Morality & Conscience

PHILO 102
• The judgement about responsibility is a factual judgement about
the degree of voluntariness; the judgement of conscience is an
evaluative judgement about the moral value or disvalue of my
act and so of myself as a person.
• All people, no matter what their system of morals might be,
make the kind of evaluative judgements associated with
conscience and admit that they make them
• This personal judgement in these terms about my own actions
and about myself as a person is what we mean in this by the
judgement of conscience.
We shall use the following points to guide us in
our discussion:
• What do we mean by morality?
• What is conscience?
• How is the judgement of conscience formed?
• What part do our emotions play in forming the judgement of
conscience?
• Must we always follow the judgement of conscience?
• May we act with a doubtful conscience?
• How can doubts of conscience be solved?
 MEANING OF MORALITY
• Morality is the quality or value human acts have by which we call them
right or wrong, good or evil.
• The term “moral” is also used at times as a general term covering both
good and bad qualities or values in the same way that morality is used.
• The terms moral and immoral mark the extremes of good and bad
within morality, in the field of morals when moral is used as the
opposite of immoral.
• The term moral means “morally good” only when it is clearly opposed to
immoral, which means “morally bad.”
• When moral and immoral are used in opposition to one another to
describe human acts, each indicates that the act has a definite moral
quality or value.
• An act is moral when it has the quality or value of being
good; an act is immoral when it has the quality or value of
being bad
• .The field of morals, that is morality, is possible because of
the kind of beings are namely, beings who have the power to
do both good and evil.
• There is this negativity or limitedness about our being, we as
personal beings can fail to live always in accord with our
potentialities and our vision of the good.
• We are imperfect and weak at times even when we would
like to be more perfect and strong. Because of our
limitedness as persons, we have the possibility of doing evil
rather than good.
 Morality (objective and Subjective)
• In judging the morality of a human act, we take into
consideration the subjective peculiarities of the agent.
(Considered in this way, morality is subjective, the goodness or badness being
determined by whether the act agrees or disagrees with the agent’s own
judgement of conscience.)
• Then we ask not whether this individual is (excused from responsibility for
the act because of strong emotion, ignorance, or any other modifier of
responsibility, but whether, if any normal person with full command of his or her
own powers deliberately willed that kind of act, the result would be a morally
good act.)
• We would be judging the objective nature of the act done, not the
subjective state of the doer. Morality considered in this way is
objective morality.
If we ask, “is murder wrong?” “Is truthfulness
right?”

(we are asking about objective morality)

If we ask
“did this man fully realize what he was doing when he
killed that child?” “Did this woman intend to tell the
truth when she blurted out that remark?

(we are asking about subjective morality.)

Thus, Morality in its completeness includes both its

subjective and its objective aspects
• The study of ethics generally stresses objective morality.
• But each person has a life to live, must personally
account for his or her deeds as he or she saw them, and
will be judged morally good or bad in terms of the
sincerity in following his or her conscience even if his or
her moral judgements turn out to have been objectively
incorrect.
• In this sense, subjective morality is paramount for each
person; but at the same time, each of us tries to conform
his or her judgement of conscience to what is objective
morality is paramount.
Summary of Morality
• Morality refers to be rightness or wrongness of human
acts.
• We speak of objective or subjective morality
accordingly as it overlooks the particular
characteristics of the doer of the act and his or her
circumstances or else take them into consideration.
• The norm of subjective morality is the evaluative
judgement of conscience.
 MEANING OF CONSCIENCE
• conscience is often thought of as an “inner voice,” sometimes as
the “voice of God.
• conscience is not a special power distinct from our intellect.
• Conscience is not a special faculty but a practical function of the
intellect, under the impulse of the desire to do the right and good,
the judges the concrete act of an individual person as morally good
or evil.
• Conscience is only the intellect itself exercising a special function,
the function of judging the rightness or wrongness, the moral
value, of our own individual acts according to the set of moral
values and principles the person holds with conviction.
 MEANING OF CONSCIENCE
• Conscience is a function of intellect concerned with actions that can be good
or bad. It does not deal with theoretical questions of right and wrong in
general, such as:
“Why is lying wrong?” “Why must justice be done?”
• Conscience is the same practical intelligence we use to judge what to do or
avoid in other affairs of life:
““What ought I do to do here and now in this concrete situation?” “If I
do this act I am thinking of, will I be lying, will I be unjust?”
“how shall I run my business, invest my money, protect my health, design my
house, plant my farm, raise my family?”
“Thus, Conscience, in this traditional sense, can
then be defined as the intellect’s practical
judgement about an individual act as good and to
be done, or as evil and to be avoided.”
The term conscience can actually be applied to any
of the three distinct aspects of this judgement
process:
• The intellect as a person’s ability, under the influence
of a desire to do the right and the good, to form
judgements about the right and wrong of individual
acts
• The process of reasoning that we go through, under
the influence of that desire, to reach such a
judgement
• The conclusion of this reasoning process, which is
called the evaluative judgement of conscience
 We arrive at the judgement of conscience by a
kind of “shortcut” that seems to conceal the
deductive process. For example:
• “Should I say this? No, that would be a lie.”
• “Must I correct this mistake? Yes, it may hurt someone.”
• “May I keep this? Of course, no one else owns it”

(If we were to formulate explicitly each of the deductions in

these examples, this is what we would have:
Lies are immoral. This explanation of my conduct is a lie.
This explanation of my conduct is immoral.)
EMOTION AND CONSCIENCE
• If emotion was not at all involved, there would be no judgement of
conscience in the first place.
• We would have been aware of no values either to form convictions.
• The evaluational elements that we use in living my life have their
beginnings in our emotions, the affective side of my being.
• It is a Personal value orientation, my set of moral values and principles
that I hold with conviction, the values and principles I have found for
myself and tested out with my own emotions and then integrated into
my own moral approach to life.
• Conscience is not developed by critical thought alone. Emotion also
enters into its development along with imagination, for conscience is not
merely our power to judge the past in moral terms but also our ability to
see alternatives in moral situations that have implications for the future.
 EMOTION AND CONSCIENCE
• All moral knowledge has an emotional dimension, and our
emotions draw the values we experience into the interior of
our personality.
• These values enter into our intellectual framework for use in
making our evaluative judgements of conscience.*
• The person who is morally good is one who loves the good
and is sensitive to its presence.
• Another way we can see how much emotion is involved in
conscience is to realize that our most profound interpersonal
relationships are precisely relationships in which one moral
consciousness meets another at the level and in the intimacy
of conscience.
• Since conscience is the total moral personality, conscience is
also more than intellect and includes emotion, willing,
imagination, and natural inclination as well.
• Conscience is not a matter of me against them; it is an affair
of me distinct from them but together with them. (What we
must not do is allow ourselves to be engulfed and dominated
by others.)
• If I am to follow my own conscience; then I must also
question my own conscience and test it. I can do this only
with the help of others, being emotionally sincere and
intellectually honest with them.
• we live our lives in dialogue with others, and so the moral
self that I am mirrors my social nature.
 KINDS OF CONSCIENCE
For the purpose of ethics, conscience as a guide to future
actions is more important. Its acts are chiefly four:
1. commanding or forbidding:,
2. when the act must either be done or avoided;
3. persuading or permitting:,
4. when there is a question of the better or worse course of
actions without a strict obligation.
KINDS OF CONSCIENCE
1. A correct conscience judges as good what is
really good, and as evil what is really evil. The
term correct to the objective truth of the person’s
judgement; the person’s judgement of conscience
represents the real state of things.
- subjective and objective morality
correspond.
2. An erroneous conscience judges as good what
is really evil, or as evil what is really good.
-All error involves ignorance.
KINDS OF CONSCIENCE
A person’s judgement of conscience may also be
certain or doubtful.
3. We are certain when we judge without fear
that the opposite may be true in fact.
- is the subjective assurance of the goodness
or evilness of the act.
4. We are doubtful when we either hesitate to
make any judgement at all or make a judgement
but with misgivings that the opposite may be true.
KINDS OF CONSCIENCE
5. The fact that people differ in their levels of sensitivity to
moral values gives habitual characteristics to their
judgements of conscience strict or lax.
-that which is inclined to follow the easy way.
6. A perplexed person is one who cannot make up
his or her mind and remains in a state of indecisive
anguish, especially if he or she thinks that whatever
alternative he or she chooses will be wrong.
KINDS OF CONSCIENCE
7. A scrupulous person torments himself or herself
by rehearsing over and over again doubts that were
once settled.
-finding new sources of guilt in old deeds that
were best forgotten, striving for a kind of certainty
about one’s moral state that one simply cannot be a
serious form of self-torture
FOLLOWING THE JUDGEMENT OF CONSCIENCE
There are two chief rules, but each of them involves
a problem. The two rules are:

1. Always follow a certain conscience

2. Never act with a doubtful conscience
Always Follow a Certain Conscience

• The word certain refers to the subjective state of

the person judging namely, how firmly assent to
the judgement has been given, how thoroughly
fear of the opposite has been excluded.
What degree of certainty is required to call
our judgement certain?
• Traditionally it has been said that prudential
certainty is sufficient.
• This kind of certainty excludes all prudent fear
that the opposite may be true, but it does not
require us to rule out imprudent fears based on
bare possibilities.
• that the person would feel safe in practice even
though there is theoretically a chance of being
wrong.
“A prudent person, having investigated the case,
can then say with prudential certainty that this
business venture is safe, that this person is guilty
of a crime, that this employee is honest. This
degree of certainty, since it excludes all
reasonable fear of error, is much stronger than
high probability, which does not exclude such
reasonable fear.”
What happens when I have an erroneous
conscience, that is, when I make a mistaken or
incorrect moral judgement?
• If I know my judgement may be wrong and I am
able to correct the possible error, then I have an
obligation to do so before acting. .
 “If I were not obliged to follow my conscience when
my judgement is certain even though mistaken but not
known to be mistaken, then I would be forced to the
absurd conclusion that I am not obliged to follow my
judgement of conscience when it is certain and
correct”
Summary
“Always obey a certain conscience even when it is unknowingly
or unavoidably mistaken. A certain and correct conscience is
the clear and proper judgement about one’s moral duty or
obligations. Prudential certainty, the exclusion of any prudent
fear of the opposite, is all that can be expected in moral
matters.”
“A certain but erroneous conscience must also be followed
because the agent cannot distinguish it from a correct
conscience and has no other guide; the act is subjectively right
even if objectively wrong.”
Never Act with a Doubtful Conscience
• A person who acts with doubtful conscience is
willing to do an act whether it is wrong or not,
refusing to take the means to avoid doing moral evil.
• This type of person acts without care for the
rightness or wrongness of acts.
• This person has reason to believe that the intended
act may actually be wrong and yet is willing to go
ahead and do it anyway.
What should a person with
a doubtful conscience do?
• The person’s first obligation is to try to solve the
doubt, to find out the true nature of the act. If I
am a person with a doubtful conscience, I must
reason over the matter more carefully to see
whether I can arrive at certainty.
• investigate the facts of the problem
What if a prudentially certain conclusion
cannot be reached by doing all of this?

If one should never act with a doubtful

conscience, what can one do who is still
in doubt?
• no one need ever remain in doubt about what
he or she must do.
• To see this, we must distinguish between:
-direct method of inquiry and investigation, in
which has just been described, and the indirect
method of forming our conscience by the use of
reflex principles.
• If the direct method yields no results, the
indirect method of forming one’s conscience may
be used.
• This consist in solving not be theoretical doubt
(what is the actual truth?), for that is what
cannot be solved if the direct method fails, but
in solving the practical doubt alone (how should
a doubting person act in this case?).
FORMING ONE’S CONSCIENCE
The doubting person who has exhausted the direct
method described above without obtaining the
knowledge he or she needs has a double doubt:

• What is the actual truth about the matter in hand?

• What is one obliged to do in such a situation?
 FORMING ONE’S CONSCIENCE

• What is the actual truth about the matter in hand?( theoretical

doubt)-cannot be answered if the direct method was used and failed to yield
results
• What is one obliged to do in such a situation? (question is a
practical doubt)- can be answered in every instance by use of the indirect
method
This process of solving a practical doubt without
touching the theoretical doubt is called the
indirect method or forming one’s conscience.
• The process of forming one’s conscience is
accomplished by the use of reflex principles, (we use
them while reflecting on the state of doubt and
ignorance)
• We have only two possible courses of action open to
us: “play it safe” or “take the easier way.”
Since these two courses of action are almost
always opposite courses, may we take
whichever we please in any case?
 No. Forming one’s conscience by use of the
indirect method consists in determining when to
“play it safe” and when to “take the easier way.”
The practical doubt can always be solved by using one
of two reflex principles;
1. The morally safer course is preferable.
• morally safer course is meant the course of action that more surely
preserves moral goodness and more clearly avoids moral wrong doing.
• We have an obligation to follow the morally safer course whenever
we have a known moral obligation to fulfil or an end (goal) that we
ought to achieve to the best of our power.
• This course is always allowable but sometimes is burdensome. It
must be used if the case concerns not the existence or application of an
obligation but the effectiveness of the means used to fulfil a certain
moral obligation or attain an end that must certainly be attained.
• The morally safer course (our first reflex principle), though always
allowable, is often costly and inconvenient, sometimes physically more
dangerous and even heroic.
2. A doubtful obligation does not bind.
• This second principle is applicable only when I doubt whether I
am bound by a moral obligation.
• This principle may be used only when there is a question of the
obligation itself, when either the existence or application of an
obligation is genuinely in doubt.
The principle that a doubtful obligation does not bind may be used in
both of the following situations:
I doubt whether such an obligation exists or is genuine.
I doubt about how to interpret the obligation, that is, I doubt
whether the existing obligation binds me here and now.
(Is there any known moral obligation that is applicable to my case and
that certainly forbids my doing what I am thinking of doing? )
2. A doubtful obligation does not bind.
• If the direct method fails to prove any moral obligation,
then I am justified in going ahead and doing these things on
the principle that a doubtful obligation does not bind.
• this principle is that an obligation must be certain in order to
have binding force, and a doubtful obligation is not
sufficiently certain to bind the person about to act here and
now.
• If the person is not doubtful, then this second reflex principle
does not apply.
• If the obligation is certain, I must follow the morally safer
course and not use doubtful means if certainly effective ones
are available.