The Value of Conscience as a Moral Guide

• Valuable - the voice of God

  Through God's laws we are able to standardise our conscious mind and create rules and regulations to discern right from wrong
• Not valuable - the voice of God

  - there is no way of knowing if the voice you are hearing is genuinely the voice of God

  - there are conflicting messages coming to people who all believe that God is speaking to them.

  —> this makes conscience both subjective and unreliable
• Value of the conscience as the internalised values of society or inner parent

  The conscience naturally unites society because its members have shared values which the conscience enforces
• Not valuable - internalised values of society or inner parent

  If you disagree the collective morality of a particular society, then you are not going to approve of the mechanism by which that society's values are sustained.
• Value of feelings of guilt

  They warn us when our actions are wrong and we may want to modify our behaviour in the future to avoid them
• Feelings of guilt are not valuable

  We may feel guilty about something we do not need to change such as something that our parents have taught us is wrong when it isn't
• Can conscience 'guide' at all?

  Christians and hard determinists believe that the idea that conscience is a guide is invalid, because they believe that all behaviour, including moral conduct, is determined. That means that we are not free to choose how to behave and we have no free will that can be influenced by any guide
• The subjectivity of conscience

  Only you know what your conscience is telling you to do. If you claim that you were 'following your conscience' when you did something that others do not approve of, only you know if that is true. In a court, saying that 'God told you to do it' does not deem you innocent as your actions are based on your consequences rather than the justification behind it
• What is the main problem in assessing the value of conscience as a moral guide?

  There is no real agreed definition of it