is that a sin? In that case, it would be a sin to square dance since I would be acting in a way in which I think is wrong . Imagine if I were at a neighbor’s house and see a wallet lying on the floor. Thinking it’s my neighbor’s wallet, I quickly take the cash from it. Later I realize that it wasn’t my neighbor’s wallet at all – it was my wallet, which had fallen out of my pocket. Would I still be guilty of theft, even though it was my own money I took? Yes, I would be since I had intended to do wrong . I had intended to steal – intended to violate God’s commands—even though I was mistaken about the object of my theft. As Paul says, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23).” R.C. Sproul expands on that verse by saying:

If we do something that we think is sin, even if we are misinformed, we are guilty of sin. We are guilty of doing something we believe to be wrong. We act against our consciences. That is a very important principle. Luther was correct in saying, “It is neither right nor safe to act against conscience.

Sproul adds that the “conscience can excuse when it ought to accusing, and it also can accuse when it should be excusing.” While we should challenge misperceptions of what the Bible commands and forbids, we should be careful about encouraging people who are not yet mature in the faith or are underdeveloped in knowledge of Scripture from acting in ways that will violate their unformed or immature conscience.

5. Conscience can be suppressed by sin.

If we desire to develop a positive habit, we need to perform an action repeatedly, over time, until it becomes an automatic reflex. The same process occurs when we fall into sin. When we sin, we reject God’s authority. If we repeat our sin, over time, the rejection of God’s authority becomes an automatic reflex. Even unbelievers, who innately know God’s general revelation, such as his invisible attributes, the creation ordinances, and the Noahide Laws , begin to deny such knowledge because of sin. Paul says that by our unrighteousness we suppress the truth. They think they are wise, but their sin makes them foolish. Eventually, God gives them over to their debased minds. (Rom. 1:24) Believers are also in danger of falling into this destructive pattern. Sometimes our sin leads us to doubt the very reality of God. When we deny God’s authority we begin to doubt his existence so that we can salve our conscience about his judgment. (Not all doubt is caused by sin, but sin almost always leads to doubts.) Sin can cause our conscience to become “seared” and “corrupted” and wholly unreliable. (1 Tim. 4:2; Titus 1:15) This is why to protect our conscience and keep it in working order we must preach the gospel to ourselves daily. We must call on the Holy Spirit to convict us of sin, lead us to righteousness, and remind us of the judgment that we are spared by our union with Christ Jesus. Only then can our conscience serve its intended purpose of helping us conform to the values of our Creator.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

Joe Carter is a senior writer for The Gospel Coalition, author of The Life and Faith Field Guide for Parents , the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible , and coauthor of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator . He also serves as an associate pastor at McLean Bible Church in Arlington, Virginia.

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Conscience Essay Titles

• What Exactly Is the Conscience? How Does “Natural Law” Inform?
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the Development of Conscience
• The Moral Conscience’s Effects in Charles Dickens’ Novel Oliver Twist
• The Three Teachings That Aid in the Development of One’s Conscience
• The Negative Effects of Conflict of Conscience and Interpersonal Conflict
• Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the Importance of a Conscience
• The Importance of Tom’s Conscience in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• The Theme of Awakening of Man’s Conscience in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
• Macbeth’s Conflict Between Ambition and Conscience
• The Victorian Era’s Social and Moral Issues in William Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience and Flicien Rops’ Pornokrates
• The Role School Environment Play in the Formation of Children’s Conscience
• Mark Twain’s Moral Conscience and Huckleberry Finn
• The Story’s Representation of the Concept of Conscience The Trial by Fire
• Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and the Collective Themes of Class Hate, Guilty Conscience, and Redemption
• The Human Conflict with Conscience in Mark Twain’s Novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Issues of Deterrence and Conscience in the Capital Punishment Debate
• The Management Challenge of Social Responsibility: The Case of ‘Universidad de Lisboa – Social Conscience’
• Lady Macbeth’s Guilty Conscience from William Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”
• Mark Twain’s book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : Moral Battles with Conscience
• In Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, Imperfect Conscience
• The Character of Tom Sawyer’s Conscience in Mark Twain’s Novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• Children’s Lives and a Nation’s Conscience in the Case of the United States
• The Conscience of the Court Authored by Zora Neale Hurston
• “Macbeth” and the Inner Conscience by William Shakespeare
• The Stench of a Guilty Conscience in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Essay Topics On Conscience

• Terry Malloy as a Hero: Individual Conscience Takes Priority Over Community Loyalty
• The Dilemma of Conscience In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible Faced by Proctor
• Individual Conscience Development in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Power of Conscience
• Dorian Gray’s Conscience Portrait Makes Egotists of Us
• Without a Conscience: The Perplexing World of Psychopaths Among Us
• The Ostrich and its Conscience: Impunity Games and Information in Dictator
• Reverend John Hale: Authority and Ignorance or Conscience and Intelligence?
• Conscience Struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
• Themes of Uneasy Conscience in Modern Fundamentalism
• The Hamlet Theme of Clear Conscience in William Shakespeare’s Play
• The Consequences of Going Against Your Conscience in Walt Disney Productions’ Pinocchio
• The Dead Man Walking ’s Awakened Conscience and Emotions
• The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on Literature’s Wisdom, Opinion’s Danger, and the Writer’s Task
• The Examination of Good and Bad Conscience Genealogy of Morals by Frederick Nietzsche
• Freedom of Conscience and Veneration without Understanding
• Lady Macbeth’s Struggle with Conscience and Guilt in William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
• Is Consciousness a More Effective Motivator Than Money, Fame, or Power?
• Walter H. Capps’s The Unfinished War in Vietnam in the American Conscience Reviewed
• Overcoming Society’s Conscience: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Holocaust and the Relationship between Authority and Personal Conscience
• The Awakening of a Conscience in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
• The Milgram Experiment: A Study of the Conflict Between Authority and Personal Conscience

Questions About Conscience           

• What Exactly Is Conscience?
• How Is It Possible for Conscience to Have a Moral Pattern?
• What Type of ‘Law’ is Conscience?
• What Effect Does Conscience Have on Decision Making?
• Should a Person Follow the Law or their Conscience?
• How does Shakespeare Address Macbeth’s Conflict with His Conscience?
• Should We Always Follow Our Conscience?
• How Did Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration Influence Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Conscience Speech?
• Should You Always Follow Your Gut Feelings?
• How Does Conscience Aid in Personal Development?
• What Does Martin Luther Have to Teach Us About Conscience?
• How Can You Develop Conscience in Your Life?
• Should Scientists Be Socially Conscious?
• How Can Nurses Improve Their Moral Conscience?
• Should Making a Moral Decision Based on Conscience Include Cognitive Consideration of the Consequences?
• What’s the Importance of Conscience?
• Is Consciousness Always Correct?
• Why Is Conscience Trustworthy?
• How Does the Conscience Form?
• Why Is Conscience Freedom Important?
• Is Conscience Related to the Unconscious Mind or Reason?
• Where Can I Find Conscience?
• Is Conscience Equal to Guilt?
• Can Conscience Be Taught?
• What Are Conscientious Belief Rights?
• Which Part of the Brain Is In Charge of Conscience?
• How Can a Conscience Be Incorrect?
• Is It Possible for Humans to be Born with a Conscience?
• What Makes Conscience More Than Just a Feeling?

Questions About Consciousness

• What Does It Mean to Be Conscious?
• Does Raising Food Safety Awareness Benefit Smallholder Dairy Farmers?
• What Is a Person’s Consciousness?
• What’s the Distinction between Mind and Consciousness?
• Does the Brain Create Consciousness?
• Do Physical Components Have an Impact on Our Consciousness?
• Is There Consciousness Outside of the Brain?
• Is It True That Everyone Has a Consciousness?
• How Does Culture Influence Consciousness?
• How Does the Media Control False Conscience?
• The Contrast between Consciousness and Unconscious?
• How Do Drugs and Alcohol Affect People’s Consciousness?
• Why Can’t We See Consciousness Empirically?
• What Are the Four Major Consciousness Theories?
• What Are the Three Fundamental Consciousness Concepts?
• What Is Freud’s Consciousness Theory?
• Who Created the Consciousness Theory?
• Consciousness: What is its Purpose?
• What Constitutes Consciousness?
• What Is the Most Advanced Level of Consciousness?
• In Psychology, What Is Consciousness?
• Is Consciousness Required for Life?
• What Is the Relationship Between the Theory of Mind and Consciousness?
• What Exactly Is Soul Consciousness?
• What Is Consciousness Neurophysics?

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Conscience – An Essay in Moral Psychology

2009, Philosophy

The ultimate aim of this essay is to suggest that conscience is a very important part of human psychology and of our moral point of view, not something that can be dismissed as merely ‘a part of Christian theology’. The essay begins with discussions of what might be regarded as the two most influential functional models of conscience, the classical Christian account of conscience and the Freudian account of conscience. Then, using some insights from these models, and from some comparatively recent work in psychology and especially psychiatry, the author argues for a quite different model of conscience that might be called the personal integrity account of conscience.

Related Papers

Nalan Sarac

Thomas Lees

Attempting to rectify casuist and manualist theories of conscience, Catholic moral theology has since sought to quell the unnecessary conflict these theories have imposed between freedom and law. For such a dichotomy necessitated an errant understanding of conscience as that capacity by which one discerns and applies the dictates of natural law over and against human freedom. However, despite its attempt to offer a more holistic and “orthodox” conception of conscience, Catholic moral theology has often found itself bound by notions of “natural law” still indebted to the definitions and constructions of these very traditions. Following Herbert McCabe’s assessment, I wish to propose that Catholic moral theology’s reconciliation between law and freedom, though necessary, is misinformed in its present understanding of natural law as obligation. Examining the critique of conscience offered by the 1993 papal encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, might best elucidate this error. I will then argue that by reconceptualizing natural law anthropologically, McCabe is able to present a more robust theory of conscious that enables moral growth and opens the individual more fully to the community.

Paniel Reyes Cardenas

Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Anne Jeffrey

Moral reasons are considerations that count in favor of or against actions in light of a moral standard. They can be functionally defined as authoritative guides to morally right action. Embedded in this concept is a deep tension between the two features that account for moral reasons having this unique function: namely, practicality and objectivity. On the one hand, in order for a consideration to be objective, as a conceptual matter, it must be mind independent. On the other hand, in order for a consideration to be practical, as a conceptual matter, it must be mind dependent. Since no consideration can be both mind dependent and mind independent, no consideration could be a moral reason, on the innocent functional analysis. I call this the puzzle about moral reasons. The going solutions to the puzzle require conceptual revision, foregoing the idea that moral reasons are, as a conceptual matter, either practical or objective. This dissertation defends a solution to the puzzle that ...

Steven DeLay

There is no doubting conscience is central to the human condition and our understanding of it. Still, questions arise. What is its origin and purpose? What does it disclose? And how? Although any historical schema will be imperfect to the extent that it must be incomplete, broadly speaking, the history of the concept of conscience can be usefully divided into four familiar periods: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern. Historically, it has been conceived in numerous ways, whether as an innate capacity responsible for the ability to discern right from wrong (the Hebrew Prophets), as a voice of divine guidance (Socrates), as an internal tribunal whereby we pass judgment on ourselves by way of reason (Kant and German Idealism), as the ontological hallmark of our capacity for authentic individuality (Heidegger), or as an internalization of society’s repressive norms and mores (Freud). This rich and variegated conceptual reception only serves to underscore the phenomenon’s remarkable pertinence to multiple dimensions of philosophical interest. It is, perhaps first above all, a matter of our individual responsibility and morality. What, for example, does the capacity to draw moral judgments on its basis reveal about what it is to be the selves each of us is? It also, second, is an item of social, communal, and political significance. What, for example, does it mean to have our actions laid bare before others for moral and rational appraisal as social and political beings? And, of course, it is a spiritual matter too, as it discloses us before God. How, then, does conscience lay us bare before ourselves, others, and God? From Plato to Kant and Fichte, from Rousseau and Mill to Nietzsche and Freud, from the Prophets and Apostles to Heidegger, this work traces the evolution of the concept of conscience’s formation, in turn highlighting how the capacity to hear, and so heed, its voice forms the heart of man.

Edgar Ter Danielyan

Judgment of conscience, at least formed and informed conscience, is compelling inter alia precisely because it is perceived by the subject as binding search for objective truth. It is not a capricious fancy, with no basis in anything whatsoever outside the perceived autonomy of the individual, that can be easily and painlessly dispensed with at a whim. Unfortunately, the grotesque exaggeration of individual autonomy in the contemporary Western societies, ignoring the facts of our intellectual, spiritual and material dependence on others, feeds the misguided narrative that everyone is sovereign on their island, contra Donne. Such attitude repudiates our duties and obligations towards each other, undermines our shared humanity, and is simply not in accord with the facts.

Gerald Gleeson

Barry W. Bussey

The law has yet to articulate a separate test for conscience in the law. The fact that it has not done so raises a number of questions: Why? Is it possible that the concept of conscience and religion is, in their essence, the same? If they are different, which the jurisprudence suggests they are, how are they different? What are their parameters? How are we able to distinguish between the two? Until these questions are answered – and there are no doubt many others – we are left with a definition of religion that may well be the basis upon which we can use to define “conscience.”

Kathy Lavezzo

Mariano Gutierrez Alarcon

There is in our culture and ourselves a high need of freedom, certainty and discernment on what we do. The own individuals sense of purpose and their own social nature, which seek for love and approval, creates a complex inter-relational web where each individual is formed. But reality is always there, showing us that we are not as free as we think we are. Certainty on what we consider right or wrong more often is challenged up to the point where we are not sure of those values anymore, and the discernment we need to not to fall in this desolated world seems to fall short from our hearts. This self-awareness, that it can be easily track down in the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno or Søren Kierkegaard, expose the conflict between ourselves and that strive of " do good / avoid evil " (synderesis) and society. Commonly called conscience, in this essay firstly I will outline the most common definitions of conscience, secondly In the light of the knowledge introduce by psychology in the last century I will assess the main challenges to the previous definitions, thirdly I will expand of what Christian tradition understands for conscience To finally draw conclusion on what do we mean today when we say conscience. Definitions " It is that moral faculty which tells people subjectively what is good and evil and which manifests their moral obligation to them. " (Peschke, pp203) From this basic definition we can infer a simple differentiation between the manifestations of moral obligation and the action that fulfils it. For Karl H. Peschke in his book Christian Ethics, conscience can be divided also as moral faculty, which from traditional scholastic theology can be consider " as a particular instance of the operation of reason. " and " process in which the general norms of the moral law are applied to a concrete action. " (pp203) From this point of view, Peschke define conscience as the courier between the law and how to apply it to a concrete individual situation. " Conscience accordingly is considered a judgement of the practical reason. " (Peschke, pp 203) From different traditions in Christianity, the Augustinians and Franciscan understood conscience briefly as " the place of the loving colloquy between God and man, therefore

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

Religious views on conscience

Aquinas’ natural moral law.

Aquinas developed Natural law as a form of religious ethics. Natural law is the theory that God has designed a moral law into human nature such that we are naturally inclined to certain moral behaviours. Ethics is therefore about using reason to discover the natural law within our nature so that we can conform our actions to it in order to fulfil our purpose (telos) of glorifying God, by following his law.

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 practical principles … [belong to] a special natural habit … which we call “synderesis” … is said to incite to good, and to murmur at evil, inasmuch as through first principles we proceed to discover, and judge of what we have discovered.”

The first principle synderesis tells us is called the synderesis rule: that the good is what all things seek as their end/goal (telos). This means that human nature has an innate orientation to the good.

“This therefore is the principle of law: that good must be done and evil avoided. ”

In addition to this, synderesis tells us the primary precepts: worship God, live in an orderly society, reproduce, educate, protect and preserve human life and defend the innocent. These primary precepts are the articulation of the orientations in our nature toward the good; the natural inclinations of our God-designed human nature, put into the form of ethical principles by human reason.

Secondary precepts & conscientia

The primary precepts are applied to situations or types of actions – a process called conscientia . The judgement we then acquire is a secondary precept. E.g euthanasia: the primary precepts don’t say anything about euthanasia exactly, but we can use our reason to apply the primary precepts to euthanasia, and realise that it goes against the primary precept of protecting and preserving human life. Arguably it even disrupts the functioning of society too. Therefore, we can conclude the secondary precept that euthanasia is wrong.

Aquinas’ view of the conscience

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.

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:

• Witness – by knowing whether we have done or not done something.
• Bind & incite – “through the conscience we judge that something should be done or not done”
• Accuse, torment & rebuke – “by conscience we judge that something done is well done or ill done”

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.

Because human reason is fallible, the conscience thereby becomes fallible. We could be mistaken for example when we don’t know how a general rule applies to a certain situation (mistake in conscientia). Aquinas claims that the synderesis rule and the primary precepts cannot be mistaken or lost from the human mind. However, mistakes can be made in conscientia – the application of the primary precepts to moral situations or actions to derive secondary precepts. These mistakes can result from original sin, unvirtuous habits and corrupt culture.

“As to those general principles, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be blotted out from men’s hearts. […] But as to […] the secondary precepts, the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits”

Real vs apparent goods. We might reason that something is in accord with our nature’s goal and is thus good, when really is not. Such actions are called apparent goods because they only appear good to someone engaged in faulty reasoning. They are not real goods. Despite this potential for our conscience judging something bad to be good, Aquinas still insists we must follow it:

“ Every judgment of conscience, be it right or wrong … is obligatory … he who acts against his conscience always sins ”

This is because if you choose to act against your conscience, then you are choosing to do something you believe to be evil. Conscience is thus always ‘binding’.

Vincible vs invincible ignorance

Whether errors in conscience that lead to sinful acts will be forgiven or pardoned depends on the type of ignorance that caused the error.

Invincible ignorance involves circumstances where a person could not have known better and so are not to blame for their action. For example if someone drunkenly jumps in front of your car and there was nothing you could have done, you would not be held responsible for hitting them. Actions that go against the natural law but are done due to invincible ignorance are technically not voluntary and thus not sin.

“It is not imputed as a sin to man, if he fails to know what he is unable to know. Consequently ignorance of such like things is called ‘invincible’”

Vincible ignorance involves circumstances where a person could have known better and so are to blame for their action. It typically involves some kind of negligence or ignorance of which moral principle is relevant to a situation. For example, if a fire breaks out in a building because it wasn’t looked after properly, then the person in charge of that is to blame for their action. They were ignorant that the fire would happen, but they should have known better. Actions that go against the natural law done out of vincible ignorance are sins because we should have known better.

“[invincible ignorance] not being voluntary, since it is not in our power to be rid of it, is not a sin … On the other hand, vincible ignorance is a sin, if it be about matters one is bound to know.”

Arguably Aquinas is too optimistic about human nature. If you consider the terrible things that humans have done and that entire cultures have embraced, e.g. slavery and Nazism, it starts to look like human nature is not as positive as Aquinas thought. If we really had an orientation towards the good and the primary precepts accurately described our nature’s orientation, then we should not expect to find the extent of human evil we do.

However, Aquinas’ claim is merely that human nature contains an orientation towards the good, it doesn’t involve a commitment to humans actually doing more good than evil, nor to incredibly evil acts or cultures occurring infrequently. Aquinas acknowledges that there are many reasons we might fail to do good despite having an orientation towards it. These include original sin, mistakes in conscientia, lacking virtue and a corrupt culture.

The fact that humanity could sink so low as to produce Nazism and the holocaust is strong evidence against the human nature having an orientation toward the good.

Descriptive moral relativism

Aquinas was not as aware of different cultures as we are today. As we now know thanks to modern anthropology, there are vastly different moral beliefs across cultures; this is called descriptive moral relativism. Fletcher made the argument that this could be taken as evidence that there is not an innate God-given ability of reason to discover the natural law, since then we should expect more moral agreement. Freud would argue that it is society which conditions our moral views. There either is no natural moral law or human reason is unable to discover it. So, what Aquinas thought was human nature was really just his culture.

However, there do seem to be some core similarities between the moralities of different cultures such as not killing for no reason and rules about stealing. Reproduction and education are also universal. Moral thinkers from different cultures came up with similar moral prescriptions such as the golden rule; to treat others as you would like to be treated, which can be found in ancient Chinese Philosophy, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity. This could be taken to show that moral views are determined by a universal human moral nature.

Alternative explanation: These cross-cultural similarities in moral codes might have resulted from a biologically evolved morality rather than one designed by a God, however, which would mean it is not related to a telos designed by God.

Alternatively, cross-cultural morality might result merely from the basic requirement of a society to function. If anyone could kill or steal from anyone else for no reason whenever they wanted, it’s hard to see how a society could exist. That might create an existential pressure which influences the moral thinkers of a society, yielding prescriptions such as the golden rule. Cross-cultural ethics therefore has a practical reality as its basis, not God and not or not only evolution.

Aquinas’ Natural Theology

Aquinas believed that human reason could never know or understand God. However, Aquinas is a proponent of natural theology through reason which he claimed could support faith in God. Human reason can gain knowledge of God’s natural moral law through the ability of human reason to know the synderesis rule and primary precepts.

Karl Barth argued that Aquinas’ natural law theory was a false natural theology which placed a dangerous overreliance on human reason. Barth argued that if humans were able to know God or God’s morality through their own efforts, then revelation would be unnecessary. Yet, God clearly thought revelation necessary as he sent Jesus.

Barth also argued that “the finite has no capacity for the infinite” ; our finite minds cannot grasp God’s infinite being. Whatever humans discover through reason is therefore not divine so to think it is must then amount to idolatry – the worship of earthly things. Barth argued idolatry can lead to worship of nations and then even to movements like the Nazis. It follows for Barth that after the corruption of the fall, human reason cannot reach God or figure out right and wrong by itself. Only faith in God’s revelation in the bible is valid.

In defence of Aquinas, he is not suggesting that our finite minds can understand God’s nature or goodness (eternal law). Aquinas is only suggesting that reason can understand the natural law God created within our nature. If reason only has this goal of supporting faith in such ways, then it cannot make revealed theology unnecessary.

  Tillich defends Aquinas to a degree, arguing that Barth was too negative in denying the possibility of reason discovering anything whatsoever of the natural law.

“there is self-deception in every denial of the natural moral law … The very statement that man is estranged from his created nature presupposes an experience of the abyss between what he essentially is and what is existentially is. Even a weak or misled conscience is still a conscience, namely, the silent voice of man’s own essential nature, judging his actual being” – Tillich.

To deny that our conscience can discover the natural law is to claim that there is a gap between what we currently are and what we could be. Yet, to have an awareness of that gap is to have a conscience that is aware of its fallen state. So it is contradictory to deny the natural law. Even it now involves a weakened conscience, that still tells us at least something of the direction we have fallen in and the direction back towards righteousness.

However, whatever a weak and misled conscience discovers is surely not God’s morality. Humanity believing it has the ability to know anything of God is the same arrogance that caused Adam and Eve to disobey God. Humanity believing that it has the power to figure out right and wrong is what led to the arrogant certainty of the Nazis in their own superiority. The arrogance of natural theology is evidence of a human inability to be humble enough to simply have faith.

Psychological views on the conscience

Sigmund freud.

Freud thought the conscience was just the result of psychological forces that science could understand. Freud believed the mind was divided into the Id (our unconscious animalistic desires), Ego (Our conscious decision-making self) and the Super Ego (the part of us that “stores” the values we introjected ((unconsciously adopted)) from authority figures during childhood and is the source of our moral feelings). When a desire bubbles up from the unconscious Id into our conscious Ego, we become aware of wanting to act on it, but our Super Ego then tells us whether the values of our society allow it. If so, we can act on it. If not, we have been conditioned to repress that desire, which Freud thought responsible for many mental problems.

The ethical implications is that conscience is not the voice of God in us, it is just what our society wants from us. Our society might be good or bad, therefore our conscience is not the best guide if Freud is right. Furthermore there might not even be a ‘good or bad’, if morality is merely the conditioning of societies on its members.

Freud was influenced by Nietzsche who argued that human conscious mind (what Freud called the ego) developed by necessity when humans underwent the radical change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Our natural animalistic instincts (What Freud called the 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.

Oral stage: Between birth and 1.5 years old. Babies breastfeed, and explore the world by putting things in their mouth. Failure to develop properly during this stage can lead to smoking or overeating.

Anal stage: 1.5 – 3 years old. The ego develops at this time and pleasure is gained through exercising self-control over going to the toilet. Those who overly-control become a control freak, those who do not learn to control enough become messy.

Phallic stage: 3-6 years old. Children become aware of their genitals and their gender. Oedipus and Electra complex develops – jealousy of the parent of the same sex for the time and attention they take from the parent of opposite same sex. Problems moving through this stage cause intimacy issues later in life.

Latency stage: 6-puberty. Sexual desire develops and is repressed. Gender roles are learned.

Mature genital stage: lasts until death. Controlled sexual desires result in a desire for love and marriage. A person now has a fully developed conscience where the ego controls the Id with reference to the superego.

Freud has been criticised by contemporary psychologists for not being empirical enough. Karl Popper criticised Freud’s theory for being ‘unfalsifiable’ as it could not say what would prove it wrong. This means it is not true empiricism. Freud studied a small sample size of patients, a poor cross-section of society and did not do proper experiments, so he is unscientific. However, Popper was clear that he wasn’t saying there was absolutely nothing of value in Freud’s ideas – just that they needed to be subjected to proper scientific experiment and testing.

Piaget was a contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud but came to similar conclusions, so can thus be seen to defend Freud to some degree from the accusation of being unscientific. He studied the development of children and argued that there occurs a fundamental shift in the nature of ‘conscience’. Before the age of 11 children have what he called heteronomous morality. This means they merely associate actions as bad because of the influence of their authority figures like parents. For example, an 8 year old child dangerously runs into a road and their parent yells at them. The child will learn not to do that again, but not because they have cognitively understood that running into the road will cause them injury or death which would be a bad thing, but because they merely associate the action of running into the road with the loud scary noise of their parents shouting occurring. After 11 year old however, Piaget argued that the autonomous morality develops in children, where they can begin to have abstract cognitive moral beliefs about how one ought to act and why.

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 civilization” 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 “backslidings into sin” and seeking of penance.

After millennia of religious rule, too many people are still unhappy being controlled by social rules. Freud claims this is because the religious approach to conscience is external imposition by authority, similar to how children are treated, the result being comparable to a ‘childhood neurosis’. Although rules are in place to reduce suffering, they also cause suffering through repression and thus inspire unconscious resentment against civilisation.

Freud argues that the better approach for society would be autonomy. People can rationally understand that repressing their instincts is for the good of social order, making them capable of choosing autonomously to follow social rules. This makes them more likely to happily accept and follow them. Furthermore, this would also introduce flexibility into the rules. If it were accepted that the social rules of human origin with the intention of improving society, then they could be continually improved, further encouraging adherence to them.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of religious rules as tools for social order depends on the notion that a God has decreed them, which inexorably burdens religious social order with the psychology of external imposition and the inflexibility of eternal unchanging ‘laws of God’. Freud concludes that society would be much better off if it could admit that the purpose of its social rules is the maintenance of social order, rather than their “pretended sanctity”.

Aquinas’ natural law ethics arguably gets around Freud’s critique, because Aquinas thought that following of the natural law did involve the engagement of a person’s rationality with God’s eternal law in a way that enabled their virtue and flourishing. It’s not simply externally imposed and there is a degree of flexibility in the application of the primary precepts and use of the double effect.

Perhaps Freud’s critique only really works against approaches to the conscience like Augustine’s where it simply involves an external imposition of God’s law.

Possible exam questions for Conscience

Easy Critically compare Aquinas and Freud’s view of the conscience Are the workings of God present in the conscience?

Medium ‘Freud makes more sense of the concept of guilt than Aquinas’ – Discuss. Does a theological approach to conscience work better than a psychological approach? Critically compare Aquinas and Freud’s views on the process of moral decision-making.

Hard Does conscience exist at all or is it an umbrella term for culture, environment, genetics and education? Is conscience merely an umbrella term for the psychological factors involved in moral decision making? Critically assess Freud’s psychosexual approach.

Quick links

Year 12 ethics topics: Natural Law. Situation ethics. Kantian ethics. Utilitarianism. Euthanasia. Business ethics. 

Year 13 ethics topics: Meta-ethics. Conscience. Sexual ethics. 

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Conscience Essay Examples

The importance of conscience and factors influencing it.

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A Theme of Conflict in Conscience in the Raven by Allan Poe

The poem, written by Allan Poe “ The Raven” speaks about an unnamed character who is alone in his house on a cold December evening. As he is about to fall asleep he hears a knock on the door, however, he decides to ignore it....

Comparison of Conscience with Super Ego and Mature Moral Conscience

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Parallel Between Conscience and Power in Shakespeare and Pacino's Works

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The Comparison of the Conscience and Morality

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The Impact of Conscience on Climate Change

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The Role of Conscience in Moral Formation

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, I am satisfied to be here this afternoon and to give a discuss on the position and relevance of moral sense in ethical life. Morality is said to be the science of true and evil. It is clear and indeniable that...

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