Conscience Religious Approaches Secular Approaches Modern Approaches

Key questions: What is conscience? Where does conscience originate? Is conscience innate or acquired? What is its function in ethical decision-making?

Mark Twain What is conscience? ‘I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I know it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started with.’

Generic Views A moral faculty, sense or feeling which compels individuals to believe that particular activities are morally right or wrong. There exists a sense of moral obligation. There implies objective morality. Inherited at birth and present throughout life.

Problems with Conscience Different people’s consciences tell them to do very different things with a clear conscience. Individual consciences seem to change with the times so that they perform contrary actions with a clear conscience. Under what conditions can conscience change?

Religious Influences on Conscience We all have a conscience that is part of us but not identified with our physical makeup. Druids believed it was located in the liver. Both Plato and Aristotle argued there is a faculty of rational judgment concerned with choosing the right way of acting.

Biblical Ideas And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. – Genesis 2:7 When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts. – Romans 2:14-15a

Biblical Ideas There is no Hebrew word for conscience, but the Greek word ‘synderessi’ (meaning right reason) appears in the Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament. St Paul mentions conscience many times, describing it as an awareness of what is good and bad.

Biblical Ideas Implications: The conscience is God-given. Morality is objective. All people have the same access to morality. By following one’s conscience one is following the divine law.

Early Christian thinkers St Jerome (147-240) believed conscience to be an innate faculty which reveals God’s moral law as this is inscribed in men’s souls. He described it as ‘…the spark of conscience….with which we discern that we sin’.

Early Christian thinkers St Augustine (354-430) developed this idea and argued that knowledge of the moral law is not sufficient for virtue. The will should also be turned towards good. God’s love draws the soul towards Him.

Augustine (354-430) Voice of God ‘Return to your conscience, question it. …Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness.’

Key question Are the Biblical and Patristic views of conscience compatible and coherent?