CONSCIENCE AND ITS EMOTIONAL CONSTITUENTS

1. Conscience and emotion in general.

In English now ‘conscience’ means a distinctively moral awareness of oneself that is negative , i.e., we realise or suspect that what we are doing (including refraining from doing), want to do or have done, is wrong or could well be wrong. It thus acts on the same principle as what we usually act, viz., that everything is innocent or definitely good until we have reason to think otherwise. It is also more than ‘head knowledge’, but has distinct emotional aspects, viz. that we feel that what we are doing or not doing, etc., is wrong or at least doubtful about its probity, not merely in the tentative sense of suspecting but primarily in the emotional sense. Hence its ‘nagging’ character and the effort required to ignore it, to be in self-denial, to deceive ourselves about it, and so to set it aside and thrust it to the back of our minds. Properly to understand how conscience operates, we need to overcome deep-seated assumptions about moral cognition and emotions, and also a mistaken reaction against them. We do not think, nor cannot think, according to the rules of formal logic and necessary entailment that philosophers too often regard as the paradigm of reasoning. Equally, knowing is more than knowing propositions to be true or false. Likewise, emotions are not essentially irrational, but, on the contrary, are essential to rationality. Many accounts of moral reasoning are ones of merely reasoning about moral conduct and not of what actually results in right conduct, which requires active and felt responses to, and engagements in situations, and their moral aspects, and not detached observation of, and thinking about, them. Hence, more important than any reasoning is a person’s ordo amoris, which directs what he desires and aims at, what and how he thinks about, and what he does. It is the whole person that is morally significant, and not just his intellectual powers and will. Conversely, an ethics of feeling alone is equally erroneous.

2. Conscience, guilt and feeling guilty.

Most emotions and attitudes can be directed to oneself or to other objects: I can be afraid that something untoward will happen to me or to someone else, and that someone will hurt me or that I shall hurt someone else. But some are directed solely to oneself or to whom or what we identify ourselves with: pride, regret, remorse, rue and guilt. Now, unlike most words for emotions attitudes, ‘guilt’ and ‘guilty’ have separate objective and subjective applications. Whereas to be regretful about X is to feel regretful and to wish we had not done X, to be guilty of X is to be responsible (or partly responsible) for X with no implication that we feel guilty, either because we deny that we were responsible for X or that X is in anyway wrong, or both. Equally, we can feel guilty about something when in fact we are not responsible for it, or it was not wrong, or both. Moreover ‘guilt’ and ‘guilty’ entail that what a guilty person is responsible for is something that is definitely morally wrong or illegal or both, whereas ‘regret’ has no such entailments: I can regret being found guilty of dangerous driving simply because of the penalty I have to pay for it, and can also regret it because by doing so I might have hurt people or damaged their property. In the latter case I feel guilty and acknowledge that I should not have driven as I did. Hence conscience is the felt self-awareness of doing, having done, intending to do, or being inclined to do, something wrong in a definitely moral sense.
3. Conscience, remorse and rue.

But conscience involves more than that, for it prompts rue and remorse, and a will not to do again what we have done, and to make amends if possible. Those who speak about their consciences tend, on the contrary, to make that a substitute for action, either, in prospect, to face up to what the situation requires or, in retrospect, to do whatever may be possible to repair the wrong they have done. Yes, I now admit that I have done something that was wrong, or what I was tempted to do would have been wrong, but I am not resolved to try to undo it, to make amends, or to avoid any similar actions in future, and so I set aside the further promptings of conscience, the nagging awareness that more is required of me.
4. Conscience and shame

So far, conscience has been taken to be a spontaneous awareness of the wrongfulness of our actions or intentions. But it may not always be active, or some people may appear to lack one, indeed, to be shameless in their disregard of moral principles and their application in concrete situations. How then can such a person’s conscience be aroused, or one born within him? Certainly not by abstract reasoning. What is required is to make him feel ashamed of himself. Shame is feeling that one is contemptible or ridiculous in some way in the sight of others, or the fear of being so regarded. It has no inherent moral significance, and can lead to being more concerned with appearances than with the moral reality of oneself and one’s conduct. But being ashamed (of oneself, one’s conduct) is a felt moral self-condemnation, whereas shame would merely issue in regret that we have done whatever it was that caused others to regard us with ridicule or contempt. Being ashamed of oneself can be aroused, especially in the young, by the judgment of someone respected or loved. This is different from mere shame in that we accept the pronouncement of the other person and apply it to ourselves. What we now deeply regret is not only losing the good opinion of the other and that it was wrong.