Explain and evaluate the role of conscience in moral decision-making

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Explain and evaluate the role of conscience in moral decision-making.

        Conscience can be defined as something within each of us that tells us what is right and what is wrong. In Latin ’Con’ means with and ’science’ means knowledge. Therefore we should surely use our conscience when we are making decisions as we should be being told what is the right thing to do and what is wrong. This however doesn’t always seem to be the case.

        The problem with using your conscience is that it is not consistent. We can see this when claims have been made after someone made the wrong choice. For example at the time he was Prime minister Tony Blair took the choice to go to war with Iraq. It is widely regarded as being the wrong choice to have made and Tony Blair said in response that he was following his conscience.

        There are religious and secular (non-religious) views on the conscience. The religious views have been developed from biblical teaching and the divine command theory. However there is more than one interpretation about the conscience. Thomas Aquinas for example believed that people should follow their conscience totally as long as your principles are right because it is the voice of reason. On the other hand Butler argued the conscience comes form intuition.

        Thomas Aquinas thought that synderesis is the means of distinguishing between right and wrong. Synderesis was first used by Aristotle and is the ability of the mind to understand the first principles of moral reasoning. He noticed that people do chose the wrong choice and said that this was ‘conscientia’ which is the actual ethical judgement or decision a person makes. Aquinas said that it is important to apply your moral principles to each situation but you can still be wrong if you follow your conscience because your principles can be wrong so your conscience will be too. Conscience is reasoning used correctly to find out what God sees is good.

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        Joseph Butler similarly to Aquinas believed that  conscience could determine and judge the rightness or wrongness of different actions or thoughts. However Butler saw the conscience as being more authoritative that “magisterially exerts itself.” in such a way that it had the last say when it comes to moral decision making. Butler described a hierarchy of human nature in which the desire for food and other animal instincts are at the bottom and the conscience at the top. Self love and benevolence was above the drives and the ability to reflect was above that. Mistakes made by conscience were not ...

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