What is conscience?

Is conscience the voice of God, the voice of reason, or the voice of society internalised? AQA contrasts religious/rationalist accounts with psychological ones.

• Aquinas — conscience is reason making moral judgements.
• Newman & Butler — conscience is God-given, even the voice of God.
• Freud & Fromm — conscience is a psychological product of upbringing.

Aquinas: synderesis and conscientia

For Aquinas, conscience is not a special faculty but reason rightly used in moral matters. He distinguishes:

• Synderesis — the innate disposition to do good and avoid evil, the first principle directing us toward real goods.
• Conscientia — the act of applying that knowledge to a particular situation, judging this act right or wrong.

Because it is reasoning, conscience can err when we reason from faulty information — Aquinas speaks of following an erring conscience in good faith (invincible ignorance) versus culpable error.

Synderesis or conscientia?

Conscience as God-given

• Cardinal Newman: conscience is the voice of God within — "the aboriginal Vicar of Christ" — an intuitive, authoritative sense of duty that points beyond ourselves to a divine lawgiver.
• Joseph Butler: conscience is the supreme authority in human nature, given by God to adjudicate between self-love and benevolence; to follow it is to follow our true nature.

These are realist/religious accounts: conscience genuinely tracks a moral (and divine) order.

Freud: conscience as super-ego

Sigmund Freud gives a psychological account. The mind has three parts — the id (desires), the ego (reality), and the super-ego. The super-ego is the internalised voice of parents and society, formed in childhood; conscience is the guilt it produces when we transgress.

On this view conscience is not the voice of God or of pure reason, but a product of authority and upbringing — and can be harsh or irrational.

Whose super-ego?

Fromm: authoritarian vs humanistic conscience

Erich Fromm distinguishes two kinds of conscience:

• Authoritarian conscience — the internalised voice of an external authority (parents, state, religion); we obey out of fear and seek its approval.
• Humanistic conscience — our own inner voice of integrity, judging how well we are living up to our full human potential.

Fromm saw the authoritarian conscience as potentially dangerous (blind obedience), and urged development of the humanistic conscience.

Religious or psychological?

Weighing the accounts

• If conscience is reason (Aquinas), why do sincere people's consciences disagree?
• If it is the voice of God (Newman), how do we explain guilt over trivial or culturally-specific things?
• If it is the super-ego (Freud), is conscience just conditioning — and does that dissolve moral authority?
• Fromm's humanistic conscience keeps autonomy but may lack an objective standard.

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The big ideas to hold together

You can now compare religious/rational and psychological accounts of conscience and evaluate them. Press Finish to see your score.