Conscience (3)

The way I have always thought about conscience is not the way philosophers do and it's not the way Catholic theory about conscience works either. You can see the difference in just one sentence of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Medieval theories of conscience:

Through conscience and its related notion, synderesis, human beings discern what is right and wrong.

That is not a voice that occasionally pipes up and says, Do you really think this is morally right?

My notion of conscience is hiding there though. The Encyclopedia article goes on to say that there were two competing notions of conscience and that ...

Both seem to derive from Philip the Chancellor's treatise on conscience. In his treatise, Philip chiefly discusses synderesis, and at times he describes it as an unerring intellectual dispositional potentiality that provides general truths to conscience for specific application. At other times, he describes synderesis as the desire for the good, and it is equated with emotional reactions when one follows evil instead of good.

Synderesis—emotional reactions when one follows evil instead of good—that's something like, but not exactly like, what I mean by conscience.