CONSCIENCE: Conscience sits in a sort of middle position in moral psychology. On the one hand, conscience can appear as a purely descriptive, psychological term. Especially post-Freud, we may be apt to treat this as the main meaning of conscience. On this picture, conscience is the “super-ego” or the internalization of one’s early authority figures. Conscience here has no prima facie normative weight, and indeed the goal of therapy might be to get one to move away from heeding one’s conscience – as treating its demands as overly harsh, and restrictive, and as merely the residue of “what Daddy said” you ought to do. Conscience might figure especially in cases of sexual guilt, as an irrational holdover of early parental taboos (as in, I know by doing that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I still have a bad conscience over it).

But conscience can also be seen in a much more avowedly normative way. Actually it can figure normatively in one of two ways, which we can call formal and substantive. The substantive take on conscience would be to equate conscience with what morality demands, so that the voice of conscience turns out to be the voice of morality. I have a hard time with this substantive reading, because it too strongly separates it from the psychological/developmental story of conscience. On the substantive, normative reading, one’s conscience can never be in error, because it just is the voice of what morality requires. This strikes me as contrary to ordinary usage (not that this is the last word on the matter, but it is the first word).

I prefer the “formal” normative reading of conscience to the “substantive” one. On this interpretation of (normative) conscience, acting on your conscience is just acting on those reasons one thinks, all things considered, are the best ones. Here there is the possibility of “what conscience tells you that you ought to do” and “what morality requires you to do” diverging. You can act on your best reasons, or at least what you perceive to be your best reasons, but still do something morally wrong.

If we take the normative dimension of conscience to be along these “formal” lines, an interesting question emerges: what is the value of following one’s errant conscience? Do we want to say that one always ought to follow one’s conscience, knowing that it can sometimes go wrong? There seems to be something bad about not following one’s conscience, because it means going against what one perceives to be the best reasons in the particular case. Yet at the same time, not following your conscience could, in some cases, lead you to do the right thing.

Note that if we stick only with the psychological story about conscience, we don’t get this dilemma, because read purely descriptively, conscience has no claim on us: there’s no reason to follow conscience if it’s just a matter of what you’ve internalized early on. There’s no reason to think that one’s early authority figures were right.

Where the dilemma (follow conscience even when it might be in error) emerges is when we get to the definition of conscience as “one’s best reasons for action, in a particular case.” It’s true that one’s early authority figures will contribute to what one sees as the best reasons in a case – but they get their normative status only when the enter in as the “best reasons as I perceive them in this case,” not merely as “the reasons I see myself as having because I was raised in a particular way.” How reasons go from being the latter to the former is an interesting question.

It may seem that the dilemma I’ve been trying to raise (whether to act on conscience given that conscience can err) is a false one, or one that may never arrive: how could I not follow those reasons which seem to me best in this instance? If I don’t follow them, I’m acting akratically, irrationally, and so it’s not clear that even if I do the right thing by disobeying my conscience, I shouldn’t get moral credit for it, because the act is not, in any full sense, “mine.”

I’m not entirely sure about this, but I’ll let it pass. We can reformulate my dilemma, along these lines: what’s the value of following an errant conscience when that conscience leads you to do something morally wrong? This bears some relationship to my post on “integrity” below, where I suggested that there was no intrinsic value to integrity. The same reasoning would lead me, here, to say that when an errant conscience leads one to do wrong, there is no value to following it: the content of the conscience is what matters. You don’t get points for following an errant conscience into wrongdoing.

Now I’m not so sure about this conclusion. To answer it, I think I’d need to get a better grip on what an “errant conscience” is. For there are a lot of ways one can develop a faulty conscience, and be culpable for that. So if one is culpably ignorance about some facts or another, or even about what a certain moral principle is, then one’s errant conscience hasn’t been formed rightly – you’re acting according to a conscience that’s been misinformed. And so there might be no value in following this conscience, but mainly because it’s a conscience that one has been culpable in forming.

What I want to say is this: if you’ve done nothing wrong – or I guess I should say, nothing unreasonable – in forming one’s conscience, there is an intrinsic worth to following one’s conscience, even if it leads one into moral wrongdoing. Now, it may be that a reasonably informed conscience will never lead one into wrong doing. Here the “formal” and the “substantive” readings of conscience merge, in the sense that I seem to be saying that a procedurally correct conscience (one that collects the facts and reasons in the right way) will always be led to the right answer in a particular case. Yet it seems to strong to say that this will always be the case, i.e., that a reasonably informed conscience will always lead you to the right answer.

So: in those cases where it doesn’t, even though you do the wrong thing, you still deserve some moral credit (or it may be better to say that you are absolved of moral blame). Perhaps my objection to the “integrity” case below is not that there is no intrinsic value to integrity, but that Judge Moore has culpably failed to heed certain relevant facts and principles. He has the integrity of following a (culpably) mis-informed conscience, which is not true integrity at all.

- posted by Chad @ Sunday, September 14, 2003