Conscience and Other Virtues: From Bonaventure to MacIntyre

7. Conscience as Something Other Than a Faculty

s e v e n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CONSCIENCE AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN A FACULTY Although discussions of conscience in the philosophical literature of the last half of the twentieth century are rare, in general there are three different views about the nature of conscience in the literature.1 Some writers advocate a cognitive view of conscience. According to this view, conscience is the device by which one contemplates and evaluates one’s own actions or moral standing. By and large, those who view conscience as a faculty advocate this understanding of conscience.2 Clearly this view regards conscience as closely connected to moral reasoning. A second view of conscience, as an affective faculty, regards conscience as the unpleasant emotional reactions to 1. Broad discusses the three theories of conscience in his “Conscience and Conscientious Action ,” in Donnelly and Lyons, eds., Conscience, 8. 2. Butler, Kant, Freud, and Ryle can all be seen as taking this approach to conscience. 100 . . . . . . . Contemporary Dismissal of Conscience moral actions or moral standing that control or modify one’s behavior. This second view is distinguished from the first in that it sees conscience as having little to do with the formulation of moral imperatives; this formulation is more likely an aspect of moral reasoning. On the second view, conscience is concerned with the enforcement of imperatives through feelings like guilt and remorse. The third view regards conscience as a conative disposition to follow out what is thought to be right. (In many ways, this view of conscience seems similar to Bonaventure’s notion of synderesis as the drive to the good in human beings.) Each of these three views has its advocates, but a number of writers argue against them. Moreover, there has emerged during this century the view that there is no such thing as conscience. To a large extent, this view is tied up with the rejection of the notion of faculties, but it is also linked to the reductionistic view that conscience can be reduced to moral reasoning or emotional conditioning. Joseph Butler’s views of conscience are frequently taken as the starting point for twentieth-century discussions of conscience. This is fitting, of course, because Butler is one of the most influential proponents in the history of the notion of conscience of a number of claims about conscience. He regarded conscience as a faculty that is a supreme moral authority. Conscience is the formulator of universal moral principles that have authority for all human beings, not simply the individual possessor of a particular conscience . Modern critics point out that the notion that conscience is a supreme moral authority in Butler’s sense is highly suspect. One need only point to two obvious facts to show this. In the first place, the conscience of an individual comes up with different verdicts on the same issue at different times. This occurs whenever an individual acts in good conscience and later comes to think the action was wrong. If conscience were a supreme moral authority, its verdicts would be essentially infallible and not subject to later revision by the same individual. In the second place, it is clear that the consciences of different individuals vary: What one individual finds permissible another finds forbidden. If conscience were a supreme moral authority, such variation should not occur. Moreover, this last point cuts against the view that conscience legislates universal moral principles. If individual consciences in various societies establish different general moral rules, it is difficult to see conscience as establishing universal moral rules. In fact, variations in conscience among individuals and groups strongly suggest that, as Ryle urged, conscience has only personal authority. But such a view of conscience Conscience as Other Than a Faculty . . . . . . . 101 does not fit well with Butler’s view that the universal dictates of conscience are authoritative for all human beings. Although such criticisms of Butler’s view seem well founded, it is not at all clear that they undermine all cognitive views of conscience. A more moderate view of the cognitive aspect of conscience holds that there may be some universal principles common to everyone, but many of the dictates found in conscience vary from culture to culture and even in the same person over time. Other cognitive views, directly influenced by Freud, hold that conscience contains dictates gained from external authorities and internal reasoning and is not the sole originator of dictates as Butler indicates. To link the issue...