Conscience

Conscience

Conscience as behaviour developed through social interaction (Lawrence Kohlberg)

- Defined six stages od moral development from birth, in three levels: pre-conventional, conventional
and post-conventional.
- The final stage is am individualised conscience where moral decisions must be consistent and
universalizable.
- To go against the conscience leads to feelings of guilt.
- Kohlberg stressed the development through encountering dilemmas.

Conscience as an aspect of the super-ego (Sigmund Freud)

o The super-ego is the controlling/restraining self: it controls impulses that are potentially damaging to
society, by judging and threatening punishment.
o The feeling of threat is the conscience.
o To go against the super-ego beings about feelings of shame, guilt and anxiety.
o If Freud is right, then the conscience cannot be seen as a source of moral authority, since is it just the
internalisation of others wishes.
o It has nothing to do with God, except where God is invented as another source of authority.
o Therefore, conscience has little to do with our desire to do what is morally right.

Conscience as sanctions or social conditioning (Émile Durkheim)

 Conscience is the sanctions/social conditioning that the group brings to bear on the individual,
reinforced by the figure of God as the ultimate projection of moral authority.
 Argued that societies work through a collective conscience, an act is wrong if society disapproves of
it.
 Receives support from evolutionary accounts of conscience as a survival mechanism.

Conscience as the authoritarian and the humanistic conscience (Erich Fromm)

 Conscience is associated with guilt, shame and fear, it is the sense of moral responsibility rising from
the fear of being rejected by society.
 Society is based on rules and conformity to norms.
 Argues that we have a humanistic conscience that arises from our instinctive knowledge of what
destroys life and what makes it flourish.
 This can make us disobey society to bring about flourishing.
 Groups improve their survivability by individuals having a conscience that compels them to maintain
group loyalty.
 The authority of parents and society is a powerful tool to compel social obedience.

Conscience as the innate voice of God (Augustine and Schleiermacher)

- Conscience is innate, put into human minds by God, and so amounts to innate knowledge of God’s
moral laws.
- Augustine literally sees conscience as the voice of God.
- Problems with Augustine’s view:
o The amount of evil in the world, suggests God speaks to people selectively.
o Makes ethical discussion redundant.
o Means we cannot be morally free.