Module 7: Conscience PDF

1 Module 7: Conscience Learning Outcomes At the end of this module, the students should be able to: 1. Define the importance of Morality and Conscience ; 2. Determine the right way to use conscience 3. Apply conscience in ethical dilemma This module discusses the morality that refers to...

1 Module 7: Conscience Learning Outcomes At the end of this module, the students should be able to: 1. Define the importance of Morality and Conscience ; 2. Determine the right way to use conscience 3. Apply conscience in ethical dilemma This module discusses the morality that refers to be rightness or wrongness of human acts. We speak of objective or subjective morality accordingly as it overlooks the particular characteristics of the doer of the act and his or her circumstances or else take them into consideration. The norm of subjective morality is the evaluative judgement of PROBLEM conscience. We make two kinds of judgements about ourselves and our actions: (1) judge whether and how far I am responsible and so for my every self and (2) I also judge whether these acts are good or bad and whether I as a person deserve praise or blame as a result of doing these actions. As we said earlier, ethics takes as its starting point a fact of human experience: the conviction that some acts are right and ought to be than, that others are wrong and ought not to be done and still others are indifferent and may either be done or not. Whether such evaluative judgements are correct or not is another matter, but the fact we are interested in is that people do make them. They also judge themselves and one another as persons. The power to do this kind of evaluative judging is called conscience, the conscious self-attuned to moral values and disvalues (right and wrong, good and evil) in the concrete and judging the self and its personal actions in terms of those values and disvalues. How far we as individuals are responsible for our acts only the individual person can know. The act I do has its source in me; it is my act. Because this is so the quality of my act reveals the quality of my own personhood. I am the kind of person who does this kind of act, and so to the degree that I am responsible for the quality of my acts I am also responsible for the kind of person I am. Other may judge me, but without my help they can see only the externals. I usually know when I have been misjudged by others, and I can know this only by comparing their judgement with my own and passing a further judgement on both these judgements. Reflecting on my act in this way, I can usually find the degree of my own responsibility for the act I have done and for the further determination I have given my own personal character by doing that act. The judgement of responsibility as such is different from the judgement of conscience. The two are certainly connected with one another, because we normally judge the goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness, of only the acts we are responsible for. The judgement about responsibility is a factual judgement about the degree of voluntariness; the judgement of 2 conscience is an evaluative judgement about the moral value or disvalue of my act and so of myself as a person. Since we have been dealing up to this point with the subjective aspects of the human act such as voluntariness and responsibility and since morality first presents itself to our experience as a personal reflective judgement on our acts and ourselves as being good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral long before we have begun to articulate the principles on which such judgements rest or should rest, it will be convenient to continue with the subjective aspects of morality. All people, no matter what their system of morals might be, make the kind of evaluative judgements associated with conscience and admit that they make them. It is when we try to find an objective basis for the judgements of conscience that ideas about values, about what is good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral begin to diverge. The differences of approach that people take in these matters cannot be understood, compared, and examined until we make the effort to justify our own personal judgements of conscience. Embedded in all the differences is something common to the all all—the need to be true to oneself as a person. Apart from what others may think and do, I must in the last analysis make my own informed judgements, so I am ultimately dependent on my own judgements of good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral. This personal judgement in these terms about my own actions and about myself as a person is what we mean in this chapter by the judgement of conscience. We shall use the following points to guide us in our discussion: 1. What do we mean by morality? 2. What is conscience? 3. How is the judgement of conscience formed? 4. What part do our emotions play in forming the judgement of conscience? 5. Must we always follow the judgement of conscience? 6. May we act with a doubtful conscience? 7. How can doubts of conscience be solved? MEANING OF MORALITY Morality is the quality or value human acts have by which we call them right or wrong, good or evil. It is a general term covering the goodness or badness of a human act without specifying which of the two moral values is meant. The term moral is also used at times as a general term covering both good and bad qualities or values in the same way that morality is used, that is, without specifying whether good or bad or both good and bad are meant. We speak of the moral character of a person’s acts or personality and say, for instance, “Harry is a mature adult capable of moral discrimination,” meaning that Harry can differentiate between good and bad; “Jane’s moral character is an unknown quantity to me,” meaning that Jane may be good or bad; “George’s motivation in helping the poor 3 seems morally ambiguous,” meaning that George seems to have a mixture of good and bad motives. The terms moral and immoral mark the extremes of good and bad within morality, in the field of morals when moral is used as the opposite of immoral. The term moral means “morally good” only when it is clearly opposed to immoral, which means “morally bad.” When moral and immoral are used in opposition to one another to describe human acts, each indicates that the act has a definite moral quality or value. An act is moral when it has the quality or value of being good; an act is immoral when it has the quality or value of being good: an act is immoral when it has the quality or value of being bad. For instance, “John’s decision not to have the operation was moral or “Jane did the moral thing in telling Harry how she feels about George.” Usually the context will make the meaning of moral clear. The word amoral is sometimes used in the sense of “nonmoral.” But more often it is applied to persons deficient in moral concern or responsibility. Moral beyond being used to designate the good or bad quality of human acts, is also used to designate the quality of a person as good or evil, as upright or despicable. The field of morals, that is morality, is possible because of the kind of beings are namely, beings who have the power to do both good and evil. Such are our possibilities. We can do good but we can also not do it. That “not” points to the limitedness or finiteness that is integral to our being as persons and affects our relations with the rest of the world. Because there is this negativity or limitedness about our being, we as personal beings can fail to live always in accord with our potentialities and our vision of the good. To some extent we are all closed and indifferent to others. We cannot love enough to be completely open to all others and concerned with their lives and what happens to them; we are imperfect and weak at times even when we would like to be more perfect and strong. Because of our limitedness as persons, we have the possibility of doing evil rather than good. In judging the morality of a human act, we take into consideration the subjective peculiarities of the agent (the doer of the act) and look at the act as conditioned by the agent’s knowledge and consent, background, training, prejudices, emotional maturity and stability, value orientation, and other personal traits. We ask whether this individual person did right or wrong in this particular situation, whether this particular act was good or bad for him or her to do in particular circumstances. Considered in this way, morality is subjective, the goodness or badness being determined by whether the act agrees or disagrees with the agent’s own judgement of conscience. We may also abstract from such subjective conditions which, though always present in any individual act, can be known directly only by the simply look at the kind of act performed and at the outward circumstances apparent to any observer. Then we ask not whether this individual is excused from responsibility for the act because of strong emotion, ignorance, or any other modifier of responsibility, but whether, if any normal person with full command of his or her own powers deliberately willed that kind of act, the 4 result would be a morally good act. We would be judging the objective nature of the act done, not the subjective state of the doer. Morality considered in this way is objective morality. If we ask, “is murder wrong?” “Is truthfulness right?” we are asking about objective morality. If we ask “did this man fully realize what he was doing when he killed that child?” “Did this woman intend to tell the truth when she blurted out that remark?” we are asking about subjective morality. Morality in its completeness includes both its subjective and its objective aspects. Neither aspect is more important than the other. Unless acts have a rightness or wrongness of their own with which a person’s judgement of conscience can and should be in agreement, anybody’s judgement is as good as anybody else’s and ethics becomes a mere listing of personal opinions. The study of ethics generally stresses objective morality. But each person has a life to live, must personally account for his or her deeds as he or she saw them, and will be judged morally good or bad in terms of the sincerity in following his or her conscience even if his or her moral judgements turn out to have been objectively incorrect. In this sense, subjective morality is paramount for each person; but at the same time, each of us tries to conform his or her judgement of conscience to what is objective morality is paramount. MEANING OF CONSCIENCE In the popular mind, conscience is often thought of as an “inner voice,” sometimes as the “voice of God,” telling us what to do or avoid, but this is metaphor. If conscience speaks with a voice, it is our own. Doubtless, most people do experience a kind of subconscious reaction based on their childhood environment training, a tendency to approve or disapprove of things for which approval or disapproval was shown in childhood. Such a tendency will often give correct moral estimates or evaluations if one has been brought up well. As a result of such early childhood experiences I may have a vague, unidentifiable feeling, a sense of unease and even of “guilt” in departing from the established pattern, even when I recognize the feeling as unreasonable. This is not what is meant by conscience in the traditional sense, nor is it to be identified with Freud’s “super-ego” though they are somewhat related. In the traditional sense, conscience is not a special power distinct from our intellect. Otherwise our judgements about the rightness or wrongness of our individual acts would be non-intellectual, nonrational, the product of something other than our own consciousness. Conscience is only the intellect itself exercising a special function, the function of judging the rightness or wrongness, the moral value, of our own individual acts according to the set of moral values and principles the person holds with conviction. 5 Conscience is a function of intellect concerned with actions that can be good or bad. It does not deal with theoretical questions of right and wrong in general, such as “Why is lying wrong?” “Why must justice be done?” but with the practical question: “What ought I do to do here and now in this concrete situation?” “If I do this act I am thinking of, will I be lying, will I be unjust?” Conscience is the same practical intelligence I use to judge what to do or avoid in other affairs of life: how shall I run my business, invest my money, protect my health, design my house, plant my farm, raise my family? Like other human judgements, conscience can go wrong, can make mistaken moral judgements. As a person can make mistakes about what is the right thing to do here and now. In making any such practical judgement, however, a person has no guide other than his or her intelligence desiring to do what is right and good and what that intelligence reveals about what it is right and good to do in the situation here and now. Conscience, in this traditional sense, can then be defined as the intellect’s practical judgement about an individual act as good and to be done, or as evil and to be avoided. The term conscience can actually be applied to any of the three distinct aspects of this judgement process: 1. The intellect as a person’s ability, under the influence of a desire to do the right and the good, to form judgements about the right and wrong of individual acts 2. The process of reasoning that we go through, under the influence of that desire, to reach such a judgement 3. The conclusion of this reasoning process, which is called the evaluative judgement of conscience The reasoning process we go through in arriving at a judgement of conscience is the same as in any logical deductive argument, even though we rarely spell out the steps for ourselves. Usually we draw the conclusions so quickly that, we are not aware that we have been engaging in a process of deductive reasoning. We arrive at the judgement of conscience by a kind of “shortcut” that seems to conceal the deductive process. For example: 1. “Should I say this? No, that would be a lie.” 2. “Must I correct this mistake? Yes, it may hurt someone.” 3. “May I keep this? Of course, no one else owns it.” These are all examples of a shortened form of deductive reasoning used to form a judgement of conscience. If we were to formulate explicitly each of the deductions in these examples, this is what we would have: 1. Lies are immoral. This explanation of my conduct is a lie. This explanation of my conduct is immoral. 2. Mistakes that may endanger someone must be corrected. The mistake I just made may endanger someone. I must correct the mistake I just made. 3. What belongs to no one may be kept. This object I just picked up belongs to no one. I may keep this object I just picked up. 6 Deductive reasoning supposes a major premise or general principle, a minor premise or application of the principle to a particular case, and a conclusion necessarily following from the two premises. The major premise employed in forming the judgement of conscience is a moral value or a general moral principle known by means of our rational predisposition to appreciate moral values and formulate such principles so as to have them in my mind ready for use as the basis of our conduct. The major premise may be either a principle I have directly formulated as a result of this preposition such as “do good and avoid evil,” “Respect the rights of others,” and “Do to others as you would have them do to you” or a conclusion derived from such a principle and held as a general rule of conduct for myself. The minor premise brings the particular act here and now to be done under the scope of the general principle stated in the major premise. The conclusion that logically follows is the judgement of conscience itself. EMOTION AND CONSCIENCE The judgment of conscience is an evaluative judgement made in terms of the goodness and badness of the act I did or am thinking of doing. Say, for example, my “conscience bothers me” because I feel guilt or remorse for speaking harshly to one of my closest friends when he criticized me for the way I voted in the last election. I am reflecting on a past act, speaking harshly to my friend, an act done in a situation that obviously involved a great deal more than intellectual activity. I was in conversation with whom I love, and it was in that context that he criticized me for voting as I did. I had voted the way I judged that ought, given my own moral and political convictions. I was trying to be true to myself in voting as I did. My friend could not allow the incident to pass without criticizing my view because he loves me and cared enough to try to help me see something I did not see before. I became angry with him because of his criticism of my views and expressed that anger in harsh words. Now I am experiencing guilt or remorse for having responded to his love and care in that way. Why? Because I find on reflection, that anger and harsh words were an inappropriate response on my part. My anger at the moment blocked out the fact of our mutual love and my response was one of taking offense where none was meant. Note the interplay of emotion evaluative on both sides in this situation. If emotion was not at all involved, there would be no judgement of conscience in the first place, because I would have been aware of no values either to form my convictions about how to vote or to respond to my friend’s love and care. My moral awareness in terms of forming personal convictions about how to vote have been there. The evaluational elements that I use in living my life have their beginnings in my emotions, the affective side of my being. Conscience is not so much a part of ethics as it is the morally evaluating self that ethics as study seeks to serve. This morally evaluating self that my conscience is grows out of appreciation of myself and of other persons as valuable, intrinsically worthwhile, and important just because we are all persons. My moral awareness, my conscience, has its roots in this appreciation of self and grows and develops in the process of experiencing myself and others in our interrelatedness. Just as no two persons are ever absolutely identical, so no two consciences will ever be identical. My conscience bears the unique markings of my moral journey through life. It is conditioned by my personal history and is develop as my history develops. What my 7 conscience has in common with other consciences is it rootedness in that moral experience of self and other as interrelated and valuable. My conscience is like a housing that myself build and carry around with me through life. I look out the world and other persons through the windows in this housing. Another way of speaking of his housing is to call it my personal value orientation, my set of moral values and principles that I hold with conviction, the values and principles I have found for myself and tested out with my own emotions and then integrated into my own moral approach to life. Conscience is not developed by critical thought alone. Emotion also enters into its development along with imagination, for conscience is not merely our power to judge the past in moral terms but also our ability to see alternatives in moral situations that have implications for the future. All moral knowledge has an emotional dimension, and our emotions draw the values we experience into the interior of our personality. These values enter into our intellectual framework for use in making our evaluative judgements of conscience. The values and principles we accept and hold with conviction become so much a part of the moral self that we use them in making our judgements of conscience without a judgements of conscience without reformulating them as we go along. We use the rules of grammar when we speak, but we do not reformulate those rules explicitly as we speak. So too, in working out a judgement of conscience, we use the values and principles we have found for ourselves and integrated into our moral stance toward others and to our life itself without explicitly reformulating those moral values and principles when we act. They are enfleshed in us and at our service even if we do not think of them explicitly. The person who is morally good is one who loves the good and is sensitive to its presence. Love enables us to discover the value of other by guiding us to those values and revealing them for our understanding and appreciation. A love-informed conscience has a special keenness for discerning the good that exists and a creative impulse to bring about an increase of good in our lives and the lives of others. Another way we can see how much emotion is involved in conscience is to realize that our most profound interpersonal relationships are precisely relationships in which one moral consciousness meets another at the level and in the intimacy of conscience. To love another person is to give one’s deepest self to that other to cherish and, in turn, to accept and cherish that other’s deepest self. This is the same as moral conscience meeting and cherishing another moral conscience. The encounter of self with another self is total. Certainly it is not a mere meeting of intellects; it is a meeting of persons with all that this means in terms of emotion, intellect, will, imagination, and inclination. Since conscience is the total moral personality, conscience is also more than intellect and includes emotion, willing, imagination, and natural inclination as well. In the opening chapter of this book we spoke of the difference between customary morality and reflective morality. Customary morality enters into the formation of the conscious moral self each of us is by teaching us the moral tradition of our society and civilization. We also learn about moral values and principles from our parents and other persons of authority. Our awareness of moral values and truths has a social dimension, for we depend on one another in knowing ourselves and our world. Conscience just because it is personal and unique, need not be closed-minded but can be realistically, need not be closed-minded but can be realistically to embrace the truth wherever it is discovered. What we must not do is allow ourselves to be engulfed and dominated by others. A good 8 conscience is both individual and social at the same time. We, as a person, are not atomistic centers of moral judgements; we live our lives in dialogue with others, and so the moral self that I am mirrors my social nature. Conscience is not a matter of me against them; it is an affair of me distinct from them but together with them. If I am to follow my own conscience; then I must also question my own conscience and test it. I can do this only with the help of others, being emotionally sincere and intellectually honest with them. From those around us we need love and respect as persons, conscious moral selves, and then we can explore the depth and dynamics of our moral awareness but only if we respond to that love and respect in a creative way. KINDS OF CONSCIENCE Conscience may be a guide to future actions, prompting us to do them or avoid them, or a judge of our past actions, the source of our self-approval or remorse. For the purpose of ethics, conscience as a guide to future actions is more important. Its acts are chiefly four: commanding or forbidding, when the act must either be done or avoided; persuading or permitting, when there is a question of the better or worse course of actions without a strict obligation. Since the judgement of conscience is an intellectual judgement and the intellect can err, either by adopting false premises or by drawing an illogical conclusion, conscience can be either correct or erroneous. A correct conscience judges as good what is really good, and as evil what is really evil. In this case, subjective and objective morality correspond. An erroneous conscience judges as good what is really evil, or as evil what is really good. All error involves ignorance, because a person cannot make a false judgement unless he or she lacks knowledge of the truth. The ignorance involved in error is either vincible, if the error can be overcome and the judgement corrected, or invincible, if the error cannot be overcome and the judgement cannot be corrected, at least by means any normally prudent person would be expected to use. A person’s judgement of conscience may also be certain or doubtful. We are certain when we judge without fear that the opposite may be true in fact. We are doubtful when we either hesitate to make any judgement at all or make a judgement but with misgivings that the opposite may be true. If we make the judgement with fear that opposite may be true, we assent to one side, but our judgement is only a probable opinion. There are varying degrees of probability, running all the way from sight suspicion to the fringes of certainty. The fact that people differ in their levels of sensitivity to moral values gives habitual characteristics to their judgements of conscience strict or lax, tender or tough, fine or blunt, delicate or gross, according as they are inclined to perceive or habitually overlook various moral values. A perplexed person is one who cannot make up his or her mind and remains in a state of indecisive anguish, especially if he or she thinks that whatever alternative he or she chooses will be wrong. A scrupulous person torments himself or herself by rehearsing over and over again doubts that were once settled, finding new sources of guilt in old deeds that were best forgotten, striving for a kind of certainty about one’s moral state that one simply cannot be a serious form of self-torture, mounting to neurotic anxiety that is more of a psychological than an ethical condition. Such a person 9 needs to learn, not to the distinction between right and wrong, which he or she may know very well, but how to stop worrying over groundless fears, how to end ceaseless self- examination and face life in a more confident spirit. FOLLOWING THE JUDGEMENT OF CONSCIENCE Having seen what conscience is and the forms it takes, we must now discuss our obligation to follow what conscience approves. There are two chief rules, but each of them involves a problem. The two rules are: 1. Always follow a certain conscience 2. Never act with a doubtful conscience Always Follow a Certain Conscience First, notice the difference in between a certain and a correct conscience. The term correct to the objective truth of the person’s judgement; the person’s judgement of conscience represents the real state of things. The word certain refers to the subjective state of the person judging namely, how firmly assent to the judgement has been given, how thoroughly fear of the opposite has been excluded. Obviously, the kind of certainty meant here is there is a subjective certainty which can exist along with objective error. We have two possibilities that need to be examined: 1. A certain and correct conscience 2. A certain and erroneous conscience 1. A certain and correct judgement of conscience really offers no difficulty. Our obligation is clear. The person judges what conduct is required here and now. The judgement is correct, and the person is certain of its correctness. What degree of certainty is required to call our judgement certain? Traditionally it has been said that prudential certainty is sufficient. Prudential certainty is not something absolute. It is still a matter of degree. This kind of certainty excludes all prudent fear that the opposite may be true, but it does not require us to rule out imprudent fears based on bare possibilities. That is, the reasons are strong enough to satisfy a normally prudent person on an important matter, so that the person would feel safe in practice even though there is theoretically a chance of being wrong. He or she has taken every reasonable precaution but cannot guarantee against rare contingencies and freaks of nature. When there is a question of action, of something involving future consequences some of which are dependent on the wills of other people, the absolute possibility of error can never be wholly excluded; but it can be so reduced that no prudent person who is free from neurotic anxiety would be deterred from acting through fear of it. A prudent person, having investigated the case, can then say with prudential certainty that this business venture is safe, that this person is guilty of a crime, that this employee is honest. This degree of certainty, since it excludes all reasonable fear of error, is much stronger than high probability, which does not exclude such reasonable fear. 2. What happens when I have an erroneous conscience, that is, when I make a mistaken or incorrect moral judgement? If I know my judgement may be wrong and I am able to correct the possible error, then I have an obligation to do so before acting. Otherwise, I 10 run the risk of doing moral evil. Obviously, if I make an error and do not know about the error, I have no means of correcting it. Since my error and ignorance are unavoidable because they are unknown to me, I act morally when I go ahead and follow my judgement of conscience. My judgement is certain and correct as far as I am able to know here and now so even if I do something objectively wrong, I am responsible for what I do but am not morally blameworthy for having done it. Conscience is the only guide a person has for acting here and now. If I were not obliged to follow my conscience when my judgement is certain even though mistaken but not known to be mistaken, then I would be forced to the absurd conclusion that I am not obliged to follow my judgement of conscience when it is certain and correct. A person’s willing the good depends on his or her understanding of that good. Whether the judgement about the good is correct to what the intellect understands and presents as good, and the act is bad if it consents to what the intellect understands and presents as evil under guise of good. A person firmly convinced that an action is right is in fact choosing what is thought to be evil whether it really is so or not. Such persons are not responsible for the unknown error of judgement, but they are praiseworthy or blameworthy for their choices of what they judged was good or evil. Never Act with a Doubtful Conscience We have seen that a person acting with a certain but unavoidably mistaken conscience is avoiding moral evil as far as possible. The mistaken judgment is not person’s fault, for the person has no reason to believe that the judgement is mistaken. But the same cannot be said of one who acts with a doubtful conscience. This person has reason to believe that the intended act may actually be wrong and yet is willing to go ahead and do it anyway. True, the person is not certain about the wrongness, but such as a person is not willing to take the means to avoid this probable wrongdoing by determining the true nature of the act, if that is possible. This type of person acts without care for the rightness or wrongness of acts. Even if the rightness or wrongness of acts. Even if the act turns out to be objectively right, this is only accidental. Therefore, we may conclude that one must never act with a doubtful conscience. But, then, what should a person with a doubtful conscience do? The person’s first obligation is to try to solve the doubt, to find out the true nature of the act. If I am a person with a doubtful conscience, I must reason over the matter more carefully to see whether I can arrive at certainty. I must inquire and seek advice, even the advice, even the advice of experts if the matter is important enough and there are experts available who can help me. I must investigate the facts of the problem and there are experts available who can help me. I must investigate the facts of the problem and make certain of them, if this is possible. I must use all the means that normally prudent people are accustomed to use, in proportion to the importance of the problem. Before deciding on an important course of action, business and professional people, for example, take a great deal of trouble to investigate a case, to secure all the data, to seek expert advice, besides thinking over the matter carefully themselves. The same degree of seriousness and care is demanded in moral affairs. 11 What if a prudentially certain conclusion cannot be reached by doing all of this? For example, it may happen that the required information cannot be obtained because the facts are not recorded the records are lost, the obligation remains obscure, the opinions of the learned differ, or the matter does not admit of delay for further research. If one should never act with a doubtful conscience, what can one do who is still in doubt? It may seem that the answer is easy; do nothing. But often this approach will not help for doing nothing can often have as many and as important consequences as doing something. Surely omissions can be voluntary and the doubt may concern precisely the question of whether we may morally refrain from acting in this case. The answer to difficulty is that every doubtful conscience. That is, no one need ever remain in doubt about what he or she must do. To see this, we must distinguish between the direct method of inquiry and investigation, in which has just been described, and the indirect method of forming our conscience by the use of reflex principles. Note first, however, that we are not offered a choice between using the direct or the indirect method. We must use the direct method first. Only when the direct method yield no result may we use the indirect method. FORMING ONE’S CONSCIENCE The doubting person who has exhausted the direct method described above without obtaining the knowledge he or she needs has a double doubt: 1. What is the actual truth about the matter in hand? 2. What is one obliged to do in such a situation? The first question is theoretical doubt, and it was cannot be answered if the direct method was used and failed to yield results. But the second question is a practical doubt, and this question can be answered in every instance by use of the indirect method, which we shall now describe. Through many doubts are theoretically insoluble, every doubts is capable of being solved practically. Any person can become certain of what he or she is morally required to act, even while remaining in a state of unsolved theoretical doubt. Thus, though the rightness or wrongness of the action may not be settled in the abstract, a person can become prudentially certain of what he or she in these actual circumstances is obliged or allowed to do and can therefore act with a certain conscience. What he or she determines is the kind of conduct that is certainly right for a doubting person in this situation. This process of solving a practical doubt without touching the theoretical doubt is called the indirect method or forming one’s conscience. The process of forming one’s conscience is accomplished by the use of reflex principles, so called because we use them while reflecting on the state of doubt and ignorance in which we now find ourselves. We have only two possible courses of action open to us: “play it safe” or “take the easier way.” Since these two courses of action are almost always opposite courses, may we take whichever we please in any case? No. Forming one’s conscience by use of the indirect method consists in determining when to “play it safe” and when to “take the easier way.” The two reflex principles we use are (1) the morally safer course is preferable and (2) a doubtful obligation does not bind. We must now examine each of these principles to determine when to use the one or the other. 12 The Morally Safer Course By the morally safer course is meant the course of action that more surely preserves moral goodness and more clearly avoids moral wrong doing. One is always allowed to choose the morally safer course of action. If I am not obliged to act and simply am in doubt about whether this money is justly mine, I can simply refuse it. If a person is certainly allowed to act but doubts whether he or she has an obligation to act, the morally safer course is to do the act. If I doubt, for example, whether I have paid a bill, I can offer the money and risk paying it twice. Sometimes neither alternative appears morally safer and the obligation on each side seems equal; then we may do either. We have an obligation to follow the morally safer course whenever we have a known moral obligation to fulfil or an end (goal) that we ought to achieve to the best of our power. The only doubt we have is about the effectiveness of the means to be used for this purpose. The obligation we must fulfil or the end we ought to strive for places a further obligation on us to use certainly effective means. A lawyer, for example, who has agreed to take on a client and defend that client in court has a clear obligation to fulfil his or her agreement to defend that client. That clear obligation places a further moral obligation on the lawyer to use the most certainly effective means at his or her disposal to defend the client. The lawyer must take the morally safer course when it comes to choosing the means to fulfil his or her moral obligation to defend the client. In such cases, the doubt is solely about a matter of fact, namely, which means will certainly fulfil, the moral obligation incurred in agreeing to defend the client. A Doubtful Obligation There are other cases in which the obligation itself is the thing in doubt. Here we have a different question. The morally safer course (our first reflex principle), though always allowable, is often costly and inconvenient, sometimes physically more dangerous and even heroic. Out of a desire to do the better thing we often follow the morally safer course without question, but if we were to have an obligation to follow it in all cases of doubt, life would become intolerably difficult. To be safe morally, we should have to yield every doubtful claim to others who have no better right than we do, and so we would become the victims of every cheat and swindler whose conscience is less delicate than ours. Such difficulties are avoided by avoided by the use of the second reflex principle: a doubtful obligation does not blind. This second principle is applicable only when I doubt whether I am bound by a moral obligation. My doubt of conscience concerns whether the act I am thinking of doing is one I am obliged to do or obliged to avoid doing. The principle that a doubtful obligation does not bind may be used in both of the following situations: 1. I doubt whether such an obligation exists or is genuine. 2. I doubt about how to interpret the obligation, that is, I doubt whether the existing obligation binds me here and now. I may doubt, for example, whether the fruit on my neighbor’s tree hanging over my fence belongs to my neighbour or me, whether I am sick enough to be excused from going to work today, whether the damage I caused was purely accidental or due to my own 13 carelessness. We are assuming that there are in the examples questions of what is morally allowed: am I allowed to pick up the fruit, to stay home from work, to refuse to pay the damage? Is there any known moral obligation that is applicable to my case and that certainly forbids my doing what I am thinking of doing? If the direct method fails to prove any moral obligation, then I am justified in going ahead and doing these things on the principle that a doubtful obligation does not bind. The reason behind this principle is that an obligation must be certain in order to have binding force, and a doubtful obligation is not sufficiently certain to bind the person about to act here and now. It is important to remember that we are talking about situations here in which the person is sincerely doubtful whether there is a moral obligation (principle or rule) that covers the case. If the person is not doubtful, then this second reflex principle does not apply. We must be careful to distinguish these doubtful obligation cases from those that fall under the first reflex principle. If the obligation itself is the thing in doubt, then I am not obliged. If the obligation is certain, I must follow the morally safer course and not use doubtful means if certainly effective ones are available. I may not roll boulders down a hill in the mere hope that they may not hit anyone on the road below, but I may cart off boulders from property that is only probably mine. I may not leave poisoned food lying about on the chance that no one would care to eat it, but I may manufacture clearly labelled poison if such manufacture is probably forbidden. In the first instance there is no doubt about the obligation: I am not allowed to jeopardize human life unnecessarily. It may happen that no harm results from my acts but those acts are certainly dangerous, and so the morally safer course must be chosen. In the second instances, the obligation not to seize others’ property or not to manufacture dangerous products is of doubtful application to my case, and I may morally go ahead and do a thing for a doubtful obligation does not bind. However, if the manufacture of poison turns out to be forbidden by civil law, I would be legally liable even though not morally fault. How doubtful does the moral obligation have to be to lose its binding force? Must the existence or application of the obligation be more doubtful than its nonexistence or nonapplication, or equally so, or will any doubt suffice to exempt a person from the obligation? Such questions were hody debated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though by moral theologians than philosophical ethicians. The view that survived this debate as the most tenable in the theory and the only one workable in practice is called probabilism. It does not refer to a weighing of probabilities on either side of the case but rather requires me to have a solidity probable reason for thinking that a moral obligation does not exist or does not apply to my case for me to be allowed to go ahead and to do the act. Solid probability means that the reasons against the obligation’s existence or applications are not frivolous or fictitious but genuine and weighty, even though they may be somewhat less so than the reasons in favour of the obligation. No judgement can be certain if there are genuine and weighty reasons against it. If it is not certain, it is doubtful, and if it is doubtful, it does not bind. To list all the reasons on both sides and weigh their relative merits is often a hopeless task, baffling the best experts. The average person has neither time nor knowledge nor ability for such a complete comparison. In practice, choices must be made promptly and yet be made with a certain conscience. The theory of probabilism enables a person to do so by saying that a moral rule 14 does not oblige when where are solid reasons for thinking that either does not exist or does not apply to the person’s case here and now. One final caution is in order: we have been dealing with moral obligation and not with obligations that stem from civil law. The second reflex principle that a doubtful obligation does not bind does not apply to cases of civil law. Ignorance may be an excuse in some cases of civil law, but ignorance of the law is almost never an excusing condition before the civil law. Once a civil law has been passed and put on the books the presumption is that the citizens know the law as it applies to them. We have a moral obligation to obey civil laws that are just. We shall discuss this matter in the chapter on government. CONCLUSION The whole matter of forming one’s conscience may seem to involve a great deal of subtlety, as if we were whittling down moral obligation to its lowest terms. It this not contrary to moral virtue and personal honor, straightforward simplicity and sincerity? In an answer, the first thing to note I that we can always follow the morally safer course. But in ethics we must study not only what is the virtuous and better, the nobler and more heroic thing to do, but also exactly what a person is strictly obliged to do. A generous person will not haggle over good works, but a reasonable person will want to know when he or she is doing something that is strictly a duty (carrying out a clear moral obligation) and when he or she is being generous. Accurate moral discrimination is also important is judging the conduct of others. In our personal lives we may be willing to waive our strict rights and to go beyond the call of duty, but we have no business imposing on others an obligation to do so. The borderline between right and wrong is often difficult to determine. It is certainly foolish to skirt it too closely; but we are not allowed to accuse another person of wrong-doing if he or she has not truly done wrong. This is another reason why we need to detail these principles very carefully. SUMMARY Morality refers to be rightness or wrongness of human acts. We speak of objective or subjective morality accordingly as it overlooks the particular characteristics of the doer of the act and his or her circumstances or else take them into consideration. The norm of subjective morality is the evaluative judgement of conscience. Conscience is not a special faculty but a practical function of the intellect, under the impulse of the desire to do the right and good, the judges the concrete act of an individual person as morally good or evil. The reasoning used by the intellect in doing this is a form of deduction. The major premise is an accepted moral value or principle, the minor premise is an application of the value or principle to the case at hand, hand and the conclusion is the evaluative judgement of conscience itself. Conscience functions both as guide to future acts and as judge of past acts. A correct conscience judges good as good and evil as evil; an erroneous conscience judges good as evil or evil as good. A certain conscience judges without doubt or fear that the opposite is true. A doubtful conscience either makes no judgement or judges with fear that the 15 opposite is true. Conscience is said to be strict or lax according as it tends to perceive or overlook various moral values. Always obey a certain conscience even when it is unknowingly or unavoidably mistaken. A certain and correct conscience is the clear and proper judgement about one’s moral duty or obligations. Prudential certainty, the exclusion of any prudent fear of the opposite, is all that can be expected in moral matters. A certain but erroneous conscience must also be followed because the agent cannot distinguish it from a correct conscience and has no other guide; the act is subjectively right even if objectively wrong. Never act with a doubtful conscience. A person who acts with doubtful conscience is willing to do an act whether it is wrong or not, refusing to take the means to avoid doing moral evil. A person in doubt must first use the direct method of inquiry and investigation to dispel the doubt. That is, the person must reason over the matter more carefully, inquire and seek advice of experts if possible, and investigate the facts of the problem to make certain of them if possible—in short, use all the means a normally prudent person would use in proportion to the importance of the problem. If the direct method yields no results, the indirect method of forming one’s conscience may be used. This consist in solving not be theoretical doubt (what is the actual truth?), for that is what cannot be solved if the direct method fails, but in solving the practical doubt alone (how should a doubting person act in this case?). The practical doubt can always be solved by using one of two reflex principle; 1. The morally safer course is preferable. This course is always allowable but sometimes is burdensome. It must be used if the case concerns not the existence or application of an obligation but the effectiveness of the means used to fulfil a certain moral obligation or attain an end that must certainly be attained. 2. A doubtful obligation does not bind. This principle may be used only when there is a question of the obligation itself, when either the existence or application of an obligation is genuinely in doubt. Probabilism is the name given the claim that to bind, an obligation must be certain, and no obligation can be certain if there are solidly probable reasons against it no matter how strong the probability, that is, the reasons for it, may also be. It is practically impossible to weigh the degrees of probability on every side completely, so probabilism holds that such a comparison is really necessary. The purpose of this practical study of conscience is not to whittle down moral obligation but to help us make accurate moral discriminations both about ourselves and about others.