Conscience is a Mediocre Concept 

Interesting how the conscience is socially conditioned. I have learned that for many Muslim men living in Germany, leading a white woman on for a sexual relationship doesn't make a dent in their conscience. Wanting their own child aborted doesn't make a dent. Disobeying a father, even one who takes money from his children, causes a crisis of conscience. That is why he will always be haunted by disobeying the patriarch, not by an aborted child, not by  the woman he seduced. 

   Many Nazis acted according to a strong sense of duty, according to their conscience, as they committed the most vile acts. The slave master suffered no genuine remorse for raping his property in the form of a slave woman. He would not have found it intelligible to suffer remorse because the body and sexuality of an African he had already so demeaned the rape that it was beyond his imagination that it could be an object of love, of a gentle caress. He would have ridiculed someone who made the argument that his property was an intelligible object of sexual love.

      If conscience were the whole story, the human conscience would be nothing more than Freud's super-ego. Conscience can be conditioned by culture – or ideology (false consciousness) communicated through media, as in the case of MAGA, or many feminists when it comes to the unborn, or the Hamas terrorists and their counterparts in Israel, or (at a qualitatively different level of evil) the Nazis. Conscience can be colonialized. I could spend the rest of the decade making of list of people and groups who did evil with a good conscience: not people who rationalized the evil done to deceive their conscience; people who did evil with a pure conscience. Culture or propaganda can invade and take over the conscience. Brains can be hacked and the conscience hijacked. I put no faith in it.

         To matter morally, conscience must be informed by the real Good. How do we know the real Good? Conscience itself doesn't tell us. I guess God's commands as revealed in the Old Testament (variously and mostly opportunistically interpreted) for most protestants, as revealed in the Koran and Hadith for the Muslims, or as revealed in the Torah and Talmud for the Jews. Reason determines the Good for the philosopher (and I would agree if Reason includes hope, faith, and love).

   Aquinas makes the most sense to me on this. The will – conditioned by the virtues – must conform what a clear mind and a pure heart recognize as Good into a duty to respect or love.  Christ's supernatural love reveals the Good for the Catholic and Orthodox; God's love for the world - the Creation - reveals it (John 3:16). Even if you want to think of this a metaphorical, it points you in the right direction. To me, it is revealed in Jesus' parables, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and in his compassion for the adulteress for example. Without love, there is no real Good. The Good is revealed in and through love. Jesus said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." An implication of that could be “where your love is, there will your conscience be also.” It’s love that does all the work. The good is what can be loved by a clear mind and a pure heart.        

    Needless to say, our human hearts and minds are to a greater or lesser extent darkened by injustice and sin; by fantasy, sentimentality, and the narcissism of the damaged, alienated ego . We are for much of our lives creatures living out fantasies - some of our own making, but usually emanating from some power complex. Our failures are failures of love, and failures of love happen because fantasy replaces a clear mind and a pure heart i.e. replaces Reason: that which apprehends reality and thus the Good, through thought and feeling. 

      But that which is in itself lovable – or beautiful (a kind of love) – is like the Northern Star or a compass for the conscience. I think the best most of us can do is start with our children - some can't even love their children but only sentimental fantasies of children. But for those who can love their children, imagine others - including those desperate people seeking not just a better life but survival at our southern border - as someone's child, as held by Christ, as a loving God's children. ["I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - see Matthew 25:40-45] Even if you think of it as a metaphor, that works better than abstractions. Perhaps the first act is the steadfast refusal to reduce and demean other people, especially those you think of as "enemies." (There was a reason why Christ told us quite literally to love our enemies - not to like them, but to love them, to will their good, to pray for them: not to reduce them to orcs or liberals.) 

 

 Do we love it because it is good, or is it good because we love it? Indeed, the good is only revealed through love – at a minimum through it being intelligible that someone could love it even if I can’t. But if our loving it alone made it good, then good would have no reality. The Good is the real. Evil is a corruption or perversion of that which is real (as the Christian tradition teaches). Therefore loving it alone does not make it good. Through love, the deepest aspects of reality accessible to us are disclosed. We can only know our children, for example, through loving them. Outside of love, their reality remains hidden from view. 

see my entry from November 22, 2023