Friday, March 12, 2010

Virtue: Uncompromising conscience?

Last time I was on about whether conscience is a kind of sensibility or if it something that makes judgments of right or wrong.

Linda Hogan wants it to be both. I suspect she is in good company here; her partners in this equivocal notion including Thomas Aquinas. I'm not so sure this view of hers spells out in any helpful or convincing way though.

Some more text:
The work of conscience doesn't finish when the person has identified the right and good course of action. Conscience also involves the desire to do the good and right thing. It impels us to act on the basis of our own judgment. (Confronting the Truth pp 10-11)
The question that pops up for me after reading that is "What is left for me to do?" Because surely I am responsible for my moral decisions. All of me makes them not some part called the conscience.

This sort of conscience threatens to become bigger than me.

Hogan seems fond of the point she makes in the bit cited above because she repeats it a number of times here. The last iteration adds a new element in the tail:
Conscience itself is comprised of both the decision-making aspect (involving reason and emotion) and the obligation to carry through such decisions. This explains why decisions of conscience are experienced as uncompromising. (ibid Page 11)
Certainly it feels that way sometimes. Other times, it doesn't. Hogan seems to have a paradigmatic case of conscience in mind here. What exactly it is I will leave aside for now.

But let me give an example of way that conscience works that doesn't feel quite so insistent.

My father calls me and asks me to help him with something next Saturday morning. I've already committed to do something else with a friend next Saturday so I offer to come over Sunday instead. He says it has to be Saturday and I say, I wish I could help but I cannot.

So I hang up the phone and I feel my conscience nagging at me. I sit down to reconsider. It's not impossible for me to break my promise to my friend but it is a promise and I feel I owe him.  I have also been a good and dependable son over the years and I know that my father has other options. I think this through a number of times trying to make sure I'm being honest with myself and decide in the end that I made the right decision the first time.

As I walk away, my conscience is clear. It asked me to reconsider and I did reconsider. The reconsideration, as sometimes happens, yielded the same result as the initial consideration.

I don't know about others, but my conscience works like that all the time. It asks me to rethink and I do rethink. Sometimes it has to ask me more than once and, alas, sometimes I have ignored my conscience. Sometimes I reverse my original choice after rethinking. Other times I reach a sort of modification of my original choice.  And yet other times I decide I was right in the first place.

But my conscience—although it sometimes screams at me to pay attention—never makes moral judgments. I make moral judgments, both the good ones and the bad ones. Conscience is, as it were, part of my advisory board but the buck stops with me.

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