Value of conscience as a moral guide

• value of conscience as the 'voice of God'

  • there is no way of knowing if the 'voice' you are hearing is genuinely the voice of God
  • Conflicting messages coming from different people who all believe that God is speaking to them
  • Conscience appears to be both subjective and unreliable
• Value of conscience from a psychological approach

  • The conscience naturally unites society as its members have shared values which the conscience enforces
  • However, this would apply whether the society was ‘good’ or ‘bad’
  • If you regard the collective morality of a particular society as ‘evil’, then you are not going to approve of the mechanism by which that society’s values are sustained
  • If the role of conscience is to challenge existing values, then the collective conscience has no value
• The value of reason as conscience

  • Reason is not infallible
  • therefore an unreliable guide
  • conscience is influenced by the passions and by social conditioning, which means that following the conscience can lead to seriously harmful acts
  • it is not a sufficient guide on its own
• Feelings of guilt

  • may warn us when our actions are wrong so prevent us from doing it again in the future
  • However we may be influenced and feel guilty about something that doesn't need to change
• Determinism

  • useless as some believe that all behaviour, including moral conduct, is determined
  • 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 the 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 - not justification for others
• Problem defining the conscience

  • no argument that can show that any particular view is right