The Role of Conscience Revision Notes for AQA A-Level Religious Studies

The Role of Conscience

Joseph Fletcher's understanding of conscience

Joseph Fletcher offers a distinctive view of conscience that differs from traditional religious approaches. He identifies and rejects four common theories about conscience:

Conscience as an innate faculty built into human nature
Conscience as guidance from the Holy Spirit, angels, or other supernatural entities
Conscience as the internalised values of society
Conscience as reason making moral judgements (Aquinas's view)

Conscience as action, not possession

Fletcher proposes an alternative understanding: conscience is not something we possess but something we do. He states that there is no conscience as an object or faculty - the word 'conscience' simply describes our attempts to make decisions creatively, constructively and appropriately.

infoNote

Fletcher's approach represents a fundamental shift from viewing conscience as a static faculty or entity to understanding it as an active process of moral decision-making. This makes his theory prospective rather than retrospective - focused on future actions rather than past judgements.

Key features of Fletcher's view:

Conscience is prospective, not retrospective - it looks forward to decisions, not backwards at past actions
It is not a review officer judging past behaviour
Conscience involves choosing what agape-love demands in the present situation
The calculation about how to act lovingly in a specific situation is the conscience
Conscience is a verb (an action), not a noun (a possession)
The situational context is crucial - conscience operates 'there and then' in specific circumstances

The role of conscience in making moral decisions

Conscience can function in several ways when people face moral choices:

Three main roles

1. Pre-decision guidance Conscience helps decide what should be done before any action is taken. It provides direction when facing moral dilemmas.

2. Post-action evaluation Conscience informs moral agents whether their actions were right or wrong after the event. This may manifest as feelings of guilt or satisfaction.

3. Compelling action Conscience can demand a particular course of action, creating a sense of moral obligation.

Individual variation in conscience use

Different people experience conscience differently:

Some individuals appear to have no active conscience, showing no inclination to follow societal norms, divine laws, or rational principles
Others never use their conscience because all decisions have been predetermined for them
Many people actively engage their conscience in decision-making processes

Augustine's perspective on conscience as the voice of God

The problem of conflicting messages

Those who view conscience as the voice of God face a significant challenge: how can they verify that what they hear is genuinely divine guidance? Individuals may report hearing contradictory commands whilst believing both originate from God. This creates obvious problems of reliability.

Grace as the solution

Augustine addressed this problem by arguing that conscience must be supported by grace. Grace, as a gift from God, ensures the conscience is properly motivated by love of God rather than other influences.

Augustine's definition of cardinal virtues: Augustine explained the four cardinal virtues as different expressions of love for God:

Temperance: keeping love whole and uncorrupted
Fortitude: ensuring no misfortune can disturb this love
Justice: obeying God alone
Prudence: careful discernment to avoid deceit or trickery

The importance of intention

Augustine emphasised that good actions require the right intention. Consider two people contributing to charity: if one acts from guilt or desire for social approval whilst the other acts from love of God, only the second person's act is truly morally good. Actions without proper intention lack moral worth.

chatImportant

The Role of Grace in Conscience

For Augustine, grace is not optional but essential. Without grace, conscience cannot reliably distinguish between genuine divine guidance and other influences. This means that human reason alone, without God's grace, cannot ensure proper moral motivation or decision-making.

Applying conscience to lying and breaking promises

Aquinas's approach using reason

Core principles: Aquinas viewed conscience as reason identifying what is rational. From this perspective, telling lies and breaking promises conflict with the synderesis rule to seek good and avoid evil.

Impact on ordered society: Lying and breaking promises violate the primary precept of living in an ordered society. Social order becomes impossible when:

People habitually lie in business arrangements, making property insecure
Spouses break marriage promises, undermining the institution of marriage

Handling exceptional circumstances: Aquinas recognised that secondary precepts may apply differently in specific cases. In the classic 'mad axe-murderer' scenario, where someone has promised to tell the truth but doing so would endanger an innocent person, Aquinas suggests telling an evasive truth rather than a direct lie. For example, stating where the victim was previously seen without revealing their current location.

chatImportant

Limitations of Aquinas's Approach

Many people find Aquinas's position too rigid. Most would instinctively break a promise and lie directly to save an innocent life, suggesting his framework doesn't match common moral intuitions. This highlights a potential weakness in applying Natural Law theory too strictly to real-world moral dilemmas.

Sociological perspective

Social stability argument: From a sociological viewpoint, lying and breaking promises are socially destructive. Society depends on promise-keeping for basic functions. Consider that banknotes represent a promise from the Bank of England to pay the bearer. Breaking such promises would cause complete social breakdown and financial collapse.

infoNote

Fromm's Two Types of Conscience

Erich Fromm distinguished between two forms of conscience:

The authoritarian conscience prevents promise-breaking through fear of social disapproval
The humanistic conscience recognises that lying and breaking promises violate the ethical norms necessary for fruitful communal life

These different types of conscience operate through different motivations but can reach the same moral conclusions.

Freud's psychological analysis

Focus on guilt: A Freudian approach begins not with moral reasoning but with feelings of guilt, anxiety and remorse emerging from the subconscious mind. These feelings represent parental commands or other authority figures whose influence remains psychologically powerful.

Variable responses: Lying and breaking promises are common in modern society. On Freud's account, this occurs when the super-ego remains quiet because parents saw no problem with such acts and imposed no prohibition on their children.

Limited moral dimension: Freud's framework treats lying and breaking promises primarily as psychological issues rather than genuine moral questions.

Applying conscience to adultery

Aquinas on adultery and fallible conscience

Reason's verdict: Aquinas maintained that reason (conscience) dictates adultery is wrong. However, he emphasised that conscience is not infallible and can make mistakes.

lightbulbExample

Example of Mistaken Conscience: The Widow's Previous Husband

Aquinas provides an illuminating example: a man might marry a widow and have sexual relations with her, only to discover later that her previous husband was still alive.

Analysis:

Although his conscience cleared him to act, it was mistaken about the facts
There was no intention to do wrong
The person genuinely lacked knowledge of the true situation
Following conscience in such circumstances involves no fault

Key Principle: Genuine ignorance of facts can lead conscience to wrong decisions without making it wrong to follow conscience.

Fletcher's situational approach to adultery

Fletcher's situation ethics challenges absolute rules about adultery. His famous example of 'sacrificial adultery' involves Mrs Bergmeier, a German woman separated from her family after World War II and imprisoned in a Soviet camp in Ukraine.

lightbulbExample

Case Study: Mrs Bergmeier's Dilemma

The Situation:

Mrs Bergmeier learned her husband and children were desperately searching for her
The family needed to reunite in their situation of hunger, chaos and fear
The camp would only release prisoners for two reasons: serious illness requiring external medical facilities, or pregnancy
Pregnancy would result in return to Germany as a liability

The Decision: Mrs Bergmeier asked a sympathetic camp guard to impregnate her. After medical verification of pregnancy, she returned to Berlin and her family, who welcomed her lovingly. The resulting child, Dietrich, was cherished by the family as having done more for them than anyone else.

Fletcher's Analysis:

Conscience is action (a verb) in a specific situation
It involves deciding what agape-love demands in that particular circumstance
Reason combined with love guides the decision
The situational context determines whether adultery can be morally justified

Note: This case also involves breaking marriage vows, connecting to the earlier discussion of promise-keeping.

Sociological view of adultery

Durkheim's perspective: Sociology treats religion as a social phenomenon without judging God's reality. Durkheim argued that 'God' functions as a mechanism enforcing society's rules. Conscience represents social conditioning - the sanctions groups impose on individuals. Belief in God creates moral obligation to obey society's demands.

Collective conscience: According to Durkheim's concept of collective conscience, acts are considered bad simply because society disapproves of them. This understanding of adultery as merely group perception helps explain changing attitudes in Western societies.

infoNote

Changing Social Attitudes Toward Adultery

Modern Western societies have experienced significant shifts in attitudes toward adultery:

Adultery is now tolerated far more than previously
God's authority has declined as a force in collective conscience
Religion has lost much of its authority over moral matters
Marriage is increasingly viewed as a social contract rather than religious ceremony
Contracts can be terminated by mutual consent
Adultery has shifted from being a sin against God's laws to grounds for terminating a marriage contract
The primary morality involved concerns keeping or breaking contracts

This represents a completely different framework from religious scholars like Aquinas.

Freud's psychological perspective on adultery

In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud theorised that humanity invented civilisation to control instinctive drives, particularly thanatos (destructive impulses) and eros (sexual drives).

The paradox: Civilisation creates a paradox - whilst designed to protect us from unhappiness, it has become our greatest source of unhappiness by frustrating instinctive drives for killing and sexual gratification. Laws prohibiting murder, rape and adultery represent this frustration.

Conscience as psychological preference: The operation of conscience depends on which drive is more deeply rooted in an individual's psychology: the preference for civilisation or for sexual gratification. This preference, in turn, depends on influences such as:

Racial, national and family traditions
Demands of the social environment
Incalculable psychological factors

Distance from traditional views: This analysis presents conscience as a deep-rooted psychological compulsion from numerous sources. It stands far removed from views (Christian or otherwise) that regard adultery as morally wrong in itself, whether for religious reasons or through exercise of reason.

The value of conscience as a moral guide

Evaluating conscience's usefulness involves considering whether it helps make moral decisions rather than leaving us confused and stressed. The assessment also depends on what results we seek after making decisions.

1. Conscience as the voice of God

Potential problems:

No reliable method exists for knowing whether the voice heard is genuinely God's voice
Different people report receiving conflicting messages whilst believing God is speaking to them
Conscience appears subjective and unreliable under this understanding

chatImportant

The Verification Problem

This type of conscience may lack value as a moral guide due to verification problems and internal contradictions. Without a reliable method to distinguish genuine divine guidance from personal desires, psychological factors, or other influences, conscience as God's voice becomes problematic as a consistent moral guide.

2. Conscience as internalised values of society

Strengths: Conscience naturally unites society because members share values that conscience enforces. This creates social cohesion and shared moral understanding.

Weaknesses: This benefit applies whether the society is morally good or bad. If a particular society's collective morality is considered evil, the mechanism sustaining those values cannot be approved. Where conscience should challenge existing values rather than enforce them, collective conscience offers no value.

3. Individualised conscience (Kohlberg)

The inner demand that moral decisions should be consistent and universalisable, as described by Kohlberg, provides a strongly rational account of conscience. This approach emphasises personal moral reasoning and development through stages of moral maturity.

Exam tips

Be prepared to compare different theories of conscience when discussing its role
Use specific examples (lying, adultery) to illustrate how different understandings of conscience lead to different moral conclusions
Consider both strengths and weaknesses of viewing conscience as a moral guide
Link conscience theories to broader ethical frameworks (Natural Law, Situation Ethics, psychological/sociological approaches)
Understand that Fletcher's view is fundamentally different from traditional religious perspectives
Remember Aquinas allows for exceptional circumstances through secondary precepts
Note how sociological views reflect changing social attitudes

bookmarkSummary

Key Points to Remember:

Fletcher's distinctive view: Conscience is something we do (a verb), not something we have (a noun) - it involves deciding what agape-love demands in specific situations
Three main roles: Conscience can guide pre-decision, evaluate post-action, or demand particular courses of action
Augustine's solution: Conscience as God's voice requires grace to ensure proper motivation by love of God
Different approaches to lying/adultery: Aquinas uses reason, sociologists examine social conditioning, Freud focuses on psychological drives
Value depends on perspective: Conscience as God's voice faces verification problems; as social conditioning it may reinforce good or bad values; as individualised reason it provides rational consistency

The Role of Conscience (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes