What Is Moral Conscience?

What Is Moral Conscience? | Rev. Thomas V. Berg | Homiletic & Pastoral Review

Refuting four mistaken ideas about conscience in light of the natural law tradition.

My experience as a teacher, counselor and confessor has repeatedly confirmed that there is a tremendous amount of confusion, especially among Catholics, about the nature of moral conscience.  That experience has also taught me just how sensitive this topic is. Want to make a group of people immediately uncomfortable? Start talking about conscience—and worse, suggest that the ideas they have about conscience are perhaps mistaken. In what follows, I will offer a sketch of the perennial, Catholic, natural law (NL) understanding of conscience—in a hopefully accessible, non-scholarly, and pastoral fashion—by first sketching out and  refuting four popular misconceptions about moral conscience.1

To begin with, I hope most of us would agree that conscience is not the proverbial angel on my shoulder, the antagonist of the little devil who whispers temptations in my ear perched on my other shoulder.  Yet, while most of us have progressed beyond this childish understanding of conscience, I fear that a large percentage of Catholics still labor under some form of misconception about the nature of moral conscience.

Allow me to suggest that most if not all of those problematic notions about conscience—having trickled down to us historically from different schools of moral philosophy, psychology and related fields—generally fall into one of the following broad categories:

(a) Conscience as emotive response. On this view, conscience is nothing more than an emotive response conditioned over time by genetic factors, environment and other socializing factors, in addition to psychological forces deep at work in our own psyche.  So conceived, conscience—particularly when manifested as guilt—is to be overcome or ignored or otherwise harmoniously integrated into our own everyday life in a way that it does not become an obstacle to our "life style choices," "values," "self-projects," and so on.

(b) Conscience as built in moral guidance system. Here, conscience is understood to be a kind of natural faculty or power. Some depict it as the very voice of God who, through conscience, can guide our actions directly.  If not so depicted, it is presented as at least responding to the external dictates of moral authority in the manner of an internalized moral GPS: "do this," "avoid that," "too much more and you will cross the line," and so on.

(c) Conscience as moral sense. A third misconception, presents conscience as a kind of intuition which simply cannot be accounted for or explained in terms of human reasoning. Sometimes called the "moral sense," conscience, from this viewpoint, must be developed much like developing the ability to judge a good wine, pick a winning race horse, assess a person's character, or keep a group of school children well behaved and attentive.

(d) Conscience as moral opinion. Finally, a fourth misconception presents conscience as simply that process by which I give consideration to moral matters and come up with my best judgment—essentially my opinion—about what I, or others, ought to do or not do.  When I am convinced of this judgment, it enjoys primacy over all other moral points of reference, trumping any other considerations. As such, my "judgment of conscience"—that is, my best formed opinion on the moral matter at hand—is infallible and absolute:  my conscience is my moral compass, period.2

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