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 as sexualised as that of Freud, he shares the basic belief that ‘conscience’ is aquired. In Piaget’s case, the conscience is arrived at through simple observance of the world, and is in a constant state of development throughout life – from the oung child’s simple understanding that that is ‘naughty’ to the teenager’s proclamation that ‘stealing is wrong as it hurts people’.
You could argue Piaget is a moral relativist as he seems to value all of these logical systems of ethics. However, Piaget’s view of conscience seems far more reliable than Freud’s as in Piaget’s eyrs conscience is part of an active process of experimentation and improvement. This ‘informed’ conscience is not simply the superimposed super-ego, but rather the logical and reasonable deduction of rational beings. However, it can clearly still be mis-informed, as it must be misinformed at at least one point in any person’s development.
There is some scientific evidence for the idea that conscience is aquired and informed. In studies such as the Sherman experiment, it has been shown that those who engage in debate and analysis of moral issues before being presented with ethical decisions are more likely to act morally when encountering them.
However, both these views of conscience could present the conscience as an innate capacity of human nature, even thought it is acquired. While the methodology of an acquired conscience differs, the basic premise – that conscience is developed during childhood, and is developed by largely universal experiences – remains the same. From this we could deduce, particularly from Piaget’s view, that while conscience is not pre-ordained it is a natural extension of the human condition.
Joseph Butler (while he occasionally referred to conscience as ‘the voice of God’) also believed in conscience as a faculty of human nature. However, unlike Freud and Piaget, Butler’s psychological context puts conscience at the top of the ‘hierarchy’ of faculties. From this point alone we can see that Butler views conscience as an informed and reliable tool for ethical decision-making, but what exactly did Butler mean by ‘conscience’?
While Freud saw conscience as irrational and emotive, Butler saw the conscience as a kind of disinterested referee in the moral game of life. He referred, in his first sermon, to the unique ability of conscience to evaluate and assess our motives without having motive in itself. However, he also saw conscience as an emotional imperative – it could inform us through our feelings of the value of our actions. Butler’s great success was uniting the emotional and rational agents of conscience.
Piaget very much believed in a teleological nature of the human body i.e. every part of the self has a purpose and, in the case of the mind, these purposes could be broadly categorised into private and public affections. Neither kind was wholly good, but, in a natural law sense, each was good in as much as it performed its function. For example, the private affection of hunger was good in that it promoted the good of the self through sustaining nutrition, but was obviously not intrinsically good. The private functions are all things which relate directly to the welfare of the self. The public functions – emotions like benevolence, ‘indignation at successful vice’, ‘love of society’ seem to relate more directly to the matter of conscience. They are the emotive arm of the conscience in that they provide an emotional imperative to fulfil the good ‘functions’ of each. The rational arm of conscience comes in when it is time to decide what that function is, and how/whether it has been fulfilled.
As for the matter of the reliability of conscience, Butler’s functionalist view brings us to the following argument. The rational nature of conscience must in itself have a purpose, and as this drive and structure seem to direct, this purpose is in the governing of ourselves. Thus Butler establishes the primacy and the authority of conscience.
However, we are still left asking the question: how do I know if my conscience is right? Butler’s position seems to be that the accuracy of conscience is less important than that it be followed wherever it should point. This has a logic to it – while we might question our private affection to consume poisonous mushrooms, what possible agent could there be which had the authority to direct and second-guess conscience. Is Butler’s conscience reliable? It would seem to me that, in as much as we can trust ourselves, Butler’s c onscience is reliable. But, directed as it is by the all too corruptible public affections, how much can we trust the dictates of our emotions, however benevolent they may be in essence. Morality is a maze, not a point on the compass and we cannot always rely on our seemingly well-intentioned emotions. As for rationality, ruling over emotions, this seems to simply confuse the picture. Either we can use our rational consciences as disinterested observers of our emotional motivations, or as emotionally informed legislators of morality. Either choice is unsatisfactory, and they seem at least in conflict, if not mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, the weakness in butler’s theory is also one of his greatest credits. The divorce of the supremacy of conscience from divine authority is valiant but ultimately flawed. Without the divinity attributed to conscience by Aquinas and Newman, and the recognition that reason is fallible, the prescription that we should follow conscience absolutely seems reminiscent of the General’s pronouncement that ‘While we accept that your weather reports are no better than random guesswork, we would like you to keep sending them as we need them for our strategic plans’.
‘The Natural Law’ wrote Thomas Aquinas ‘Is an impression of the Divine Light’. But this may be the wrong place to start. Taken out of context, this quote suggests Aquinas believed that a kind of stone tablet was firmly imbedded in all of us, and it was simply our job to use conscience in order to read this tablet. In fact, while Aquinas believed that the ‘Natural Law’ was a reflection of the ‘Eternal Law’ (morality was ingrained within the workings of the Universe), the analogy has more similarity with a cryptic message, with conscience being the Enigma machine we use to decode it.
At the forefront of Aquinas conscience is Reason. Being, like Butler, a natural law theorist, Aquinas saw the role of conscience (reason making right decisions) as the tool we use to establish the function of every part of ourselves, and what is required to complete that function.
However, the application of this process was not a purely intellectual exercise. Aquinas lays the foundations of his theory in the syndresis rule. Syndresis is the idea that human beings will natrually veer towards the moral good, and the ‘Syndresis Rule’ states that human beings can only perform evil by mistake. Aquinas believed that the conscience can be ill- or mis-informed but, as has beocme a cornerstone of thomism, conscience can never will evil. Thus the application of knoweldge to actions must always be morally directed in one way or another.
While this view is intrinsically very similar to that of Butler, the crucial difference is that, while Butler’s conscience is a heady mix of logic and emotion, the logic of Aquinas’ conscience brings us into contact with the voice of God. Aquinas was notable for admiring and exhonorating conscience while also categorically stating that revelation was a much more important precipitate for moral and theological knoweldge, and that reason could be near-useless without it. Aquinas has also addressed the problem of evil much more directly and his theory, which includes the idea that the quality of conscience must be relate to the quality of knowledge the conscience is presented with, accounts for a ‘potentially infallible’ conscience while admitting basic flaws in the Universe.
Cardinal Newman differs from all of the previous scholars in that he believes that the starting point for all conscience is God. While you could argue that Aquinas also believed this, Aquinas saw conscience as God-Given, but opearted by human beings. In contrast Newman believed that conscience literally was the voice of God in all of us, informing us of our mistakes and promoting the good course of action. This is a strong and capable view – this kind of conscience would be ‘supremely’ reliable, and it certainly justifies Newman’s dictate that we should follow our consciences even before the Pope.
The Cardinal did concede that the conscience was open and intended for training and informing, but really it is us who is being trained and informed – to hear the voice of God.
Looking at all the possible views of conscience, I conclude that generally conscience is a reliable tool in making ethical decisions. Even mankind’s weakest opinions of conscience admit that it is vital if we are to avoid causing offence within the society we inhabit. More importantly, those theories which consider conscience arbitrary or habitual tend to not believe in moral absolutes – which absolves the question of ethical decision of the weight otherwise ascribed to it. In other words, a relative view of conscience correlates with a relative view of ethics. Conscience is the most reliable, and mst useful, tool we have for making ethical decisions.
© Jonathan May-Bowles – All work should be this colorful.
Sponsored by the Campaign For Interesting Looking Work™ (02-10-02)
© Jonathan May-Bowles – All work should be this colorful.
Sponsored by the Campaign For Interesting Looking Work™ (02-10-02)
© Jonathan May-Bowles – All work should be this colorful.
Sponsored by the Campaign For Interesting Looking Work™ (02-10-02)