by “Conscience and the Common Good” not only refers to my new book (more on that in a moment), but it also helps capture my own sense of the value that this blog can bring to the already bursting-at-the-seams blawgosphere. Participants in this blog come from a variety of faith traditions (or no faith tradition), but I’m guessing that most (maybe all?) of the participants operate from the premise that bringing our own convictions and values into the conversations about law, religion, and ethics will enrich our understanding and challenge our easy conclusions; making the conversations more particular and personal need not preclude a meaningful shared conception of the common good. My own interest in this blog is motivated, in significant part, by my skepticism toward the notion that the common good is best pursued by a lowest-common-denominator approach to law, politics, or ethics. The wisest response to moral and religious pluralism is not to keep our core convictions — those that comprise our consciences –to ourselves. It is often those core convictions that help us look beyond ourselves.
This gets to the heart of my new book, Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space Between Person and State (Cambridge UP 2010). Too often we equate conscience with individual autonomy, when in reality conscience has long been understood — from the Apostle Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, up to modern thinkers such as Taylor and Appiah — as inescapably relational: our moral convictions have sources, our moral discernment occurs in relationship, and our claims of conscience turn our gaze outward. The cause of conscience cannot reflexively be attached to the individual in every dispute against a group; in many of our current policy debates, taking the liberty of conscience seriously means defending the space in which groups can carve out their own distinct moral identities, serving as needed venues for the formation, expression, and living out of their constituents’ convictions.
Conscience, by its very nature, connects a person to something bigger than herself, both because we form our moral convictions through interaction with the world around us, and because we invest those convictions with real-world authority in ways that are accessible, if not agreeable, to others. Our concern for conscience must derive not simply from our commitment to honor the freedom of individual citizens, but from our belief that individuals are most likely to flourish in a certain type of society, one that is oriented to the common good through the operation of a vibrant marketplace of moral ideals and norms.
That’s the idea behind my book, and hopefully it will prove to be an idea that helps sustain the energy, mutual respect, and sense of a shared journey that animate this blog.
In my book at http://www.suprarational.org I wrote a chapter about morality and conscience, called “Duel of the Dual.” Here is an excerpt:
“Conscience” is a misused and misunderstood word. “Have you no conscience?,” ask people of a person who does something which seems to them to be so obviously wrong. Each person has a dual conscience and, occasionally, these two sides do engage in a duel.
The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines conscience as “a reasonably coherent set of internalized moral principals that provides evaluations of right and wrong with regard to acts either performed or contemplated. Historically, theistic views aligned conscience with the voice of God and hence regarded it as innate. The contemporary view is that the prohibitions and obligations of conscience are learned…” Individual moral development is based on both.
Socrates said that conscience was the inner warning voice of God. Among Stoics it was a divine spark in man. Throughout the Middle Ages, conscience, synderesis in Greek, was universally binding rules of conduct. Religious interpretations later changed in psychiatry.
Sigmund Freud had coined a new term for conscience; he called it “superego.” This was self-imposed standards of behavior we learned from parents and our community, rather than from a divine source. People who transgressed those rules felt guilt. Carl Jung, Freud’s famous contemporary, said that conscience was an archetype of a “collective unconscious”; content from society is learned later. Most religions still view conscience as the foundation of morality.
Sri Aurobindo said “…true original Conscience in us [is] deeper than constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us.” Perhaps conscience can be viewed as a double-pane window, with the self in between. On one side, it looks toward ego and free will to obey community’s laws. On the other side, it is toward the soul and divine will to follow universal law. They often converge to dictate the same, or a similar, course of conduct…and sometimes not.