AQA
Ethics

The conscience is an inner sense of what is morally right or wrong. If we go against our conscience, we feel guilt.

Part one of the topic is what the conscience is. This is divided into religious views, which argue the conscience comes from God in some way and nonreligious views which try to explain it scientifically.

Part two of the topic is the ethical implications of the conscience, including its value as a moral guide and its application to adultery and lying/breaking promises.

Religious views of the conscience

Augustine

Augustine had perhaps the simplest view, which is that the conscience is simply the voice of God speaking to us, telling us what is right and wrong.
Romans 2:15: the requirements of the law are written on our hearts
This suggests the conscience is built into us.

Augustine & the value of the conscience for ethical decision making & application to adultery & lying

It might seem that having God telling us what to do would allow us to be morally perfect. However unfortunately, we are corrupted by original sin which is a corruption in human nature which gives us an irresistible temptation to sin. Because of Adam’s actions, we are all born sinners who desire to sin.
So, Augustine claimed conscience isn’t enough to make one virtuous, we also need God’s grace, God’s gift of virtue making us into good people who are able to follow his moral law.
Adultery and lying are both against the 10 commandments.
The voice of God in us through our conscience would therefore tell us not to ever lie or commit adultery.

Evaluation

The whole idea of original sin is quite unscientific and morally wrong.
It is unscientific, because it’s not biologically possible for the actions of our ancestors to affect our genes, our nature.
Furthermore, the whole Adam and Eve story is unscientific because we now know that we evolved.
Original sin is also morally wrong, because it’s not fair to blame us for the actions of our ancestors.
Finally, Augustine’s theory can’t explain why different people’s consciences tell them different things. If it were really God telling them what was right or wrong, the message would be universally the same.
Everyone’s conscience would tell them the same thing. However there are people who do terrible evil but their conscience is clear if they are convinced they are doing the right thing. E.g. If someone is raised in Nazi Germany and grows up surrounded by propaganda, they are going to genuinely believe that Nazism is good. It looks like they don’t have a voice from God telling them it’s wrong. So, social conditioning looks like the best explanation of our moral views.
For example, some cultures think adultery and lying is much worse than other cultures do.
Traditional Christian culture thinks that lying and adultery go against the 10 commandments and are always wrong, whereas western culture tends to think it depends more on the situation and that such actions could be acceptable or even good. Adultery and lying in the west is very rarely considered unlawful like it is in the 10 commandments.
So, lying and adultery are culturally relative, suggesting it is social conditioning that determines how a person’s conscience feels about them.
This means Augustine’s theory of the conscience as being the voice of God in us is not correct and therefore the conscience does not have the ethical value he thinks it does.

Aquinas’ theory of the conscience

Aquinas’ theory of the conscience involves his theory of natural law ethics.
God gave us the mental ability of reason (ratio is latin for reason).
Reason has a power called synderesis which allows us to intuitively know the primary precepts. We are born with the ability to simply just know what the primary precepts are. Orderly society, worship God, protect human life, reproduce, educate.
Reason also has a power called conscientia, which allows us to apply the primary precepts to moral actions/situations and figure out what we should do, giving us secondary precepts like do not steal.
The ‘synderesis rule’ is that we have the tendency to do good and avoid evil.
Conscience is the whole process of synderesis and conscientia together.
Our ability to reason knows which actions are good and which are bad, and causes us to feel guilty if we do something we know to be bad.

Aquinas & the value of the conscience in moral decision making & application to adultery & lying

Since the conscience is not the voice of God in us, according to Aquinas, it cannot give us absolutely perfect moral knowledge.
Conscience is based on our reason, which can go wrong.
Aquinas thinks we can make mistakes when applying the primary precepts. This could cause us to think something is good or bad, when it isn’t. An action can appear to be good when it isn’t really good.
However, Aquinas still thinks we should always follow the conscience, even though it could go wrong.
This is because if our conscience judges something to be wrong, but we do it anyway, we would then be doing something we believe to be wrong. This would make us into an unvirtuous person – the sort of person who goes against their conscience.
The primary precepts do not mention adultery and lying specifically.
However, committing adultery and lying both go against the stability/orderliness of society, which is a primary precept.
The more people commit adultery, the less stable relationships and child-rearing become. The more people lie, the less stable all human interactions and trust in society become.
So, Aquinas would say that adultery and lying are both wrong as secondary precepts.

Evaluation for Aquinas

A strength of Aquinas’ approach is that we do find a core set of moral views in all different cultures. All cultures have rules against killing and stealing and everyone values reproduction and education.
So, it looks like Aquinas might be right that we are all born knowing the primary precepts because of God’s design.
However, Aquinas’ argument overall fails because there are radical moral differences between different cultures. For example, some cultures think adultery and lying is much worse than other cultures do.
Traditional Christian culture thinks that lying and adultery go against the 10 commandments and are always wrong, whereas western culture tends to think it depends more on the situation and that such actions could be acceptable or even good. Adultery and lying in the west is very rarely considered unlawful like it is in the 10 commandments.
So, it looks like it is our culture which influences our moral views, not an ability of reason from God. This makes the scientific view of conscience seem more correct. The fact that different cultures disagree morally is evidence that our moral views come from culture, not from synderesis. If Aquinas were right, we should expect to find more moral agreement than we do, since he says all humans are born with synderesis.
Furthermore, the moral agreement between different cultures could just result from evolution. We have an evolutionary drive to be social to some degree, and this could explain why all cultures have rules against stealing and killing etc. So again, we have a scientific explanation of universal moral views. We don’t need Aquinas’ supernatural explanation.

Fletcher’s views on conscience

Fletcher rejects both Aquinas and Augustine. Fletcher doesn’t think that the conscience is an ability of reason like synderesis, nor the voice of God in us.
He thinks it is the process by which we figure out the demands of agape and which action will produce the most loving result.
He says conscience is not a noun, not a set thing. It is a verb, a doing word, a process.
For Fletcher ethics is about doing whatever maximises agape. This depends on the situation we are in.
This requires calculation and figuring out. Conscience is that process of figuring out what action will maximise agape.
Fletcher says ‘love decides there and then’ in his six fundamental principles.
Fletcher agrees with ‘positivism’, the view that reason cannot figure out right/wrong, only faith in Jesus’ command to love your neighbour as yourself can.
Fletcher agrees with the criticism of natural law, that cross cultural moral disagreement shows there is no innate ability of reason to discover primary precepts.

Fletcher & the value of conscience in ethical decision making & its application to adultery/lying

For Fletcher, the conscience is not as reliable as the voice of God in us.
However, it is the best guide we have for figuring out the morally right action – i.e., whatever will maximise agape.
Fletcher thinks his view of the conscience has the most value because it is the most flexible as it takes the situation into account even more so than Aquinas.
For Aquinas, adultery & lying go against the orderliness of society and are thus wrong.
However there are situations where adultery or lying would produce a loving outcome.
Fletcher gave an example of a woman who asked a prison guard to impregnate her so that she could be released back to her family. That was a case of adultery with a loving outcome.
Lying to keep a harmless secret like planning a friend’s party also has a loving outcome.

Evaluation

Fletcher’s theory looks like the strongest religious view because he doesn’t make such unscientific claims as Aquinas and Augustine do.
He doesn’t claim we are all born with the ability to know the primary precepts, which looks false due to moral disagreement.
He doesn’t claim everyone’s conscience will tell them the same thing like Augustine implies, which also seems false because social conditioning can affect us.
However, by making his theory less specific about what the conscience does, he opens himself up to the criticism that his theory is too vague and subjective.
For example, love and agape are quite subjective. Different people find different things to be loving. That also depends on your social conditioning. A Nazi might think they are doing a loving thing, protecting the health of the human race, by killing Jewish people.
People could commit adultery and lying/breaking promises in ways that create an unloving outcome, but they might be deluded or confused into thinking they were being loving.
For example, person X could selfishly want person Y to commit adultery, so they lie that their partner cheated. Person X might genuinely think that person Y would be happier with them and that this adultery and lying is therefore a loving thing. However actually they could be acting out of selfishness and jealousy. This shows how selfishness can corrupt our ability to know and thus do the loving thing.
So, Fletcher’s theory of conscience is far too subjective to be accurate or to be morally useful.

Non religious scientific views on conscience

Freud’s theory of the conscience

Freud thinks that what we call ‘conscience’ is really just the result of the way we are raised to control our animalistic instincts.
He claimed there are three parts to the human mind:
The Id is our unconscious instincts, our animalistic desires e.g. for food and sex and sleep
The Ego is our conscious self-aware decision-making self
The Super-ego is our mind’s memory of the social rules (our society’s morality) conditioned into us by authority figures during childhood.
The conscience is just the interaction between these three parts of the mind.
E.g. there’s a desire for food which bubbles up from the Id into the Ego, so you become aware of wanting food. However, your Super-ego tells you that it’s class-time right now, so you can’t eat. You then have to choose whether to obey your ego and feel frustrated or give in to your Id and feel guilty about breaking society’s rules.
That’s what the conscience is, it is the result of the way we raise children to learn to control themselves and their bodily desires to fit with social rules.
This explains conscience without reference to anything supernatural like God.

Freud & the value & application of the conscience to lying/adultery

For Freud, the conscience is valuable because it holds society together – it promotes social order.
The conscience causes us to control our instincts and only act on them when it is socially acceptable to do so.
However, ethically speaking, the conscience is only as valuable as the society itself is good.
This is because our conscience is purely the result of social conditioning. If we live in an immoral society like Nazi Germany, our conscience will be conditioned in alignment with the Nazi ideology.
So, conscience is not a reliable or valuable guide to right and wrong – only to what our society has raised us to think.
So regarding adultery & lying, our conscience will only guide us to thinking them wrong if our society thinks they are wrong.
We will often have impulses from the Id to commit adultery or to lie, but our super-ego will only tell us they are wrong in cases where our society has conditioned us to think they are wrong.

Evaluation

Freud is not a real scientist. He lived long before psychology developed its method of doing proper experiments. Freud didn’t do experiments. He studied a very small sample size of people who were not a representative sample of society.
Karl Popper criticises Freud for this reason, saying Freud’s theory was unfalsifiable because it was not based on experiments which made real scientific predictions that could be tested.
However, Freud can be defended by more modern psychologists like Piaget who actually did do proper experiments. Piaget tested children and their knowledge of morality. He showed that before eleven years old they just followed authority figures in their moral views but after that age they started to be able to think about morality independently for themselves to some degree.
This does justify Freud’s main claim, that what we call ‘conscience’ is really just the result of the way children are raised in society.
So, Freud was not properly scientific and many of his theories and claims are still unscientific, but his main claim about conscience has been defended successfully by properly scientific modern psychologists.
So, the value of conscience is just its ability to hold society together around a shared set of moral views and in controlling people’s behaviour & instincts.
It cannot tell us the actual ethical truth of right/wrong, e.g., regarding adultery/lying though, only what our society thinks of them.
However the different cultural views in the world show that this social-conditioning view of the conscience makes the most sense.

Kholberg’s views on conscience

Argued that what we call the conscience is simply the result of the moral development of human beings, starting with how they are raised as children.
Kholberg is making a similar central claim to Freud – that conscience can be explained by scientific processes regarding how children are raised.
Kholberg differs from Freud however because he was influenced by piaget to think that the conscience is not only the direct result of social conditioning on children, but also involves further developmental stages that the human mind is capable of. Children start as purely conditioned beings, but can then develop more autonomous modes of interacting with moral rules through their conscience.
Level 1: Pre-conventional. A conversion is a social rule/norm. Very young children are pre-conventional in that they lack the cognitive development to understand social conventions. They can only be controlled through punishment and an appeal to their self-interest, not awareness of conventions. So far, this is the same as Freud.
- 1. Obedience and punishment
- 2. Self-interest
Level 2: Conventional. Freud implied that as adults we are just left with the traumatic impact/memory of our conditioning. Piaget and Kholberg argue it’s more complicated than that.
As kids get older, they develop a sense of social rules, the approval and disapproval of others on their behaviour and how that relates to society’s view of their social role and the requirements of social order. Most people remain at this stage.
- 3. Conformity
- 4. Maintenance of social order.
Level 3: Post-conventional. After, or above the conventional level is an individual’s realisation that they are separate entities from their society. This allows an individual to philosophise or reason about ethical principles regardless of the social conventions of their society.
At this level, a person isn’t merely following the rules because they have been told they are right. They are able to actually think for themselves about whether their society’s rules are actually right. This is what allows for and explains moral progress.
It is similar to Kant’s categorical imperative in that it involves figuring out universal ethical principles by putting aside one’s own feelings and circumstances and considering actions abstractly, as done by anyone and everyone.
- 5. Social contract
- 6. Universal ethical principles

Kholberg & the value & application of the conscience to lying/adultery

Kholberg’s theory of conscience manages to have more value than Freud’s. It does involve the maintenance of social order through conditioning society’s conventions into children.
Kholberg goes further, however, and claims that conscience can also involve the capacity to philosophise about our society’s social conventions themselves and to think about whether they are actually right or wrong and progress society.
Regarding adultery and lying, for example, people at level 3 could debate whether to change the traditional strict rules against them.
Kholberg allows for the possibility of the conscience actually improving our society’s rules, making his theory more valuable than Freud’s. For Freud, we are either conditioned by a good society or a bad society. Kholberg explains how we get good societies and how we could progress bad societies.

Evaluation of Kholberg

Kholberg thought the highest level of moral development of the conscience involves the individual realising that there are universal ethical principles that apply to all people at all times.
Kholberg is influenced by Kant here, who also argued that the human mind was born with the capability of knowing right/wrong universal principles.
However, Kholberg is making an assumption that Kantian-style ethics is correct. Philosophers like Bentham would disagree, arguing that there are no absolutely universal ethical principles. For Bentham, any action could be right/wrong depending on whether it maximised pleasure.
If Bentham is right about morality, society shouldn’t run on absolute universal ethical rules because whether an action is right depends on the situation.
However, Kholberg still seems correct in his views about the conscience going through stages of moral development. He may have made assumptions about what the last stage involves. Nonetheless, this just means that stage should include more utilitarian-style thinking, not just Kantian. Kholberg’s overall approach is still the most correct and most valuable for ethical decision making.