2. The classical Christian account of conscience

It has sometimes been said that Christianity, particularly in its Protestant forms, is above all the religion of conscience. But it would be wrong to conclude from this claim that the concept of conscience began with Christianity or is limited in its religious use to Christianity. There is, for instance, something very like a proto-concept of conscience in the Old Testament. In the Book of Samuel, we read that, when David was aware that he had committed some moral wrong, ‘his heart smote him’, where the word translated into English as ‘heart’ is the Hebrew word lev [transliterated often as ‘leb’] which can also mean, more generally, the viscera.Footnote ² And in one of the psalms (Psalm 16.7), we read that ‘the kidneys chastise a man’ when he does wrong. Here the Hebrew word is kelayoth which means literally ‘kidneys’ but can also refer to other inner organs.Footnote ³ More generally, in the Old Testament, there is the suggestion that when a person does wrong, the wrongdoer, at least if morally engaged, will then suffer what might be termed ‘a backlash from his or her own viscera’ or, put more demotically, a sort of ‘self-disgust manifested in his own innards’.

Arguably the very first mention of anything like a concept of conscience in western philosophy was by Socrates when, at his trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens, he is reported by Plato as defending his actions by saying:

Then Socrates goes on to point out that, when he engaged the youth of Athens in dialectic, his daimon was silent, therefore he cannot have been doing any wrong. In modern terms he might have said simply, ‘I cannot have been doing wrong, knowingly and willingly, because my conscience was clear’, which, in essence, is the structure of any argument from the authority of conscience. It should be pointed out, however, that the Socratic conscience is significantly different from the Old Testament one, and already well on the way to becoming the classical Christian conscience. For the Socratic conscience is a pre-factum warning not a post-factum visceral reaction. In being a warning, it is associated with a voice and so with a message. Moreover in being a prophetic voice, it is invested with special divine or divinely inspired authority.

It will come as no surprise, then, that Augustine, the Christian Bishop of Hippo (354–430 AD), a ‘Father of the Church’, a confirmed Platonist, and a canonised saint, had a view of conscience that might be described as Socratic but with God's divine illumination substituted for the prophetic voice or daimon of Socrates. In his Enarrationes in Psalmos (‘Commentaries on the Psalms’) and Enchiridion (‘Handbook of Faith’ or ‘Catechism’) Augustine writes of the source of knowledge of the moral law or conscience as ‘my divine illumination [dominus illuminatio mea]’ and also as ‘an interior law [lex intima] written in the heart iself [in ipso tuo corde conscripta]’.Footnote ⁵

This view differs from the later view of Thomas Aquinas (c.1224–1274), in that, for Aquinas, conscience is the whole internal conscious process by which first principles of moral right and wrong, learnt intuitively by synderesis, are applied to some action now contemplated in order to produce a moral verdict on that action. Thus, while synderesis, as a fundamental intuitive capacity of the soul given us by God, could be said to be morally infallible, the deductive processes of conscience, whereby these first principles are syllogistically applied to some practical situation, could go wrong. Anyone, regrettably, can make mistakes in logic or errors of judgment.Footnote ⁶

However, as I mentioned above, the concept of conscience in Christian theology was most developed in post-Reformation Protestant theology. Thus the 16^th cent. French Reformer, John Calvin (1509–1564), wrote in his Christianae Religionis Institutio (‘The Establishment of the Christian Religion’) that

In some respects this account of conscience is a mixture of the Old Testament view of conscience as a sort of backlash and Augustine's view of conscience as a form of ‘divine illumination’ within us. Arguably it is closer to the Old Testament account in that, for Calvin, conscience is clearly a post-factum visitation from ‘that additional witness’, the Holy Spirit within us, that points out that we have sinned and hounds us until we promise to reform. Calvin's conscience is a sort of internal ‘hound of heaven’, and an aggressive Irish wolfhound at that, rather than a gentle Bassett hound.

It could be said that the 19^th cent. English divine, John Henry Newman's account of conscience is a whole-hearted return to Augustine's pre-factum ‘divine illumination’ view. In his Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman wrote of conscience as ‘that inward light, given as it is by God…[which] was intended to set up within us a standard of right and truth’.Footnote ⁸ Moreover this source of moral authority was superior to reason and often opposed to it, so it will also come as no surprise that Newman once remarked that the common room of his own Oxford College, Oriel, ‘stank of logic’.

Clearly one could not say that there is any consensus in Christian theology about how to characterise conscience. Nevertheless I think that it is both possible and useful to draw out something like a general outline of the classical Christian account of conscience. I suggest that it goes something like this:

This definition in turn can be subjected to some analysis in the following way.

1. (a) First this classical Christian concept of conscience draws upon a sub-concept of divine authority or magisterium dei. This magisterium is conceived in two ways, first, authority meaning ‘expertise’ (in the sense, for example, that an authority on ancient Greek coins has specialist expertise or knowledge). Clearly, if the ‘light shed by conscience’ is indeed a ‘divine illumination’ or ‘the light of the Holy Spirit’, then that is all the expertise in moral matters one could ask for.

2. (b) And, second, in this context authority means ‘having the right to command and expect to be obeyed’ (in the sense, for example, that a police officer has the authority to stop you speeding when you are driving along the M50). Likewise if it is God that is commanding us not to commit some sin and to reform, then no one has greater right to issue commands about such matters and expect to be obeyed without murmur than God himself, or herself.

3. (c) Third, this definition makes it clear that the mechanism of conscience is a voice that delivers warnings in a language that we can understand. Another way of putting this is to say that it is clearly a cognitive account of conscience. Conscience, in that foro interno of consciousness, delivers a message about right and wrong conduct. It speaks only to creatures who have a language and have reached ‘the age of reason’, and so are capable of having a sense of right and wrong, and making judgments in accordance with that sense.

Of course any account of conscience that invokes divine authority is open to the demythologising moves of secular culture, whether these moves originate from philosophy or psychology or anywhere else. If a person does not believe in God, yet still believes in the existence of a conscience, then such a person needs to provide a very different account of the magisterium of conscience (in its two distinct senses) as well as of the voice of conscience. Unfortunately, in doing so, the best known example of such secular demythologising accounts, Freud's, seems to involve deracinating conscience and so to be ultimately unconvincing.

3. The Freudian account of conscience

Before looking at some of the details of how Freud demythologised and de-Christianised the concept of conscience, let us, briefly, look first at a pre-Freudian account that in some respects can be said to prefigure Freud.

I refer to two very provocative and rather beautiful passages in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. In chapter 3 of that text he wrote:

Being a true empiricist, Locke is pointing out that the moral knowledge provided by our conscience, such as it is, must come to us in the same way as we gain knowledge of anything else, namely from our experience of our own environment. That being so, such moral knowledge is ordinary secular knowledge, like our knowledge of the weather. Thus it can have no claim to be divine in origin and, more importantly, no claim to be particularly reliable, much less infallible. After all, while we might live in the same city or even in the same family, confusingly our several consciences may deliver quite different moral judgments about the same moral dilemma. This, Locke implies, is further evidence that the source of such judgments of conscience could not be divine. God would not be contradictory in His moral messages to us.

In a later section in the same chapter, he gives us his deliberately provocative gloss on this observation that humans derive the contents of their conscience not from God but from ‘their education, company, and customs of their country’:

That is to say, what we so readily think of now as ‘unquestionable, self-evident and innate [moral] truths’ delivered by conscience, are really nothing more than the superstitions we learnt on our grandmother's knee or in the nursery.

Let us now turn to Freud himself. In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) gave a new psychoanalytic and developmental slant to this Lockean demythologising, secular account of conscience. He wrote there:

The Freudian view of conscience is Locke's empiricism with some Freudian baggage added. Just as Locke tells us that the moral contents of conscience are derived from our education, companions and cultural customs, so Freud tells us that the primary situation, and the one that really forms our conscience, is a complex childhood scenario. A newborn child, in the Freudian world, is an amoral seeker after pleasure. Suddenly the child's hedonistic ego-directed but id-driven world is thrown up against the prohibitions of its parents. ‘Don't throw your cornflakes on the kitchen floor, Mary!’ or ‘Stop bashing the cat with your toy train, Johnny!’ If Mary or Johnny don't obey these prohibitions, then they are punished, according to Freud, by the parents giving ‘signs to the child of [the] loss of [their, the parents’] love'. Mummy or Daddy frown, utter condemnatory words and refuse to give Mary or Johnny an ice-cream or a cuddle. In a similar manner, obedience is rewarded by the ‘offering of proofs of love’, by words of praise, and by kisses and cuddles.

What we call conscience is, for Freud, the later, secondary stage whereby the child internalizes the parental prohibitions, together with the accompanying anxiety generated by the possibility of the loss of love if the prohibitions are disobeyed. By this process of internalizing, a child adds a third element to its topology of id (or the unconscious and irrational instincts, drives and passions) and ego (the conscious personal decision-making agency). This third element is this internalizing of the parental prohibitions and the generation thereby of a disposition to exhibit a set of accompanying emotions when these prohibitions are ignored or flouted. This third element is what Freud calls the super-ego (and occupies that Freudian limbo, the pre-conscious). The emergence and functioning of the super-ego is, he tells us, what we think of as having a conscience. Freud, of course, allows that our conscience cum super-ego can be influenced by others besides our parents, by, for example, later ‘father figures’ or ‘authority figures’. However, for Freud, as it is for Locke, it is above all our childhood environment and experiences, especially our parents, their prohibitions and the enforcement of them, that produces the foundational contents of conscience. For Freud describes this internalizing process as one of ‘identification with the parental agency’ and ‘linked with the Oedipus complex’.Footnote ¹² Thus overstrict parents will make us forever guilt-ridden and inhibited. Indeed Freud went on to decribe the super-ego or conscience as ‘cruel’ because it so often ‘becomes over-severe, abuses the poor ego, humiliates and ill-treats it, [and] threatens it with the direst punishments…’Footnote ¹³ But the opposite can also occur. Absent or morally lax parents will leave us uninhibited and self-indulgent, if not downright criminal.

Like the classical Christian account, Freud has produced an authoritarian view of conscience. It is interesting to note also that, for Freud, conscience deals mainly, and perhaps only, in prohibitions. Like the God of the Old Testament, it threatens punishments if its prohibitions are denied. It is negative in tone, a nay-sayer, a sort of moral kill-joy, and so a source of intermittent anxiety, stress and remorse. As the comic writer Henry Mencken put it, ‘conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends’.

To sum up, the Freudian account of conscience is as follows:

It is no accident that the bulk of the Freudian account of conscience is generated merely by substituting the role of the parents, in particular the role of the father, for the role of God in the classical Christian account. In so doing, of course, conscience loses the transcendental moral authority that emanates from God. For now conscience has only the questionable and fallible moral authority of one's parents. Freud went even further along this substitution path by suggesting that our very belief in God is generated by our need to have a personal, parent-like creator who will protect us when we are confronted by the unknown dangers of the cosmos. He wrote:

So it will come as no surprise that, if we now analyse this Freudian account of conscience in terms of the same three categories we employed, when discussing the classical Christian account of conscience, then a quite emasculated account of conscience inevitably emerges:

1. (a) Regarding our first category, namely the authority of conscience in the sense of conscience having moral expertise, not merely does the Freudian account make it abundantly clear that the dictats of conscience are not of divine origin, it goes out of its way to point out that the source of its moral knowledge is quite ordinary, indeed pedestrian, namely our dear old parents. If our parents included Augustine or Bishop Butler, then we might be OK. But if they include the Boston Strangler or the Yorkshire Ripper, then we're in trouble. The point is that, if our moral knowledge is just that of our parents or substitute-parent figures, then it is going to be as good or bad, or as reliable or unreliable, as they are or were morally speaking. In similar fashion Locke, you may recall, said that the moral knowledge inherent in our conscience was ‘no better…than the superstition of a nurse or the authority of an old woman’. If that were really the case, there would be no reason to give it any special place in moral decision-making. We might just as well canvas the local butcher or bookmaker for their moral views, as recall what our parents or nursery nurse or some other ‘authority figure’ said.

Some years ago I remember reading about a court case in Britain in which a physician was committed for trial accused of murdering, via a euthanasia intervention, a three-day-old child rejected by the parents because of a genetic disability. The case for the defence concluded with defending QC, Mr George Carman, saying, ‘Through me, Dr Arthur wishes to say…[that] he believed then, and believes now, that he acted in accordance with his conscience.’ However, if we substitute the Freudian account of conscience for the word ‘conscience’ in that last sentence, we get ‘Through me, Dr Arthur wishes to say…[that] he…acted in accordance with an internalized set of moral prohibitions, imbibed essentially from his parents’. This wouldn't, I feel, have greatly helped his case.

1. (b) In our analysis of the concept of conscience, in the Freudian context, authority in the secondary sense of ‘having the right to command and expect to be obeyed’, also falls upon the shoulders of the parents. Certainly for Freud, one's parents have a defining role in everything we do, hence the importance in psychoanalytic therapy of harking back to one's childhood. But there is a difference between causally pre-eminent and morally pre-eminent. Whether we like it or not, our parents (or parent-substitutes) are our first moral guides. But that is no reason for thinking that their prohibitions should be our moral guides for the rest of our lives. If nothing else, it seems to indicate a failure to grow up!

2. (c) But one place where the Freudian analysis is very shrewd, is in connection with our third analytic category, the voice of conscience. The Freudian account insists that the ‘voice’ of conscience is not a cognitive one but an affective one. Conscience catches our attention, he tells us, not by whispering moral principles or prohibitions in our inner ear but by triggering a particular set of emotions. The voice of conscience is above all the activation of the so-called ‘moral emotions’ of shame, guilt and remorse. Thus a judge in a court case will often consider a longer sentence for someone who, when found guilty of some crime, does not display any of these moral emotions. But I shall return to this matter of the connection between conscience and the emotions in some detail when discussing my next and last model of conscience.

4. The personal integrity account of conscience

Before setting out into new territory, let me briefly describe the logical geography of where we have been.

1. (1) First, both the classical Christian and Freudian accounts of conscience are externalist accounts. Both posit an external source for the moral dictates of conscience; God in the classical account, and our parents, in particular our fathers, in the Freudian account.

2. (2) Both accounts are also authoritarian. Both of these external sources of moral advice, God and our parents, are depicted as all-powerful moral policemen whom we dare not disobey. In each case the right of conscience to give commands in moral matters and expect to be obeyed, comes from the exalted and commanding position of the external provider of the moral knowledge, God in the Christian account, and parents, especially the father, in the Freudian account.

3. (3) Both accounts also depict conscience as a delivery system of moral advice, warning or condemnation. Both accounts begin with an external source and then go on to describe how we are given access, through consciousness, to the moral advice or warnings or condemnations of that source.

I am going to argue that we have been exploring the wrong territory, going in the wrong direction. I am going to suggest that conscience is not a delivery system for the moral dictats of some external authoritarian source. Rather it is the development internally of a deep commitment to moral principles of an objective and ‘other-regarding’ sort that we ourselves have judiciously generated from many sources over many years. I will suggest that an essential part of moral development, of forming a conscience, will involve deliberately distancing ourselves from the authority of external sources as our moral guide, and developing an objective moral point of view of our own and committing ourselves to act on it. Thus I am going to put forward an internalist and non-authoritarian, though objective, account of conscience.

I am going to begin on this task by taking what might seem, at least at first sight, a strange path. It is well known that an important way to gain scientific insights into the workings of, say, the kidneys, is to study someone with complete renal failure. In similar fashion I believe that we can gain some insights into the nature of conscience by studying someone who is clinically described as ‘totally lacking a conscience’, namely a psychopath.Footnote ¹⁵ I am going to begin by quoting two psychiatry textbooks of some thirty years ago, because they are so blunt, revealing and non-politically-correct. The first quotation is from A Short Textbook of Psychiatry by W.L. Linford Rees:

The second is from Lecture Notes on Psychological Medicine by T. Ferguson Rodgers and others:

These accounts are in fact supported by the work of the best-known contemporary researcher into psychopathy, the Canadian, Robert D. Hare, who has compiled a list of psychopathic behavioural symptoms, now known and widely accepted as the The Hare Psychopathy Checklist.Footnote ¹⁸ This checklist has been developed from an earlier one generated by Hervey Milton Cleckley who wrote the classic text on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, in 1941.Footnote ¹⁹ Along with other symptoms, the Hare checklist decribes the psychopath as manipulative, glibly and articulately charming, a pathological liar, arrogantly ego-centric, emotionally shallow, notably lacking any empathy, remorse or guilt, lacking responsibility for his actions, impatient and impulsively aggressive, lacking in self-discipline, easily bored, and lacking in commitment to anyone or anything. Not a pretty picture!

Now what might seem to be a long list of quite disparate aspects of psychopathy can, I think, be shown to form an integrated picture of the psychopath. A psychopath is immaturely egocentric, with no empathy with other people, and without commitments to anything other than the immediate satisfaction of his own short-term self-centred desires, so it should come as no surprise that he (and it is more usually a he) will be incapable of showing any sense of personal responsibility in relation to his actions, and so any emotions of anxiety, guilt or remorse whenever he impulsively and aggressively harms others.

Contrariwise, I believe, we can begin to see how a new account of conscience emerges from this picture. Fairly obviously it seems that conscience can only arise if we develop in a way that the psychopath has failed to develop. Thus we will only develop a conscience if we succeed in overcoming the egocentricity of childhood and begin seriously to take other people into consideration when pursuing our goals. And conscience can only arise if and when we are capable of sufficient empathy with others to be distressed when our actions are harmful to them and in consequence show guilt, shame and remorse.

But let me put some detail into this alternative account of conscience by analysing it in terms of the same three categories we applied to the other two accounts of conscience, namely in terms of authority as expertise, authority as the right to command and expect to be obeyed, and finally in terms of its voice for advising or warning or punishing.

1. (a) First, in the context of this internalist and non-authoritarian account of conscience, what if anything could provide conscience with any authority in the sense of having moral expertise?

   To provide an answer to this query, I will need to make another brief detour, this time into the area of developmental psychology. The Harvard psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg, building on the work of the famous Swiss philosopher of education and psychologist, Piaget, developed an account of the stages of a child's moral development.Footnote ²⁰ He claimed that the crucial final stages (stages 5 and 6) involved an adolescent turning away from external authority of any sort as his or her moral guide, and beginning on the task of formulating his own moral values and principles, and then finally moulding them into a consistent moral point of view. This personal moral point of view is the product of the process whereby a person works out for himself or herself, through a dialogue with himself and his parents, authority figures and peers, a set of basic moral principles and values that he is prepared to adopt and act upon. This period is, of course, what we call adolescence.

   I am aware that there are disputes in recent developmental psychology about the precise location of such stages and even whether such a linear account in terms of stages is the right way of decribing a child's normal moral development. For example, Elliot Turiel, has suggested that a child's development of basic moral principles and values, as distinct from merely acknowledging social norms, starts much earlier than Kholberg suggests and is not in opposition to the acknowledgement of social norms, but parallel too it.Footnote ²¹ Also Carol Gilligan has argued that Kholberg's work is too male-oriented and thereby underplays the role of empathy and care in any adequate moral development.Footnote ²² Leaving aside these debates, I think it is fair to say that there is general agreement with the basic claim that a child only arrives at the mature levels of moral devlopment when he or she overcomes childhood egocentrism and seriously worries about the effects on others of one's own actions.

   It seems also to be a basic fact of moral development that moral expertise (or being morally educated) emerges from this process, in much the same way as an adolescent gains social expertise, or the ability to mingle successfully with others in social contexts, namely by experience and thoughtful trial and error. The Lockean-Freudian account pointed out, correctly in my view, that our moral expertise is gained empirically from our environment. But it then interpreted this in a completely passive sense. It related how children and adolescents merely soaked up the exhortations and prohibitions of our parents or grandmother or nursery nurse or whoever. That is to say merely acknowledged familial and social norms. On my account, supported by developmental psychology, the process is essentially active and dynamic. The adolescent certainly soaks up everything, from books, films, teachers, pulpit, parents and peers but then as often as not questions, disagrees, disbelieves, distrusts, opposes, demands justification, rejects, corrects, adjusts to feedback, disobeys, and so on. Hence adolescence is such a turbulent, fractious phase that drives parents and schoolteachers to distraction.

2. (b) Second, in the context of this internalist account, what could play the part of conscience's role of authority in the sense of ‘having the right to command and expect to be obeyed’? How can the pressure to follow one's conscience come from within a person? The answer, I suggest, follows from the previous account of how a conscience is generated by an essentially active and dynamic process, that for the most part operated internally in a person's own conscious life, over a considerable period of time. That active and dynamic process consisted essentially of a young person's examining, and then accepting or rejecting, candidates for being his or her objective action-guiding values and principles that override all others, and then finally of committing himself or herself to act on them ‘in real life’. The pressure to act on them – the pressure for these principles to be obeyed – comes from the very personal and fundamental nature of the commitment to them. It has become part of their personality, part of their integrity as a person.

   Commitments, like vows, promises, covenants or contracts, exert an internal psychological pressure that is similar in force to that of an external authority's command or warning or prohibition. To put it in 17^th cent language, if one has made a solemn moral covenant with oneself about how to behave, when forming one's self as integer or into a ‘whole and coherent person’, then breaking such a covenant is a serious and disturbing matter. A matter of personal integrity.

3. (c) Third, in this new account, what could be the voice of conscience? Again I think the answer follows from what has already been said above about this internalist anti-authoritarian model. Insofar as a person forms a reasonably stable and coherent set of moral principles that are truly ‘other-regarding’, and ‘covenants’ to act upon them, then any failure to act on them will register as a deeply felt personal failure. Thus both the Old Testament prophets and Freud, I suggest, were right in depicting the voice of conscience as essentially an affective one. A person of integrity's deeply and genuinely felt ‘sense of personal moral failure’, especially when his or her actions have adversely affected others, will show itself in the emotions of guilt, shame and remorse. The failure will be registered internally, not only in our conscious thoughts, but also as ‘bodily motions’ or ‘motions in our innards’, for emotions are complex psychosomatic episodes that involve not only our cognitive and evaluative attitudes but also our visceral reactions – our heart-beat, respiration rate, perspiration levels and gastro-intestinal motility, the very things that provide the feelings integral to the emotions. Indeed our emotions are probably the truest manifestation of our deepest values, for the reason that we cannot easily dissemble in regard to them.

Let me sum up this discussion by defining this personal integrity account of conscience:

Sadly we are not, I fear, adapted by nature to cleave to virtue. Freud was probably more or less right in saying that we are born amoral. Nor are we adapted by nature, when generating our overriding action-guiding principles, to produce morally unimpeachable ones. Some of our most wicked acts have been done in the name of conscience. But we, or those of us who are not psychopaths, are adapted by our nature as rational creatures to have the possibility of forming a morally acceptable conscience. The rest is up to us and a social background of wide-ranging, never-ending, uncensored moral debate, both public and private.