Your conscience is not infallible. Go deeper.

When someone tells you they are doing what they believe is right, in most cases you know the proper response is to take cover! This blog often refers to the need to have an "examined life" and regrets the superficiality of much of the reasons supporting the life or death choices —literally— thrust upon society, especially impacting the young and the old and sick, but also employees of businesses led by managers, investors or owners who believe they have no responsibility for the wider welfare of their workers and their families.

Therefore, when a person argues they must follow their conscience, they also have to acknowledge that when they believe some line of thought or action is morally right, in reality, it could be completely the opposite.

Conscience is a fundamental anthropological structure in a person's essence, in our ontological constitution, that is, inherent in each person's innermost being. It pervades all cultures. None has been found in which it is not recognised as a fact or—in the present age—as a problem. It found formal recognition in ancient Greece and it has been the bone of contention with successive philosophies and understandings of the person since. Socrates spoke of his indwelling divine monitor. The Greeks gave it a name, and a definition that has stood the test of time as: The self-consciousness exercised in making moral judgements in respect to human action.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this: 

Conscience is defined by its inward looking and subjective character, in the following sense: conscience is always knowledge of ourselves, or awareness of moral principles we have committed to, or assessment of ourselves, or motivation to act that comes from within us (as opposed to external impositions). 

The problem over the standing of the conscience in this age is the widespread notion that a person's conscience is infallible, that there is a justifying power to a conscience's judgement so that it must be accepted by others without challenge. This would mean, in effect, that Hitler or Stalin should not be held guilty for their murderous policies, that one should expect to see them in heaven.

But most upholders of the "infallibility" view go on to admit that people should not be free to do whatever they want—murder, steal, lie—even if the "offender's" conscience had approved of the act as the right thing to do in their situation. This points to the reality of moral truth, and that we can discover this truth given the necessary deliberation.

A law written in each person's heart

This from the Catholic perspective (the non-inclusive language reflects the 1960s' vintage of  the document):

In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by love of God and neighbor. In fidelity to conscience, Christians are joined with the rest of men in the search for truth, and for the genuine solution to the numerous problems which arise in the life of individuals from social relationships. Hence the more right conscience holds sway, the more persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and strive to be guided by the objective norms of morality. Conscience frequently errs from invincible ignorance without losing its dignity. The same cannot be said for a man who cares but little for truth and goodness, or for a conscience which by degrees grows practically sightless as a result of habitual sin. — Source: Gaudium et Spes paragraph 16

In this light, conscience is the faculty that examines what is good and evil subjectively while manifesting the objective moral law known from our own innate awareness of moral truth. Assaults on this understanding have come within the last 200 years or so from the likes of Kant, with his concept of moral obligation, and from Freud with his "superego". But such conceptions have been recognised as lacking the essential elements of the conscience. For example, the superego misses the mark because the moral conscience does not rest on finding love, or approval, rather it's often the opposite. The conscience does not look to any authority other than the values that arise from the person's own being and will have an individual stand up for some principle in the face of opposition or worse from family, employer, community or nation. 

A person must deliberate on the circumstances surrounding a situation of concern to arrive at the highest possible certitude about the morality involved. Simply being personally certain about the morality relating to that situation is not a sufficient basis for action as subjective certitude marks a retreat from the search for truth. So a certain conscience can be false, can manifest error, and a false conscience can be certain, but also make an erroneous judgement.

A duty to correctly form our conscience

Therefore, we come back to the idea of an examined life. It is the responsibility of each person to correctly form their conscience, having in view objective truth. A conscience is wrongly formed when the person does not care sufficiently to arrive at objective truth. A lax conscience is that which, for weak motives or to support one's own mean motives, judges something as legitimate or not serious when it is, in reality, not right and it is of a serious character. 

In a paradox, while we have to accept that our moral judgement may be in error we should always follow the prompting our that distinctly human faculty. All the same, the notions that one's "conscience is infallible", that it is the "ultimate authority and cannot be appealed", are wrong because they bring us back to the principle of the justifying power of the erroneous conscience, that is, granting us licence to do whatever we desire simply because our conscience approves.

In this case, truth would be reduced to one's own truth, the subject's own satisfaction of certitude. Of course, the outcome would be that judgements of conscience within a community could contradict one another, and we know this does happen. It's clear a purely subjective judgement is not what gives conscience it's authority. In fact, the alternative to self-will in pursuing desired ends, and the poorly performed intellectual effort to inform one's conscience, is to strive to know truth, which in itself is the absolute that governs any judgement. Truth, as the absolute, is the objective standard by which to assess moral responsibility for the outcomes flowing from the judgements of conscience.

How we get to the truth is through guilt.  From here, I will follow the analysis of Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in his book On Conscience (2007). He states that guilt disturbs the false calm of conscience. It is as necessary for each person as the physical pain that signifies disturbances in normal bodily functioning. Whoever is no longer capable of perceiving guilt is spiritually ill.

We get a clear idea of how guilt renders a valuable service from scripture. Psalm 19:12-13 states, "But who can detect his own failings? Wash away my hidden faults."

Ratzinger notes that the falling silent of conscience—no longer seeing one's guilt—is an even more dangerous sickness of the soul than the guilt one still recognises. This is because guilt is signalling that the truth is at hand, whereas experiencing no shame signals being at a great distance from the truth. Our consciences accuse us, as well as give us the satisfaction of approval.

The letter of Paul to the Christians in Rome also provides us with a guiding text. It says:

So, when gentiles, not having the [Jewish] Law, still through their own innate sense behave as the Law commands, then, even though they have no Law, they are a law for themselves.

They can demonstrate the effect of the Law engraved on their hearts, to which their own conscience bears witness; since they are aware of various considerations, some of which accuse them, while others provide them with a defence . . . on the day when, according to the gospel that I preach, God, through Jesus Christ, judges all human secrets. (Rm 2:14-16 NJB)

Ratzinger takes this key text relating to the natural law that Christian teaching holds as central to understanding the moral demands humans face, as it was for the ancient Greeks, as it is in the Vedic concept of the Rita and in the immutable principles of dharma. Paul posits that pagans, even without the revelation the Jews had, knew with useful clarity what God expected of them, that there is present in the human person "the truth that is not to be repulsed". Not to see the truth about right and wrong comes about because the human will hinders recognition, giving rise to guilt. 

Need to put our own preferences aside

The fact that the signal lamp does not shine is the consequence of a deliberate looking away from what we don't want to see. We have to accept the fact that the necessity to obey the truth arrived at by our study, consultation with the traditions of the community, and prayer, is of a greater priority than attaining our own preferences. In discussing the pre-eminence Socrates awarded truth, and his confidence in the human's capacity for truth, Ratzinger holds that what characterises the person as human is not that the person asks about the "can" but about the "should". All this is set against a worldview of many of the ancients, as it is again of post-modernists, that the person alone sets the standards for themselves.

It is if an original memory of the good and the true has been implanted in us, so that there is an essential tendency within each person, who is created in the image and likeness of God, toward the divine attributes of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. It's as if we have a memory of ourselves as god-like creatures in the constitution of our being, which does not mean we have a store of knowledge, but we have an inner sense, a capacity to recall, what God has given us. We hear an echo, not from outside, but from within.

Paul's experience as a missionary to those who were not Jewish illustrates the ontological depth of conscience in the human person, Ratzinger says. He continues:

[Paul's] proclamation of the message of the gospel answered an expectation. [His] proclamation encountered an antecedent basic knowledge of the essential constants of the will of God ... which can be more elucidated the less an overbearing cultural bias distorts this primordial knowledge. 

Augustine, too, had noted that the sense for the good has been stamped upon us—that we could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us.

The neglect of both the ontological level of conscience and the centrality of the search for the objective truth led eventually to the scourge of the prevailing relativism, which arose from the Enlightenment's fallacies, the autonomy of the subject and the absolute claims of reason, having reduced reason to empirical or quantitative rationality. These two closely related perversions of the notion of conscience leave a large part of society floundering in uncritical conformity to convention.

That pervasive subjectivity reduces morality to personal preference, something ultimately irrational. Ratzinger finds that in such a relativistic context, in a world without "fixed measuring points" there is no direction, and "no one can be of much help to the other, much less prescribe behaviour to him". 

"It is never wrong to follow the convictions [of conscience] one has arrived at—in fact, one must do so," Ratzinger states. But those convictions can be wrong because the person has "stifled the protest" of the memory of good and evil in their being, because of "the neglect of my being that made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth."

Then comes the culminating but emphatic conclusion: "for this reason, criminals of conviction like Hitler and Stalin are guilty."

Preparing our conscience to reason rightly

To how do we prepare our conscience to arrive at correct moral judgements? There are four sources of moral knowledge:

1. Reality (objectivity): well-developed moral reasoning looks at how best a person can exercise their freedom in compliance with truth. The outcome is to establish knowledge of what is objectively (universally) right or wrong. This is opposed to calculating reasoning, which translates the world into quantitative measures in which the world becomes technologically exploitable. To make moral judgements more certain, a person has to strive to interpret the data of experience and the signs of the times, apply relevant historical lessons, take the advice of competent people, and listen to appropriate authorities.

2. Conscience: Since moral knowledge cannot be quantified, these days morality is left to the individual's imagination to decide. Relativism reigns supreme as judgements of conscience often contradict one another. Therefore, we need to note that "conscience is not an oracle. It is an organ which requires growth, training and practice, formation and education. In the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it and educate it."

3. Community: Historically considered, morality does not belong to the area of subjectivity, but is guaranteed by the community. It is in the lifestyle of a community that the experience of generations is stored up: experiences of things that can build up a society or tear it down, how the happiness of an individual and the continuity of the community as a whole can be brought together in a balanced way, and how the equilibrium can be maintained. So the wisdom of tradition guides the individual. It is therefore disappointing to observe communities in the world today being captured by corrupted mindsets so that individuals are wracked by anxiety, confusion and despair.

In that connection, an egregious error is pervasive in society at this time, namely, that if many people say something is right and true then that judgement must reflect what is, in fact, morally right. In a lazy society, consensus takes the place of useful ethical investigation. Consensus does not, however, make for truth, and the moral judgement manifested by conscience cannot be made true by appealing to majority opinion.  Each person has an obligation to confirm to their own satisfaction that something is morally right or wrong, with responsibility for any moral decision attaching to the individual before the community and before God. God forgives, but the community—of a later period—may not.

4. The will of God and His revelation: Conscience described so far denotes a co-knowing of the person with God. it is from this consideration that there emerges the absoluteness with which conscience asserts its superiority even over authority. Ratzinger continues that only the will of God can establish the boundary between good and evil, that is, certitude about what is right or wrong.  

Taken in isolation, each of the four leave questions unanswered. But when they are taken in combination, the path of moral knowledge opens up before us. The formation of conscience demands attention to all four.

Adherence to a set of moral standards is of little importance in many societies globally. Uppermost among the causes for this is the pervasive permissive culture, " that does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate standard consists of one's own ego and desires." We see the "dictatorship of relativism" and "the right to choose" giving little acknowledgement to the norms, values and lifestyles of the civilisation that made possible the world of today.

An inner apostasy against tradition has occurred in the hearts of cultural leaders and ordinary people alike. That has extended to alienation from objective truth and from God. Ratzinger draws a disturbing conclusion:

Whether a person is able to attribute reason to being and to decipher its moral message depends on whether he answers the question about God. If the Logos of the beginning does not exist, neither can there be any Logos in things...When there is no God there is no morality and, in fact, no mankind either.

In the formation of conscience the word of God is the light for our path (see Psalm 119). Prayer and openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit are essential if we are to cultivate a heart sensitive to the movements within our conscience. 

Cultivation of familiarity with the inner voice of conscience is a lifelong endeavour. First, the family circle has to be the setting for the development of human virtues, which govern our actions, order our passions and guide our conduct. There the child's effort to overcome selfishness and pride, human weakness and faults, and feelings of complacency,  can be supported. The adult continues to work on their own life of virtue:

Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Paul to the Philippians 4:8)

Ignorance that affects right judgement can be blameworthy or not. When a person takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or is blinded by bad habits or self-centred lifestyle, that person is guilty over the wrong action or omission, even though the action was taken in the belief that their conscience approved of it. 

Again, a person must not be forced to act contrary to their conscience. This is a hot issue today in the fields of healthcare, education, government, and business practice. Nor must a person be prevented from acting according to their conscience, except when the exercise of their conscience offends against one of these three rules:

💢 One never do evil so that good may result from it;

💢 The Golden Rule: Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do so to them;

💢 Charity always proceeds by way of respect for one's neighbour, and of care for their conscience so that we do not prompt the neighbour to stumble into evil.

Therefore, this post will conclude by stressing the importance of our giving deliberate attention to forming our conscience well, and conversely, by accepting that though we must always follow our conscience in doing what what we believe is right and true, and in rejecting what is  morally wrong, our conscience may direct us on a path that is morally erroneous. Our conscience is not infallible, but with effort involving our whole lifestyle and our process of reasoning, we can turn aside from what is blinding us and grow in right judgement of moral conduct. 

𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶𐫶 

This post is indebted to the author of the work below in that much of the text here is from that book.

A Reflection on Ratzinger's Analysis on the Infallibility of Conscience by Thierry M NDime, Bambui, Cameroon, 2017. Published on Amazon, Kindle edition, 2022.

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