Critically assess the claim that conscience is the voice of reason

Aquinas believed that conscience is founded in reason and rational thought processes. He believed that conscience was more a ‘faculty of reflection’ as oppose to a voice or an ‘inner guide’. He believed that through reason and the application of conscience, the most fundamental moral principles can be established (primary precepts) Although there are various different secular and religious ideas as to what conscience is, but I shall be arguing how Aquinas’ view of conscience is ‘more agreeable’ than these other views.

Aquinas splits conscience into two halves: Synderesis, which is an innate knowledge of human knowledge and primary precepts through ‘practical reasoning’ and Conscientia, which is the application of synderesis through the secondary precepts. Therefore, your conscience is the power of moral reasoning, balanced with prudence, which is the virtue of ‘right reasoning’ this is agreeable because it means that each human is morally responsible for their own actions, and that each human has the capacity to ‘develop their morality’ through reasoning, which is a faculty shared by all of us

An alternative religious view would be that of Butlers, who said that conscience is the voice of God in man. Ultimately, Butler is saying that your conscience can act as your moral judge, and it is always right, as it is ‘assigned to us by the author of our nature’ so therefore is infallible. According to Butler, your conscience was the highest authority in this world “had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.” However, I feel this view to be less agreeable than Aquinas’ view. For one, it absolutely removes all moral responsibility from the decision maker. To what extent is it actually your decision if it has already been made for you by another party? What would be the purpose of Christ and his teachings, if all we need do is follow our conscience, and not think for ourselves? People claim that their conscience pulls them towards committing acts of terror, Butlers view of conscience should mean that conscience is 100% reliable, but this clearly isn’t the case, as our conscience can be deceived

Aquinas accounts for this deception of our conscience through ‘vincible’ or ‘invincible’ action. A vincible action is when we have good intentions, and do what we think is good, but if we had thought about the decision and thought rationally and applied reason, we would have come to a different conclusion. This is the way conscience can be deceived with Aquinas. Our conscience can lead us to the ‘wrong conclusions’ if we haven’t effectively applied conscientia. So, although conscience is God-given, it is not 100% infallible and is susceptible to deception. However, it is our misguided reasoning that leads to vincible errors; synderesis still stands true and infallible, regardless of how we apply it.

Newman offers a similar view to Butler, in the sense that he believes that conscience is intuitive, and is the voice of God. It is not reason, it is not a feeling of guilt and it is separate from our will and personal desires. It is a power implanted in us before the ability to reason. He disagrees with Aquinas on the idea on the rule of synderesis. The conscience is not a list of commandments or laws to follow, it is a clear indication as to what is right. A big flaw with this theory is that there appears to be people in this world with no conscience; psychopaths. Are these people forgotten by God? Aquinas’ conscience allows for everyone to develop a conscience, so long as they have the capacity to reason.

These theories rely on conscience being innate, and not learned. However there are some secular theories to suggest that conscience is a learned faculty, which is a result of our upbringing and environment. Freud suggests that the conscience is just the guilt we feel when we defy our superego, by acting contrary to the moral and ethical values that we have internalised from society and our parents. It is part of our

unconscious mind, and therefore separate from reason. A positive of Freud’s theory is that it is based on research and evidence. He believes that conscience is a part of personality development, and because it is independent of religion, every person can be held morally accountable for their actions. However, a lot of Freud’s work has been criticized and discredited. He believes the superego is developed during the phallic stage of childhood which occurs between 3-6 year olds. However, it seems that most children this age cannot express any sexual desires or interests, which raises speculations as to the soundness of Freud’s theory of conscience. Freud’s view of conscience fails to discredit the claim that conscience is the voice of reason. He argues that a ‘religious conscience’ is unhealthy for proper psychological mental development, however looking at examples of religious figures in the past such as Mother Teresa and MLK would suggest otherwise. In Freud’s theory, people are also morally accountable, to an extent. Seeing as your super-ego is a product of your upbringing and society you are raised in, according to Freud’s theory, you might only ever be able to act according to the particular set of moral values you were brought up with. Therefore, a child brought up in a religious extremist environment may never break out of that paradigm of morality. However, a conscience based on reason allows anyone, regardless of upbringing, to develop their own moral code in alignment with whatever authority they find to be most agreeable, principally Christianity and the primary + secondary precepts

Piaget offers another secular theory on the conscience. He believes that the conscience is just ‘moral sense’ and is developed alongside other cognitive attributes. He believed that we are led to develop moral sense through conditioning of praise and punishment. Piaget believes that an 11 year old can have a fully developed conscience, seeing as they seem to certain perceptions such as motive, intention and so forth. This theory is not so totally at odds with Aquinas’ theory, seeing as in both cases, conscience needs to be informed / developed to a certain degree. Piaget’s theory is also based on psychological evidence and observation, which might add to its validity. Piaget’s critics say that he is working with flawed data, however.

However, to say that an 11 year old has a fully developed conscience is a claim that is susceptible to much speculation. If this were true, then 11 year olds are fully morally responsible for their actions, and the implication is that they would have to be tried as adults in a court of law. While they may have formed the ability to contemplate on motive and intention of an act, they lack the necessary experience that is so vitally conducive towards a developed conscience. However, I do not think Piaget’s view directly discredits the idea that your conscience is the voice of reason. But again, the idea that an 11 year old has sufficiently developed reasoning and logic skills to be morally responsible for his actions seems hard to believe.

None of the theories successfully oppose the idea that conscience is the voice of reason. Moreover, there are no criticisms to Aquinas’ theory that are fatal to the idea that conscience is reason. Having said this, it doesn’t seem to explain why one might have a ‘guilty conscience’ or why you might feel so bad after doing a bad action. Feeling and emotion don’t seem to be based on reason at all, so why would they be induced by a ‘flaw in our reasoning’ i.e. doing an action that is opposed to our ethical code. While I agree that the application of reason is vital to ethical decision making, I do not believe that conscience is the ‘voice’ of reason. I find that it is much more a principle/power of reflection, that we can learn lessons from for the future. In a sense, I would agree with Newman in the idea that conscience is but the expression of our moral intuition, when we follow a course of action most agreeable with our particular ethical conduct.