Conscience

The internal judgement that one's own conduct is right or wrong - and the question of what authority it has.

Theme: Ethics and character
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: συνείδησις · syneidēsis
Term fixed: c. 397

In plain terms

Everyone has had the experience of knowing they should not do something while doing it, and of being unable to argue themselves out of it afterwards.

Conscience is the name for whatever produces that. It is not simply belief - you can believe an action is permissible and still be unable to perform it. And it is not merely feeling, because it presents itself as a judgement about what is the case rather than as a preference.

The question that matters practically is how much authority it has. It can be badly formed: people have had entirely clear consciences while doing appalling things, and troubled ones about matters that turned out not to be wrong. So it is either a faculty that detects something and can malfunction, or an internalised voice that reflects upbringing - and the two accounts recommend very different responses to being told that someone's conscience forbids it.

As a philosopher would put it

The scholastic analysis distinguishes synderesis, the natural habit by which first practical principles are known, from conscientia, the act of applying them to a particular case. That structure explains error: the principles are not mistaken, the application can be.

Aquinas's hard doctrine is that an erring conscience binds. One is obliged to follow it even when it is wrong, because acting against one's judgement of what is right is always wrong - though one may also be culpable for the error itself. That is the philosophical basis for later claims of conscientious exemption.

Butler makes conscience the supreme principle in human nature, with a natural authority over self-love and benevolence rather than merely more force. Freud's superego is the deflationary rival: the internalised parental voice, explaining the phenomenology as a psychological formation rather than a faculty of moral knowledge. And Nietzsche's genealogy is sharper still - conscience is cruelty turned inward when instinct could not be discharged outward.

Where you meet it

The Military Service Act 1916 introduced conscription in Britain and included a conscience clause. About sixteen thousand men applied for exemption, and local tribunals had to decide, case by case, whether an objection was genuine.

The tribunals were not equipped for it. They asked whether a man would defend his sister, whether he had ever eaten meat, whether his objection was religious or merely political - and religious objections generally fared better, since a denominational membership was checkable in a way a conviction was not. Around six thousand were imprisoned; several dozen were sentenced to death in France before the sentences were commuted.

What the machinery exposed is the structural problem. A claim of conscience is a claim about an internal state that only the claimant can inspect, made in circumstances where there is every incentive to make it falsely. Every legal system that recognises conscientious exemption faces this, and none has found a test better than assessing the person's consistency and letting some errors through in both directions.

What is actually disputed

Whether conscience knows anything.

On the faculty account it detects moral facts, imperfectly, and its errors are like perceptual errors - real mistakes about something real. On the formation account it reports the internalised standards of one's upbringing, in which case a clear conscience is evidence about a person's socialisation and nothing else. The historical record of confident consciences in wicked societies is the strongest evidence for the second reading.

The practical question is what follows. If conscience binds even when erring, as Aquinas holds, then a person acting on a sincerely mistaken judgement acts rightly in one sense while doing wrong in another - which is coherent and gives no guidance to anyone deciding whether to accommodate them.

That is now a live legal question wherever conscientious exemption is claimed, and the difficulty is unchanged since 1916: sincerity is the criterion, and sincerity is exactly what cannot be inspected.

Commonly confused with

Intuition 1641 Moral intuition is a judgement arrived at without inference. Conscience is specifically about one's own conduct and carries an authority intuition does not claim.
personal preference A conscientious objection presents itself as a claim about what is right, not about what one likes - which is why tribunals ask about consistency.
the superego That is one theory of what conscience is. Treating the theory as the definition assumes the answer.

Defined against

Moral law The standing question is whether conscience reports the law or merely reports one's upbringing, and the two answers make the pair either partners or rivals

Philosophers

Augustine of Hippo The inner witness, in its most influential early form
Thomas Aquinas Synderesis and conscientia, and the binding erring conscience
Sigmund Freud The superego as the deflationary explanation
Friedrich Nietzsche Conscience as cruelty turned inward

Works

Confessions The inner examination as a form
Summa Theologiae The scholastic analysis, and the erring conscience
On the Genealogy of Morals The genealogical attack
Meditations Self-examination as daily practice
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Where the moral law replaces the inner voice as authority

Schools

Augustinianism Where the inner witness is central
Thomism Where the analysis is systematised
Natural Law Where conscience applies a real standard
Nietzscheanism Where its origin is treated as its refutation
Lacanian Psychoanalysis Where the internalised voice is given a structure

Related concepts

Moral law c. 1270 · Duty 1785 · Responsibility c. 340 BC · Autonomy 1785 · Authenticity 1927

The Greek syneidēsis means knowing-with, and appears in Paul before it is a philosophical term; the scholastic distinction between synderesis, the grasp of principles, and conscientia, their application, is medieval.