The Conscience Is a Crock

How to know the Good: age-old dilemma. I just had an online "discussion" with two very self-assured, very self-righteous, very "self-reliant" (in the Emersonian sense) anti-war zealots. They were signing and emailing petitions to world governments demanding that, because of the zealots' conscientious objection to taking human life, they be exempted from any taxes intended to "pay for war."

Of course, my two interlocutors knew only too well that these petitions, if they were ever read by any official of any government, would be dismissed out of hand as the frivolous ravings of crackpots.  But a positive response from governments was not the petitioners' real purpose.  Their purpose was consciousness-raising, rattling cages, attention-getting.

Well, they got my attention--mostly because I, too, (like that hypothetical government drudge assigned to read crackpot emails), found the petition ludicrous--on a par with the whinging of the right-wing "religious liberty" folks--you know, those self-designated guardians of morality who want a government dispensation to discriminate against people whom they, in their Bible-befogged consciences, condemn as "disordered."

But as the argument progressed, I began to reflect a bit more deeply--and I realized that my aversion to the deliberately provocative petition was not that I disagreed with the anti-war sentiment--I think that wars, in general, are more harmful than beneficial--but rather that I was deeply suspicious of what I must call "justification by conscience."

Because “conscience,” all too often, is an illusion—a dishonest (though often purely reflexive) attempt by our conscious brain to objectify and rationalize as “good” our subjective, prerational and hence, morally neutral, reactions to our environment. That transcendental notion--still so prominent in American thinking--that our inner selves will just somehow "naturally" vibrate in unison with the great Oversoul and the Ultimate Good--well, it's a crock. Self-reliance--if one is relying on nonsense or fantasy or knee-jerk emotion is less "good" than merely quixotic.

So let's talk about what we really mean when we talk about the "conscience." Dictionaries tend to define conscience as an "inner-voice" that defines "right and wrong" and directs our conscious mind to act accordingly. OK. But what interests me most is the question of a moral CRITERION. 

In other words, WHAT principle or yardstick does the conscience use to determine whether a certain behavior is right or wrong? Here, psychology's concept of the super-ego offers some enlightenment: apparently, for its judgments, the super-ego relies almost entirely upon the cultural norms prevalent in an individual's home society/environment. THESE NORMS ARE SUBJECTIVE AND VARIABLE (though I suppose there might be a few that are universal). In short, what our conscience tells us is right depends, for the most part, on the family we were born in, the religion of our parents, the political and economic conventions we have internalized, the education we have received. Conscience is NOT an objective guide to truth or the Good--it merely tells uswhat other people like us believe is good because they have been taught pretty much the same thing that we have been taught.

So conscience, really, just tells us what we already thought: it cannot legitimize or justify our beliefs in reference to any objective God or Natural Law or Great Oversoul. It is, in other words, a nice, cozy, feel-good crock.