Evaluate the claim that conscience is a reliable guide to ethical decision making.

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EVALUATE THE CLAIM THAT CONSCIENCE IS A RELABLE GIUDE IN ETHICAL DECISION MAKING.

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In order to decide whether or not our consciences can be relied upon, we must first examine what we mean by conscience. In order for conscience to be consistently and absolutely reliable, infallible, it must stem from an infallible source – God. Alternatively, conscience might have a potential of ultimate reliability, if the faculty of conscience was dynamic and capable of solving problems i.e. if it was an innate part of human nature. Conscience could even be totally fallible – an arbitrary by-product of experience and biology.

This idea – propagated by such scientist-thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Piaget – does not dismiss the idea of conscience, but rather seeks to define it in psychoanalytical terms. Freud had a different word for the conscience – Super-Ego. In order to understand this concept, we must delve briefly into Freud’s general psychological theories.

According to Freud, every child is born with the ‘Id’. The Id is that part of us which is based solely on the pleasure principle – ignoring all reality it seeks food, shelter or other physical gratification. As a child develops he or she will begin to realise that the needs of the Id cannot always be met, whether because of the restraints of physical reality or the emotional impact that the demands of the Id will have on others. This part of the psyche is called the Ego. The Super-Ego, Freud believed, was a collection of beliefs and values enforced on a child’s psyche by his parents and the prevailing consensus in the society which surrounded him or her.

The super-ego remains with a person for the rest of their life and, while it may change as the experience of the adult develops, the core values of the Super-Ego remain ingrained, reinforced by the Oedipus moment, or phallic stage of development. The implication of this is that the law of conscience is not routed in any kind of rational or logical idioms, or any external reality, but rather the fear of castration, or the insecurity which women (supposedly) experience as they have been deprived of the phallus.

For Freud, the conscience, or Super-Ego, was an irrational, undynamic and emotional force, of as much consequence as the Id in matters of gravity. The conscience in this case points towards one’s responsibilities to one’s parents, not to  God or any exterior moral laws.

Freud, in answer to this essay question, would say that the conscience is completely unreliable, unless you simply wish to rely on it as a barometer of social acceptability. If your view of ethics is restricted to what is inoffensive to people at large, and your parents in particular, then yes, the Super-Ego is a reliable agent of ethical decision-making. But if you wish to consult your super-ego on an issue which your parents never ad an opinion on – be it birth control, capital punishment or forgiveness – then you will find your Super-Ego of little use.

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Piaget, although often hailed as a pre-eminent child psychologist, and required reading for all trainee teachers, was in fact and epistemologist. He believed that we cannot understand knowledge unless we also understand how knowledge is acquired. He also pioneered the idea that ‘children are young scientists’, their ideas and theories – though wrong in our understanding of what is correct and otherwise – have an intrinsic value acquired through the methods children use to arrive at them.

Piaget spent a lot of time studying the way that children develop their moral belief system and, while Piaget’s theory is nowhere near ...

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