St. Thomas Aquinas did not think of conscience as being the voice of God, but as being the able to reason and distinguish between right and wrong and that there were two parts to making a good, moral decision. The Synderesis Rule is an innate ‘right reason’ that gives us knowledge of the basic principles of morality e.g. following the good and avoiding the bad. The conscienta is the choice to follow an action based upon the principles and right reasoning of the synderesis. Both of parts of Aquina’s conscience enable us to decide between good and evil and then use ‘right reason’ to follow the good action and make a moral decision. For example, realising that the good thing to do would be to help the old woman across the road and then carrying out the action. However, Aquinas did not believe that the actions of the conscience were always correct due to a mistake in reasoning. If you have a mistake in reasoning then your conscience will be flawed and your action will be immoral. Because of this, Aquinas did not see it advisable to follow our conscience at all times as even though we may think that we are carrying out a correct moral action, our reasoning may be flawed which will result in an apparent good rather than a real good.
Cardinal John Henry Newman agreed with Aquinas that conscience is the ability to apply moral principles however; this approach was more intuitive than rationalistic like Butler’s. Newman believed that conscience was God’s voice giving us direction and that following this conscience given to us by God was the same as following the Divine Law. The Cardinal also said “I toast the Pope, but I toast conscience first”. This implies that conscience is the ultimate authority rather than the Pope. For many Christian’s this is seen as being extremely controversial as the Pope has a direct link to God and are supposed to be of infallible ultimate authority. However, he does argue that conscience is innate and inborn within us, given to us by God as a moral guide for doing what is right and what is wrong.
The main problem with religious beliefs is that, if conscience was is the voice of God then why do different religions and sections of Christianity believe different things about issues such as sex and abortion? Surely, if conscience was the infallible voice of God then all religions of all cultures would have the same morals for all issues. However, as this is not the case there are differences between Christian denominations. This suggests that conscience is not as clear cut as Butler and Newman make it out to be. Another problem with the idea of having an innate conscience is that it assumes the existence of God. What about atheists and people that do not believe in God? Are we assuming that they have no conscience and they are the immoral people of the world? This poses a huge problem, as it infers that individuals that follow a religion and more superior than those who do not, as they do not have the innate moral guide to be able to distinguish right from wrong. However, atheists would tend to agree with the secular approaches to conscience.
Christian’s are more in favour of accepting Aquinas’ view of conscience as he does not say that it is the direct voice of God, but that it is reasoning that separates us from animals and helps us to make morally good decisions. If it were that conscience was the voice of God, then it would be far too easy to blame atrocities on God and say that every person on earth that has committed a bad act has done it because ‘God told them to’. Not only does this look bad on religion, but it also looks bad on the individual as they are following this word blindly and not questioning whether it really is as infallible as religious groups make it out to be.
On the other hand, there are various secular beliefs to what conscience is. These beliefs all describe conscience as being learned and developed, not innate. Sigmund Freud was a psychologist who posed a secular approach to what he thought conscience was. He believed that conscience was a part of the mind that strived to make sense of disorder and to deal with guilt. Freud said that during our childhood we are subject to accepting certain values and beliefs about morality that we reject in later life due to our moral reasoning. However, these early formed values and belief may still influence our morality today. For example, if an individual was forced to attend Sunday service at church in their childhood then they may still take these values into their later life and go to Sunday service at church so they do not feel guilt for not going. For Freud, the mind is split into 3 parts; Instinctive Desires (Id), Super-Ego and Ego. The immature conscience can be identified with mass feelings of guilt, reinforced and conditioned by childhood as previously stated for example, going to Sunday service at church as that’s what you did as a child to keep your parents happy and to stop you from feeling guilty. The mature and healthy conscience can be identified with the ego’s reflection about the best way of achieving integrity and having strong moral principles. The mature conscience is dynamic, focused on the future and it will not let the immature conscience restrict it with guilt although they may conflict sometimes. This is a process of development and learning, not something that is inborn within them. Freud’s view of conscience would blame society for an individual acting immorally, rather than God. As parenting, school and life experiences shape a persons conscience and morals it would be accurate to say that this kind of conscience has to be developed over time and at the individuals own pace, rather than just following a set of instructions by God.
Jean Piaget took Freud’s idea of guilt as a conscience and made it into his own view of what conscience is. He said that our conscience develops as we move through stages of our lives. The first conscience that we experience happens usually between the ages of 5 and 10; this is called heteronymous conscience. This conscience is developed as a result of parenting and upbringing. For example, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when addressing people. This happens when the conscience is immature and the consequences of an action determine whether it is right or wrong, so the child does not know if they have acted immorally until they have done the action. The second conscience which Piaget outlines is the autonomous conscience. This develops after the age of 10, where an individual is able to distinguish between right and wrong before they make their decision about what action they are going to take. They are also less dependent on the authority of the people around them and are able to distinguish between right and wrong for themselves. This is clearly a developmental approach to conscience, not a religious one which claims that it is innate. If an individual were to carry out and action which was bad then the blame would be placed on the child’s upbringing or that they are just a morally bad person that is unable to distinguish the difference between right or wrong, or that they do know what the right thing to do is yet they still carry out the immoral action.
One major downfall of the secular approaches to conscience is that it does not explain actions that are clearly made without the use of a conscience. If the conscience is possessed from childhood, then why do some people not have a sense of what the right and wrong things to do are. Obviously, you could put it down to poor parenting but what about those people who have had a perfect childhood and have gained everything they wanted, yet still committed horrendous crimes? Another problem with the secular ideas of conscience is that it explains how it influences us into making decisions, but it does not tell us what the right path is? How are we supposed to know that the path we have chosen to take is the wrong one, or mistake the wrong path as being the right one? St. Thomas Aquinas would put this down to a mistake in reasoning, but how would psychologists such as Freud explain this?
In conclusion, I believe with Piaget, in that conscience is something that you are conditioned with as a child, but then develop yourself when you become old and mature enough to make your own decisions about difficult situations. “Things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you” – Anna Godbersen. This implies that conscience is completely subjective and that as long as you do not have people telling you what to do and what is right or wrong like the Religious ideas of conscience tell you, then everything that you are doing seems like the right thing to do.
