## 1. Conscience as pluralistic, neutral and subjective



The concept of conscience does not bear any connection with any
particular substantial moral view (Broad 1940). The voice of
conscience might suggest different principles and different behaviors
to different people. In other words, there is no psychological or
conceptual relation between conscience and any particular moral
belief. However, as will be explained below, in the Catholic tradition
the idea of an erroneous conscience is sometimes used to refer to
conscience that fails to recognize the true moral laws which it is
naturally predisposed to "witness" within our heart. As
for secular accounts of conscience, the independence of the notion of
conscience from any substantial moral content can be understood in
three senses.



First, conscience is a *pluralistic* notion. To say that a
person acted with conscience or that something violates
someone's conscience does not entail anything about what this
act consists of or what this person's moral values are (although
it might tell us that conscience is itself a value this person holds
dear). To use a metaphor, conscience is like an empty box that can be
filled with any type of moral content. As put by Strohm, 



> 
> 
> conscience has what might be called an "identity
> problem"--that it possesses no fixed or inherited content
> of its own, and that it can be hailed and mobilized in defence of one
> position or equally in defence of its rival. (Strohm 2011: 120) 
> 
> 
> 



For example, while some health practitioners raise
"conscientious" objection to abortion and refuse to
provide the service, someone's conscience might demand the exact
opposite, i.e., to perform abortions in order to respect what is
conscientiously believed to be a woman's right (Joffe 1995).



Second, conscience is typically a *morally neutral* concept.
Appealing to conscience does not usually add anything to the moral
justification of any particular conduct or principle. Unless one is
committed to the relativistic idea that your belief (or your
conscience) about *x* being right or wrong is what makes it right
or wrong for you to do *x* (Foot 1979), something is not made
morally better or worse, acceptable or unacceptable, simply by being a
matter of conscience. For example, the morality of abortion has
nothing to do with abortion being *conscientiously* opposed by
some health practitioners or *conscientiously* supported by
others. This neutrality does not exclude, however, that an appeal to
conscience can represent itself a reason for respecting
someone's moral views, for example a reason for granting someone
a right to object to carrying out certain activities. While appeals to
conscience do not typically provide any moral reason in defense of a
certain moral stance (unless one is a relativist), they might ground
political reasons for respecting individuals' moral beliefs,
such as for example tolerance or pluralism.



Finally, conscience only concerns the *subjective* dimension of
morality. Even assuming that there are ethical values that, in some
sense, can be considered objective, conscience only refers to what
individuals *believe*, independently of any external, objective
proof or justification. And when people state what they subjectively
and conscientiously believe, they acknowledge that other people might
(and probably will) subjectively and conscientiously hold different
moral views. Thus, when I say that abortion violates my conscience, I
am not saying (although I might be thinking) that abortion is morally
wrong by some objective standard, and I'm not necessarily trying
to convince others that abortion is wrong by some objective standard.
I am simply stating what I deeply believe and what I want others to
respect as my conscientious belief, regardless of how good or bad the
moral reasons I can provide to defend my claims are or appear to be to
others (McGuire 1963: 259). In fact, when health practitioners claim
conscientious objection to some medical procedures, they are usually
not interested in preventing other doctors who hold different moral
beliefs from performing the procedure. They are usually only
interested in, so to speak, keeping their hands clean according to
their subjective moral standard.



These three aspects related to the independence of conscience from
particular substantial moral views explain why appeals to conscience
to justify one's behavior are usually made with the expectation
that no further reason for the behavior in question be required. As
put by Childress, when an agent appeals to her conscience,



> 
> 
> [u]sually the agent has given up the attempt to convince others of the
> objective rightness of his act and is content to assert its subjective
> rightness. (Childress 1979: 329)
> 
> 
> 


## 2. Conscience as self-knowledge and self-assessment



When we talk about conscience, we often refer to reflection about
ourselves as moral persons and about our moral conduct. Through
conscience we examine ourselves, as if we were our own inner judge.
The image of an individual split into two persons, one who acts and
the other who observes the former's conduct, reflects the
original conception of "conscience" in the Greek world, at
least from the 5th century BCE (Sorabji 2014: 12). But such
self- knowledge may also be thought of as shared with *others
inside of us*, such as God(s) or other imaginary witnesses (for
example an admired philosopher according to Epicurus (Sorabji 2014:
24), or an impartial spectator according to Adam Smith (1759)). The
god(s) in question might be the god(s) of a particular religion, such
as the God of Christianity, or a postulate of the practical reason,
such as in Kant, according to whom reason, in order to be
"practical" in the sense of informing moral conduct, needs
the idea of a higher authority who sanctions individuals for their
actions (Kant 1797).



The role of conscience in this sense is not that of merely gaining
knowledge about our behavior or character. The knowledge in question
is typically (though, as explained below, not always) the ground for a
moral assessment by conscience. When observing one's behavior,
conscience is more like a judge (or sometimes it is identified with
the judgment itself) than like a disinterested observer. Thus, for
instance, the impartial spectator with which Adam Smith identified
conscience, inspired by the Stoic's notion of conscience as an
imagined admired philosopher judging one's conduct, is not a
morally and emotionally neutral observer, but generates a sentiment of
approval or disapproval of oneself (Smith 1759 and discussion in
Raphael 2007: 34). Even in the Catholic view, where the main
characterization of conscience is that of a witness of God's law
in our hearts (as described in
 section 3),
 conscience is also presented as "a moral judgment about man and
his actions, a judgment either of acquittal or condemnation"
(John Paul II 1993: 59). Analogously, in the Kantian view, conscience
is conceived of as an inner court (Wood 2008: 184): it is moral
self-awareness that allows to apply the moral law suggested by
practical reason to our moral conduct, and to judge whether we have
complied with the moral law. As Kant defines it in the *Metaphysics
of Morals*, conscience is 



> 
> 
> practical reason holding the human being's duty before him for
> his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under a law
> (Kant 1797 [1991]: 160) 
> 
> 
> 



and 



> 
> 
> consciousness of an internal court in man. (Kant 1797 [1991]: 189)
> 
> 
> 



This understanding of conscience as an inner court is well illustrated
by the story of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's famous novel
(Twain 1884; Bennett 1974). In a well-known episode of the novel, Huck
feels guilty and blameworthy for having helped his slave friend Jim to
escape from his owner Miss Watson. Blame does not come from some
external moral authority, but it is a verdict issued by conscience
according to its moral laws. The bites of conscience in Huck's
case were caused by a tension between his feelings supporting what he
did and the principles he had inherited from his social environment.
At the time when the novel is set, slave-owning was considered a
natural type of possession and helping slaves run away meant depriving
someone of her private property. This was the "law"
(metaphorically speaking) against which Huck's conscience
assessed his behavior.



This story illustrates another interesting feature of conscience as a
faculty for self-assessment, i.e., the asymmetry between our
confidence in the validity of the moral standards provided by our own
conscience and our confidence in the validity of the standards
provided other people's conscience. Huck thinks that what he did
was wrong and that it rendered him blameworthy *in spite of*
his feelings, because he thinks that his own conscience provides a
correct moral standard, i.e., a standard that he endorses even if some
of his feelings or beliefs indicate otherwise. This seems to reflect
our common way of relating to our own conscience: we try to adjust our
feelings and judgments to our conscience's standard, rather than
*vice versa*. However, the same does not hold when we talk of
other people's conscience, which is usually taken to indicate
their subjective moral standard and does not imply that we are
endorsing it. This asymmetry suggests that there is no conceptual
relation between the notion of conscience *per se* and the
notion of an objective or correct moral standard; rather, it stresses
once more the fact that conscience has merely to do with one's
private morality and one's commitment to her own morality.



Consistently with this understanding of conscience as self-knowledge
and self-assessment, it has been suggested by some that
psychopaths--i.e., pathological subjects who display antisocial
behavior and systematically act without regard to what they consider
to be right or wrong--can be said to lack conscience (Hare 1999).
For instance, according to Vujosevic (2015), in
psychopaths the link between moral knowledge or beliefs and
self-directed feelings of condemnation (e.g., guilt) is broken:
psychopaths cannot feel the remorse that normal functioning agents
feel when they perceive the discrepancy between their moral beliefs
and their behavior, and as a consequence psychopaths do not consider
themselves accountable for their actions (Gudjonsson and Roberts 1983;
Aharoni et al. 2012), although their moral beliefs are often
"normal" (Schaich and Sinnott-Armstrong 2013)



As mentioned above in this section, when expressing itself through
self-evaluative feelings, conscience might be conceived of as either
*constituted by* such feelings (Fuss 1964) or as
*occasioning* them (Broad 1940).



In the former sense (conscience as *constituted by*
self-evaluative feelings), the feeling is an essential part of
conscience. Conscience in this case is better conceived not as a judge
who issues sentences, but as a feeling with cognitive
content--where the cognitive content concerns the adherence of
one's behavior to a certain moral standard; in such cases, the
negative feeling informs me that what I am doing or am contemplating
doing is wrong (according to my own moral parameters). In the latter
sense (conscience as *occasioning* self-evaluative feelings),
the inner judge, when in tension with one's conduct, generates
negative self-directed feelings (Mill 1861: ch 3). For instance, in
Freud the "Super-Ego"--the part of our personality
that attends to prohibitions, inhibitions and moral
constraints--takes "the form of conscience" to
exercise its control over one's impulses and instincts by
producing negative evaluative feelings towards the individual, such as
aggressiveness towards the Ego and guilt (Freud 1929 [2000]: 30). As
we shall see below in
 section 4,
 these self-directed negative feelings play an essential role in
fulfilling the motivational function of conscience.



As the characterization of conscience as self-assessment here
presented suggests, conscience has most often been associated with
negative feelings (Arendt 1971), such as shame, guilt, fear,
contrition. While these feelings are typical of the Christian
understanding of conscience, they need not be tied to a religious
view: for most of us, even in our common language, conscience is
something that yields negative feelings more often than not--for
example we often talk of the "bites of conscience" or of
conscience as causing us "remorse" (which derives from the
Latin "*remordere*", i.e., "to bite
again"). However, a joyful conscience that praises and takes
pride of one's own moral merit can be conceived as well.
Examples of joyful conscience can be found for instance in Cicero and
some Latin Stoics, most prominently Seneca (Sorabji 2014:
25-30). Also in the Protestant tradition started by Luther we
find the idea of a joyful conscience, where joy springs not from pride
or self-praise, but from awareness of God's future remission of
sins (Luther 1535; Calvin 1536).



The contrast between the Protestant joyful conscience and the Catholic
conscience burdened by negative feelings of guilt and fear was
emphasized by Luther when he denounced the "terrorization of
conscience" by the Roman Catholic Church. According to Luther,
with this terrorization the Roman Catholic Church aimed to reinforce
its authority and control over people' conscience. In fact,
conscience in the Catholic tradition can only be relieved from its
burden of negative feelings through the confession of one's sins
to a priest and the penitence decided by that priest.


## 3. The epistemic function of conscience



Along with the previous, non-epistemic conception of conscience, we
can also understand conscience as having an epistemic function. In
this sense, conscience brings us some form of moral knowledge or moral
beliefs--either in an absolute sense, e.g., knowledge of divine
laws, or in a relative sense, e.g., knowledge of social norms in
one's culture.



The epistemic role of conscience does not necessarily coincide with
the role of epistemic faculties or functions such as reason,
intuitions, or senses. In particular, that conscience
"brings" us moral knowledge or beliefs does not
necessarily mean that it gives us direct access to the *source*
of this knowledge or of these beliefs, as might be the case with
reason, intuitions, or senses.



The knowledge we get from conscience, understood as possessing an
epistemic function, is often conceived as mediated knowledge. This is
not surprising, since, as we have seen, conscience is mostly
understood as inward looking, which presupposes that the knowledge to
which it gives us access is already *within us* and that we
acquired it through some other process not involving conscience. In
fact, on many accounts, conscience does not generate its own moral
principles. For example, the moral contents we discover within us can
be acquired through divine intervention, as is the case with the laws
of nature which, according to Christians, God infuses in our heart. As
we are going to see in
 subsection 3.1
 here below, the understanding of conscience as having an epistemic
function and as the recipient of mediated knowledge is not exclusive
to religious views.



On other accounts of conscience, however, conscience does give us
*direct* access to moral knowledge, for example as an intuition
about what is good and what is bad.



Let us examine the two accounts of the epistemic role of conscience in
more detail.


### 3.1 Conscience as a faculty for indirect moral knowledge



In the Christian tradition, starting from Paul, the inward looking
character of conscience is emphasized by the metaphor of the witness
(Romans 2: 14-15). Conscience does not allow us to acquire the
knowledge of the moral law directly from an external source (God in
this case), but only to witness the presence of God's laws
within us. Conscience cannot directly contemplate God. The idea of a
faculty that gives us indirect, and therefore imperfect knowledge of
some external moral authority suits religious traditions very well.
For example, the idea that through conscience we discover the true
divine laws can also be found in Islam (Geaves 1999: 164).



It is important to note that also in this case, as in the previous
understanding of conscience as self-awareness and self-assessment,
conscience can be conceived as fulfilling an introspective function,
i.e., as being directed towards the *self* and towards
one's own mental states. Introspection allows one to gain
self-knowledge (Schwitzgebel 2014), but since the self which is
observed contains the moral law, it is possible to say that the law
itself, as part of our self, becomes the object of introspection.
Thus, for instance, in his theological writings before his papacy,
Joseph Ratzinger said that "something like an original memory of
the good and the true (the two are identical) has been implanted in
us", and conscience is 



> 
> 
> so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom
> it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from
> within. (Ratzinger 1991: 535) 
> 
> 
> 



The Catholic Church also makes reference to "the voice of the
Lord echoing in the conscience of every individual" (John Paul
II 1995: par. 24).



On this account--since conscience is only a *witness* and
does not have direct epistemic access to the source of knowledge,
i.e., to God--conscience is considered fallible and actually
often erroneous (1 Corinthians 4:4; Aquinas 1265-1274; Butler
1726: sermon 3 (3)). In particular, conscience might fail to correctly
interpret the divine laws when applying them to real cases. According
to some 13th Century Catholic theologians, such as Philip
the Chancellor, Albert the Great and, most notably, Thomas Aquinas,
conscience is the act of applying universal principles (i.e., divine
laws) to real situations, i.e., it is the conclusion of the practical
syllogism whose first premise is a universal principle provided by a
separate faculty called "synderesis" (Aquinas, *Summa
Theologiae*, 1 q79; Langston 2000 and 2015; Sorabji 2014:
62-66): as such, conscience can be erroneous in deriving moral
conclusions from first principles (Aquinas, *On Truth*, q17,
art. 2, and discussion in D'Arcy 1961: 100-103).



On a secular account, the external source of moral knowledge that
instills moral principles in us is not God, but one's own
culture or upbringing. In this case, the moral knowledge in question
is typically understood in a relativistic sense: our conscience is the
faculty through which the social norms of our culture or the norms of
our upbringing are evoked and exert their influence on our moral
psychology. These norms explain our moral feelings and our moral
choices, but what conscience tells us in this case is the product of
social and cultural dynamics over which we have little control. As the
case of Huckleberry Finn's conscience demonstrates, hardly can
conscience so understood be credited any moral authority, since our
educators or our culture might be highly immoral (for example our
conscience might end up drawing on racist or discriminatory
principles, such as the ones which supported slavery in Huck's
social environment). And in fact, unsurprisingly, many are rather
skeptical or dismissive of the moral authority of conscience, since
they see it as mere opinion about moral principles influenced or even
determined by one's own culture (Montaigne 1580: book 1, ch. 22;
Hobbes 1651: ch. 7). In this sense, conscience is a merely
relativistic notion whose content changes according to social,
cultural, and familial circumstances.


### 3.2 Conscience as a faculty for direct moral knowledge



Contrary to what Montaigne and Hobbes had claimed, Rousseau argued in
*Emile, or Education* that good education can free conscience
from the corrupting influences of societies. Actually, one of the aims
of education is to render the young autonomous moral thinkers and
agents by teaching them how to critically examine and, if necessary,
replace received norms (Rousseau 1762; see Sorabji 2014, for a
discussion). The idea here is that conscience is what remains of our
innate moral sense once we free it from "childish errors"
and "prejudices of our upbringing" (Rousseau 1921 [1762]:
253). As Rousseau presents it,



> 
> There is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of
> justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own
> actions or those of others to be good or evil; and it is this
> principle that I call conscience. (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 253)
> 



According to Rousseau, then, conscience has a natural tendency to
perceive and follow the right order of nature, and a good teacher
should help the young's conscience to do what it is naturally
predisposed to do. In Rousseau's words:



> 
> Too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to
> doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of
> man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body; he who obeys his
> conscience is following nature and he need not fear that he will go
> astray... Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her
> yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in
> the answer of a good conscience. (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 252)
> 



This understanding of conscience as a deeper form of moral knowledge
brings us to the second sense in which conscience can be said to have
an epistemic role. As well as merely witnessing received opinions or
divine laws, conscience can also be conceived as a moral sense giving
us direct access to moral principles. Understood in this way,
conscience is typically seen as intuitive and influenced by emotions,
rather than a reason-based faculty. In particular, 18th
Century sentimentalist philosophers often (e.g., Shaftesbury (1711)
and Hume (1738-1740)) identified conscience with a moral
"sentiment" or moral "sense". According to
Hume's psychological theory, for instance, "reason is
wholly inactive and can never be the source of so active a principle
as conscience, or a sense of morals" (Hume 1738-1740: book
3, part 1, section 1). Also on more recent accounts of conscience and
of private morality, the dictates of conscience can be understood as
expressions of our moral intuitions. According to Thagard and Finn
(2011), for instance, "conscience is a kind of moral
intuition" (p. 168) that is "both cognitive and
emotional"(p.156).



Once again, there are reasons to doubt the epistemic and moral
authority of conscience so understood. A lot of work in recent moral
psychology aimed at understanding moral disagreement has suggested
that there are seemingly irreconcilable differences in fundamental
moral intuitions and emotions among people with different worldviews
(e.g., Haidt 2012; Greene 2013). These differences in fundamental
moral intuitions seem to undermine the epistemic status of conscience
and, with it, conscience's moral authority, not least because
most of our moral intuitions seem, according to these recent
developments in moral psychology, not to be amenable to revision in
light of new evidence or new good reasons. Reasoning, on any plausible
account, should be an important part of morality; however, what our
conscience tells us may have little to do with reasons and evidence.
Theoretical work in moral psychology (e.g., Haidt 2012; Graham et al.
2009; Haidt 2001), supported by evidence from neuroscience (Greene
2013), suggests that our most fundamental moral beliefs might be based
on intuitions and emotions over which our rational capacities have
little control. If this account is correct, then we have reasons to be
skeptical about the possibility of affecting, let alone changing,
people's conscientious beliefs through dialogue, public
discussion and reason giving. Psychological research has focused
particularly on the differences between liberal and conservative
thinking. For example, it has been suggested that conservative moral
and political views are often founded on certain specific emotions,
e.g., disgust or fears, and specific intuitions, e.g., intuitive
opposition to perceived violations of purity and to authority
subversion, whereas liberal views are often driven by other specific
emotions, e.g., anger, and intuitions, e.g., intuitive rejection of
fairness violations or liberty infringements (Haidt 2001 and 2012). If
conscience simply is the expression of moral intuition, and if
individuals have significantly different and irreconcilable moral
intuitions, then individuals also have significantly different and
difficult-to-reconcile conscientious moral consciences.


## 4. Conscience as motivation to act morally



Conscience can also be conceived as our sense of duty. According to
this understanding, conscience motivates us to act according to moral
principles or beliefs we already possess (e.g., D'Arcy 1963;
Childress 1979; McGuire 1963; Fuss 1964). Conscience so understood
"establishes a general sense of moral obligation in the
individual's consciousness" (Fuss 1964: 116). The
subjective character of conscience implies that the motivational force
must come entirely from within the individual, as opposed to sanctions
from an external authority.



A powerful motivational source is represented by the feelings that
conscience generates in its self-assessment function. As we said at
the beginning, the different understandings of conscience presented
here are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Conscience as
self-assessment and conscience as motivation to act morally constitute
a good example of perspectives on conscience which are not only
consistent with one another, but which actually complete one another.
In Kant, for example, the theory of conscience can be seen as "a
motivation theory set in the context of a reflection theory"
(Wood 2008: 183): As Wood interprets the Kantian notion of conscience,
"conscience is a feeling of pleasure or displeasure associated
with myself" that arises when I comply or don't comply
with moral principles and that motivates me to act in one sense rather
than the other when the feeling accompanies the contemplation of a
certain course of action (Wood 2008: 183-184). Conscience for
Kant is therefore not only an inner court, but also the source of our
sense of duty in that it takes the judgments of the inner court as
motivation to act morally (Kant 1797 [1991]: 161).



More generally, as we have seen in
 section 1,
 conscience's self-assessment often produces remorse or other
negative feelings (guilt, shame, fear, and so on). Our desire or
tendency to avoid this form of self-punishment can have motivational
force towards acting morally. Thus, for instance, according to
Childress the motive for acting morally that defines conscience is
"in part, avoidance of a sanction imposed by the self on
itself" (Childress 1979: 328).



Consistent with this philosophical view are studies in developmental
psychology suggesting that the emotion of guilt, which is typically
seen as one of the products of conscience as self-assessment, is
"the motivational engine that infuses misdeeds with negative
personal valence" (Kochanska and Aksan 2006: 1589).
Transgression generates anxious feelings in most children, and these
negative feelings help children suppress future wrongdoing and
internalize the relative moral norms (Damasio 1994, as reported
in Kochanska and Aksan 2006: 1595).



However, at the same time, the negative self-directed feelings must
themselves be generated by previous experience of tension between our
action and a pre-existing sense of duty. Although it might seem that
we are stuck in an infinite regress, where sense of duty and negative
self-directed feelings presuppose one another, this need not be the
case. It is possible to conceive of an external or independent source
of that most fundamental sense of duty that constitutes our
conscience, such as for example our moral education and upbringing
(Mill 1861: ch. 3). But the sense of duty that identifies a
conscientious person can also be conceived as a primitive function, an
innate disposition which is not explained by any other more
fundamental mechanism. In Kant, for instance, "every human
being, as a moral being, has a conscience within him originally"
(Kant 1797 [1991]: 160), and conscience is one of the four
"natural predispositions of the mind (...) for being
affected by concepts of duty", the other three being moral
feeling, love for one's neighbors, and respect for oneself (Kant
1797 [1991]: 160). 



Negative feelings and sense of duty are not always successful in
prompting agents to do what their moral principles require. But the
"bites of conscience", or just the prospect of bites of
conscience, act as motivational force towards aligning our future
behavior to those norms. Of course, positive feelings associated with
conscience might also have a motivational force. For example, as seen
above, Kant associated conscience also with positive feelings about
oneself when the agent recognizes he has acted according to his sense
of duty. Rousseau, alongside the epistemic account of conscience
presented above, also provides in *Emile* a motivational
account of conscience based on positive feelings: while reason gives
us knowledge of the good, it is conscience, through a sentiment of
love for the good, which motivates us to behave morally (Rousseau
1762).


## 5. Conscience, self-identifying moral commitments, and moral integrity



The subjective character of conscience delimits a sphere of personal
morality that is an essential part of our sense of personal identity,
understood as our sense of who we are and of what characterizes
qualitatively our individuality (for instance, our character, our
psychological traits, our past experience, etc.). My conscience is
what makes me *this* particular individual in a social and
cultural context that I want to keep separate from *me*.



This private space in which the individual finds her own sense of
identity often grounds the political use of the notion of conscience.
Thus, many people claim the right to stick to their
conscience--particularly by advancing so called
"conscientious objection"--when social expectations
or legal obligations would demand otherwise. These political appeals
to conscience are usually made on the basis of two principles. The
first is the principle of respect for moral integrity, which finds its
justification in the close relationship between the notions of
conscience and of moral integrity on one side (Childress 1979), and
the sense of personal identity on the other. The second principle
often invoked in the political uses of "conscience" is the
principle of "freedom of conscience". The former will be
discussed in this section, and the latter in the next section.



The concept of personal identity in the sense in which the notion is
used here--i.e what defines me as this particular person in a
qualitative sense--is intimately related to the notions of
conscience (Wicclair 2011; Childress 1979) and of moral integrity, and
more specifically to the "identity view of integrity" (Cox
et al. 2013; Williams 1973 and 1981). According to this view, for
people to have integrity means to remain faithful to
"identity-conferring commitments", i.e.,
"commitments that people identify with most deeply, as
constituting what they consider their life is fundamentally
about" (Cox et al. 2013). This identity-conferring aspect of
one's morality is exactly what some people call
"conscience". According to Childress, for example, 



> 
> 
> [i]n appealing to conscience I indicate that I am trying to preserve a
> sense of myself, my wholeness and integrity, my good conscience, and
> that I cannot preserve these qualities if I submit to certain
> requirements of the state or society. (Childress 1979: 327)
> 
> 
> 



Conscience as self-identifying can be understood in two ways. It can
be thought of either as a set of core and self-identifying moral
beliefs that are "integral to an agent's understanding of
who she is (i.e., her self-conception or identity)" (Wicclair
2011: 4), or as a way of approaching and relating to such moral
beliefs, i.e., a "commitment to uphold one's deepest and
self-identifying moral beliefs" (Sulmasy 2008: 138) and "a
mode of consciousness in which prospective actions are viewed in
relation to one's self and character" (Bluestein 1993:
294).



Conceived in either way, conscience is an essential part of our
understanding of what kind of person we are, and this is taken to be a
reason for warranting protection of conscience and conscientious
objection in different contexts, particularly in the health care
professions (Wicclair 2011: 25-26; Bluestein 1993: 295).



We have seen above that there is a sense in which, according to some,
psychopaths can be said to lack conscience (Hare 1999): psychopaths
are not capable of connecting their moral knowledge to their conduct
through the feelings of guilt and disapproval which conscience, on
some accounts, produces. Interestingly, according to some
psychologists, psychopaths are also less likely to base their sense of
personal identity on moral traits than normal functioning individuals
(Glenn et al. 2010). More recent psychological studies have suggested
that people tend to link the identity of others not so much to their
memories, as traditionally believed, but to their morals: it is the
loss of one's moral character and moral beliefs, rather than of
one's memory, that leads us to say that a certain individual is
not the same person anymore (Strohminger and Nichols 2015). These
findings provide empirical support to the idea that conscience is
essential to one's sense of personal identity and to
attributions of personal identity


## 6. Freedom of conscience



Some people have suggested that appeals to *freedom* of
conscience tend to be more vigorously put forward and more effective
in contexts where political or religious structures lose power or
moral authority. Thus, for instance, according to C.A. Pierce:



> 
> conscience only came into its own in the Greek world after the
> collapse of the city-state. The close integration of politics with
> ethics, with the former predominant, was no longer possible: there was
> no sufficiently close authority, external to the individual,
> effectively to direct conduct. Consequently, as a *pis aller*,
> men fell back on the internal chastisement of the conscience as the
> only authority. (Pierce 1955: 76)
> 



The same can be said for 17th Century England, with its
crisis of religious authority and the frequent appeals to freedom of
conscience in the philosophical and political literature of that time
(Childress 1979: 326).



There are three main arguments that can be used to defend a principle
of freedom of conscience. Two of them are frequently found in the
16th and 17th Century philosophical literature:
they are the "argument from ineffectiveness or hypocrisy"
and the "argument from ignorance" (Sorabji 2014: 139). A
third argument, which might be called "argument from
legitimization", was put forward by John Stuart Mill. Let us
examine them in order.



a) The *argument from ineffectiveness or hypocrisy* is based on
the relevance of the distinction between beliefs and acts for the
definition of conscience. According to this argument, it is not
possible to compel someone to believe or to not believe something,
i.e., to change one's conscientious beliefs. All we can do is
compel people to act *as if* they believed something, which
would be a hypocritical behavior. Therefore, if some authority aims to
convert people or to change people's moral views, prohibiting
the free *expression*, through actions, of one's
conscience would not serve this purpose.



This line of argument was often put forward by early Christians, most
notably Christian apologist Tertullian, to defend their freedom to
practice their cult in a time where they were persecuted by Roman
governors: their claim was that forcing them to abandon the Christian
cults would have no effect on their conscience. The same line of
argument can also be found in Locke's works on toleration, the
*Essay Concerning Toleration* of 1667 and *A Letter
Concerning Toleration* of 1689.



However, Christians did not seem to believe in the force of this
argument, and more generally in the principle of freedom of
conscience, when, later on, they attempted to justify the violent
persecution of heretics (those who revise their religious dogmas) and
apostates (those who abandon their religion) and their forced
conversion (Clarke 2014: 118-123). Two main justifications have
been given by Christian theologians for the forced conversion of
heretics and apostates.



One can be found, among others, in Aquinas and Calvin, who thought
that violent persecution is justified because heretics' mistaken
views would exert great influence on many ordinary people. By
departing from the Christian doctrine, these people would be condemned
to eternal damnation in the afterlife, and Christians have a duty to
save as many people as possible from eternal damnation (Clarke 2014:
120-121).



A second type of argument in defense of violent persecution is the one
offered by Augustine (5th Century). He argued that
compelling people to follow the true religion--by which he meant
persecuting heretics--could open their eyes to the truth (Sorabji
2014: 49-50). This thesis implies that sometimes conscience,
even if we confine it to matters of inward conviction and not to
behavior, can be influenced by some external imposition.



This latter approach based on the idea of bringing the truth to
conscience by "freeing" conscience from error is
consistent with the Catholic peculiar understanding of the notion of
freedom of conscience. Philosophically speaking, "freedom of
conscience" is typically understood as an individualistic
concept that allows for a plurality of moral and religious views
(Strohm 2011: 90). For the Catholic Church, however,
*authentic* freedom is inseparable from the notion of truth.
Inspired by the works of the English theologian and cardinal John
Henry Newman, Joseph Ratzinger writes that in the Catholic view
"truth" is the middle term that reconciles authority of
God and subjectivity of conscience: the latter, when authentically
free, cannot but reveal the truth established by the former (Ratzinger
1991). Since, as we have seen above, in the Catholic view reason alone
can't create its own values, which are instilled by God into
humans' hearts, "human freedom finds its authentic and
complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law" of
God (John Paul II 1993: par. 35). So when practical reason is free to
exercise its "participation" (John Paul II 1993: sec. 40)
in the divine law, then "in the depths of his conscience, man
detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds
him to obedience" (Paul VI 1965: par. 16).



In any case, it is not necessary to dismiss the argument from
ineffectiveness in order to justify imposing norms and practices that
might violate individuals' conscience. Actually, the same
argument from ineffectiveness can be used to support the imposition of
policies that might conflict with individuals' consciences. On
the basis of the idea that conscience is merely a matter of private
beliefs, not of action, some authors have argued that compelling
people to follow certain rules even against their conscience would not
constitute a violation of their freedom of conscience, and is
therefore justifiable. This was the line of argument pursued, for
example, by Thomas Hobbes (1651: chapter 40), Baruch Spinoza (1670:
chapter 20) and John Locke (1660), who argued that the State has the
power to enforce certain practices even when citizens claim that it
would violate their conscience, in order to protect social order.



b) The "*argument from ignorance",* which might be
better labeled "*argument from humility*", is based
on a skeptical approach to the content of conscience. The possibility
exists that what we conscientiously believe is wrong and that those
holding conscientious beliefs opposite to ours are right. Therefore,
there is a reason for not forcing anyone to believe in something or to
engage in behaviors that might turn out to be morally wrong. The
argument from ignorance or humility started to be put forward quite
frequently, and most prominently by Pierre Bayle (1686-1688),
after the Catholic Church lost a significant proportion of its
religious and moral authority following the Protestant reform in
16th and 17th Century--which was defined by
Keith Thomas (1993) as "the age of conscience". It was at
that time that we assisted to the "secularization of
conscience" in the modern era (Strohm 2011), although the
phenomenon would be better conceived of as a
"re-secularization", since conscience was not related to
the voice or the authority of God in the Greek world.



The same argument from ignorance or from humility is also put forward
by John Locke in his *Second Letter Concerning Toleration*.
Locke had to rely on this argument as an alternative strategy to
defend freedom of conscience after the Anglican priest Jonas Proast
pointed out that compulsion can actually change personal beliefs (as
Augustine had argued), and that therefore the argument from
ineffectiveness that Locke had used in his first *Letter* fails
(Sorabji 2014: 151).



A version of the argument from ignorance can also be found in
contemporary defenses of conscientious objection in an age where
pluralism of worldviews is acknowledged and actually supported. For
example, Sulmasy appeals to epistemic humility as "true basis of
tolerance" (Sulmasy 2008: 144) in his arguments in support of a
right to conscientious objection in health care. 



c) Finally, the third argument in defense of freedom of conscience is
what I have called above the "*argument from
legitimization*". John Stuart Mill (1859) defended freedom
of conscience by appealing to the idea that allowing the free
expression of any opinion, and particularly mistaken opinions, would
allow truth to emerge more clearly and would provide us with a
justification for acting upon our own beliefs, once they have been
assessed against others' opinions. As put by Mill, 



> 
> 
> [c]omplete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the
> very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes
> of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have
> any rational assurance of being right. (Mill 1859: ch. 2)
> 
> 
> 


### 6.1 Freedom of conscience and conscientious objection today



Freedom of conscience is today protected by the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads: "Everyone
has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion"
(art. 18).



According to Strohm, this article should not be taken to imply freedom
to act according to one's conscience, but it only refers to
"matters of inward conviction" (Strohm 2011: 88). If this
interpretation is correct, article 18 does not seem to raise any
interesting philosophical or practical problem today, as very few
people today would deny freedom in matters of *inward*
conviction. More problematic is the moral and political debate about
the freedom to *act*, or to *refrain from acting*,
according to one's conscience, especially where there are
professional roles or legal obligations that would demand otherwise.
In fact, appeals to conscience and freedom of conscience are often
deployed to claim and justify "conscientious objection" to
certain activities that someone would otherwise be required to
perform.



One example is conscientious objection to the military service where
conscription is in place. Although originally conscientious objection
to war was mainly a religious issue (the Quakers were the most famous
group of conscientious objectors to war), in more recent times the
objection to war has been put forward and granted without explicit
reference to any religious justification (Moskos and Chamber
1993).



As most States have now abolished conscription, appeals to freedom of
conscience and to conscientious objection today can be found mainly in
debates in medical ethics with regard to health practitioners who
conscientiously object to performing medical procedures they morally
oppose, such as abortions (for overviews of the debate in medical
ethics, see Wicclair 2011; Wester 2015).



According to those who are against a right to conscientious objection,
professional obligations trump any value conscience might have and any
principle that might justify conscientious objection *qua
conscientious* (e.g., Savulescu 2006; Giubilini 2014 and 2017,
Savulescu and Schuklenk 2017); according to defenders of conscientious
objection, professionals' conscience must be protected to the
largest extent possible, i.e., up to the point where respecting
conscience would significantly jeopardize physical or psychological
health of patients (e.g., Sulmasy 2008; Wicclair 2011), a compromise
that, depending on circumstances--for example a too high
percentage of objecting practitioners which would make it nearly
impossible to refer patients to non-objecting doctors--might be
very difficult to achieve (Minerva 2015). Between these two stances,
there are positions that are neither for nor against conscientious
objection in principle, but pose tighter restrictions to those who
advance conscientious objection (McLeod 2020), for example the
requirement to provide reasons for the objection, and to submit such
reasons to public scrutiny or experts' assessment of the
reasonability of one's objection (Card 2007, Card 2020), or the
qualification that objection can only be justified if consistent with
the internal values of the profession (Wicclair 2000; Deans 2013).




However, if it is the validity or the soundness of the reasons
provided which is considered relevant for the justification of
conscientious objection, it seems that the value of conscience and the
principle of freedom of conscience are no longer at stake. What makes
an objection good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, has nothing to
do with its being conscientious, unless we add a "genuineness
requirement" (e.g., Meyers and Woods 1996) to an assessment of
the legitimacy of a conscientious objection, whereby professional need
to demonstrate that the moral beliefs at stake are deeply and
sincerity held. The interesting question in this case would be whether
a test can be devised that can reliably track genuine conscientious
objections.


## 7. Conclusion



There is no such a thing as *the* notion of conscience, both in
a philosophical and in a psychological sense. As we have seen, the
concept of conscience has been given different interpretations
throughout history, sometimes on the basis of underlying systematic
philosophical theories of the mind and of morality, and sometimes
serving religious or political purposes.



This lack of uniformity is not only a problem for historians and
theoretical philosophers. Because it cannot be immediately clear what
we are talking about when we talk of conscience, of freedom of
conscience, or of conscientious objection, it is important that
clarity is made every time conscience is appealed to in different
branches of applied philosophy (particularly medical ethics) and in
public debates alike.



This entry has presented a conceptual map, rather than a historical
account, of conscience, which can provide some guidance for those
engaged in this clarificatory task. One of the benefits of clarifying
concepts, and clarifying them in the different circumstances in which
they are used, is their subsequent demystification.



Conscience needs to be demystified, since it is one of those concepts
that tend to elicit reverence rather than questions or an interest in
further inquiry. As seen above, appeals to conscience often replace
reason giving and are made with the expectation that no further reason
for one's decisions and positions is requested. This attitude is
also displayed in many legislative approaches dealing with the notion
of conscience; in particular, legislations about conscientious
objection in health care typically grant doctors a right to object to
performing certain professional activities (e.g., conscientious
objection to abortion) without requiring them to provide reasons for
their objection, let alone submitting reasons to some form of
assessment.



This entry has distinguished four main understandings of conscience,
drawing on the philosophical tradition of the concept. Whether the
concept is to be understood as a faculty for self-knowledge and
self-assessment, or as having an epistemic function in the sphere of
morality, or as a motivational force, or again as a set of
self-identifying moral beliefs, or a combination of any of these
characterizations, it is important to have clear in mind what exactly
we are talking about when we talk of conscience and of freedom of
conscience in each circumstance.



Far from being a conversation-stopper, conscience can only find its
proper place in philosophical and in public discussion if its
philosophical and psychological aspects are teased out, defined and
assessed. Appeals to conscience can only be part of philosophical,
political, and legal discussion if they are seen as the start, not the
end of discussions.