CONSCIENCE

Insoluble problems can arise if one does not get clear what conscience is. In our culture there is a tendency, first, to value authenticity (doing what I think or feel, rather than being directed to an extrinsic end by another), then to identify following one’s conscience with achieving authenticity, and, finally, to conclude that one should follow one’s own conscience rather than follow absolute rules or outside authority. This view is quite confused. To get clear what conscience is, its positive rights – and its limitations – is the goal of this entry.

Conscience can be spoken of as an ability, an act, or as the content of an act. Used to refer to an act, “conscience” may refer to one’s awareness of general moral truth or to one’s awareness of the rightness or wrongness of a concrete, particular act.
In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul says: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law unto themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience (synedeisis) also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them” (2:14-15). Here conscience is used to refer to one’s awareness of the principles of God’s natural law, the basic truths of morality.

Speaking of conscience as an awareness of the moral good or evil of a particular act, in a definition echoing St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (1778). Conscience, then, is what one thinks about what is morally right or wrong, one’s judgment about a moral matter. Thus, it may be true or false.

Conscience sometimes is confused with what some psychological systems call superego. Whereas conscience is an intellectual act, a judgment that an act is right or wrong, “superego” refers to feelings one has as a result of one’s psychological development. As children we internalize the approval of certain acts and the disapproval of other acts by authority figures, usually our parents. Our feelings corresponding to this approval or disapproval are perceived as being over (super) our conscious desires (ego) and as placing a constraint on them. Thus, the superego is often the source of guilt feelings that tend to limit what one feels comfortable doing. But such feelings clearly do not necessarily correspond to objective moral truth.

One may continue to feel guilty about something one knows is morally right or, for various reasons, one may lack feelings of guilt about doing something known to be morally bad. An example illustrating the difference between conscience and superego is the feeling of guilt experienced by many Germans who resisted the Nazis. They felt guilty because they were violating their superegos, but they knew (in their conscience) that what they were doing was right.
Psychologists are quite correct, nevertheless, in saying that conscience develops. One can pick out various stages. A first stage is the child’s awareness of the need to follow rules of authority instead of his own unruly impulses. Breaking the rules of authority – usually the authority of his parents – creates conflict in the child’s feelings; he experiences disapproval, aloneness, or insecurity, and feelings of guilt. This is the level of superego. On a second level, usually during adolescence, the child is aware of the need to limit acting on impulse in order to align his actions with the demands of the group. Since the child is a member of several groups, there will be various and sometimes conflicting rules. This can be called the level of social convention, for on this level the child thinks of good and evil primarily in terms of social cohesiveness and fairness and their opposites. A third level of development of conscience involves the young person’s awareness of real human goods and true moral principles.

These stages are of course only approximations of how people often mature. Moreover, it is clear that not all do mature. In particular, to the extent a person gives in to his unruly desires in sinful acts, and thus identifies himself with those desires, he is likely to view moral truths as arbitrary, extrinsic rules rather than as truths directing his actions to his own true fulfillment. Also, all of us may revert back to earlier levels in the development of conscience from time to time. This is to say we may be tempted at times to view moral truths as mere rules imposed by an extrinsic authority (first level) or by a group (second level).

Although psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg distinguish levels of conscience much as is done here, they presuppose quite different notions of what a mature conscience should be, and they frequently fail to distinguish the ability to verbalize one’s awareness of a type of right and wrong from one’s ability to have the awareness to begin with.
Erroneous Conscience • Given that conscience is a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts, it is easy to see that it can be mistaken. For instance, if someone thinks euthanasia is morally right, then his judgment of conscience concerning the rightness or wrongness of this act of euthanasia here and now will be mistaken. It matters very much, however, how one came to have a mistaken conscience. One might or might not be at fault. Clearly, if an eight-year-old thinks stealing is morally right because he was taught that by his parents, his judgments of conscience regarding acts of stealing will be mistaken, but he is not at fault for that mistake. He has an inculpably erroneous conscience. If someone does something that is really morally wrong (or “objectively morally wrong”), but does so acting on an inculpably erroneous conscience, he does not incur moral guilt for that act.

On the other hand, suppose a professional killer thinks it is perfectly right, morally speaking, to kill people for money – “It’s only business,” he claims. He is obviously mistaken, that is, he has an erroneous conscience. But suppose also he thinks as he does because he has killed so many people in the past that he has grown callous to the taking of human life – he has, as it were, deadened his conscience. He has an erroneous conscience, to be sure, but he is at fault for his error. When he kills people with an undisturbed conscience, he is not without guilt. One is morally responsible for the evil deeds one does as a result of having a vincibly erroneous conscience.

Of course there are other ways of being morally responsible for an error of conscience. I might, for instance, hold that something is right or wrong largely through rationalization. Suppose I think contraception is right, but I have listened only to people who agree with me, read only theologians who will ease my conscience about what I am already doing, and sought out only those counselors who would give me the advice I want to hear. I cannot then say that my error is inculpable.

Vatican Council II briefly alludes to the distinction between inculpable ignorance and culpable error: “Yet it often happens that conscience goes astray through ignorance which it is unable to avoid, without thereby losing its dignity. This cannot be said of the man who takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 16). This suggests how serious is our duty to strive to inform our conscience, that is, to learn what is moral truth.

It is sometimes said or implied that Vatican II endorsed freedom of conscience and that one therefore has a right to set aside Church teaching regarding particular moral norms. Such an idea is based on a confusion.
Nowhere does Vatican II speak of “freedom of conscience.” The Council teaches that people have a moral right to follow their judgments of conscience in civil society as long as public order is not violated: This is a right in relation to the civil society. The Council’s affirmation is another way of saying that the civil society has a duty not to restrict the following of conscience by citizens, unless that is necessary to preserve public order. This says nothing about how to form conscience, nor does it say or imply that one need not form one’s conscience by objective moral truth and Church teaching. The Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, says: “So while the religious freedom which men demand in fulfilling their obligation to worship God has to do with freedom from coercion in civil society, it leaves intact the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ” (1).

Conscience and Church Teaching • One often hears an argument such as the following: “I should follow my conscience – that much everyone admits. But that means that if my conscience conflicts with what the Church teaches or with what the leaders of the Church teach, then I should certainly follow conscience rather than the Church. In fact, this is not even different from what the Church herself now admits. For the Church in Vatican II insisted on the dignity of individual conscience.”

Vatican II’s teaching is illustrated in the following passage: “However, in forming their consciences the faithful must pay careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church. For the Catholic Church is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth. It is her duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth which is Christ and, at the same time, to declare and confirm by her authority the principles of the moral order which spring from human nature itself” (Dignitatis Humanae, 14).

So, to invoke the Church’s authority in behalf of an individualistic notion of conscience is quite inaccurate.
Second, the way of posing the issue indicated above is misleading. There is a category-mistake involved in asking, “When there is a conflict, which should I follow, the Church or my conscience?” That treats conscience as if it were a source of moral information, whereas conscience is one’s grasp of moral truth or (at times) one’s erroneous judgment about moral truth. It is as if someone were to ask, “What should I listen to, the music on the radio or my ears?”

This question – “Which should I follow, the Church or my conscience?” – also is misleading in particular instances because it presupposes that I have already determined that the Church is wrong. Conscience, as was explained above, is our best judgment about a moral action, after we have taken into consideration all of the relevant factors. So, literally speaking, if my conscience tells me that I should act contrary to Church teaching, I must already have considered the Church’s teaching and set it aside. But the question should be: Is it reasonable to form my conscience in that way?

To be sure, someone sincerely convinced a particular teaching is mistaken ought not to act upon it while in that state of mind. But since the Church is the Body of Christ, and is guided into all truth by the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 14:26), it is unreasonable to place more reliance on one’s own abilities than on the judgment of the authoritative teachers of the Church, including those judgments that are not proposed infallibly. As Pope John Paul II says, “The authority of the Church, when she teaches on moral questions, in no way undermines the freedom of conscience of Christians. . . . [T]he Magisterium does not bring to the Christian conscience truths which are extraneous to it; rather it brings to light the truths which it ought already to possess” (encyclical The Splendor of Truth, Veritatis Splendor, 64).

Someone who thinks all physicians incompetent should not visit a physician; but to think all physicians incompetent is unreasonable to begin with and harmful as well. The basis of the authority of the leaders of the Church (promised divine assistance) is quite different from the basis of a physician’s authority (his knowledge and skill). Yet, our relationships to both are quite similar. As a competent physician’s judgment is a more reliable guide than my own surmises, so the judgment of the teachers of the Church on faith or morals is the most reliable guide available on matters of faith and morals. Thus the Catechism says: “In recalling the prescriptions of the natural law, the Magisterium of the Church exercises an essential part of its prophetic office of proclaiming to men what they truly are and reminding them of what they should be before God” (2036; cf. CCC 2037).

Important as Church teaching is, it does not do the work of conscience. The Church does not and cannot pronounce directly on every specific question with a moral dimension that arises in the course of daily life. Many such questions about how one’s duties ought positively to be fulfilled can only be answered well by someone whose outlook is imbued with an appreciation of the goods of human persons, who works at being a disciple of Christ, and who has appropriated the Christian outlook into his or her own character and way of thinking.

See: Conscience and the Magisterium; Conscience Formation; Magisterium; Moral Principles, Christian; Natural Law.

Suggested Readings: CCC 1776-1802, 2032-2040. John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, Veritatis Splendor, 54-63. G. Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles, pp. 73-96. G. Grisez and R. Shaw, Fulfillment in Christ, pp. 26-37.

Patrick Lee




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 03:24:19 PM