Transcript Theories of conscience Innate Environ- mental

Key Words to be happy with
 Synderesis rule
 Mature conscience (Freud)
 Authoritarian conscience (Fromm)
 Super-ego
 Intuitive conscience (Butler)
 Atheistic conscience
 Altruism
Key assumption
 Conscience is a God-given faculty (Aquinas, Butler).
 Conscience is developed from our upbringing (Freud,
Piaget, Fromm).
 Conscience is a process of reasoning (Aquinas in his
second meaning of conscience, conscientia).
Summary diagram
Theories of
conscience
Environmental
Innate
Evolution
-ary
God-given
Newman
Butler
Freud
Dawkins
Reason
Piaget
Aquinas
Innate theories: Butler
 Conscience is final arbiter in a struggle to include
others’ interests.
 We are influenced by two principles: self-love and
benevolence.
 Conscience moves us to focus on others (benevolence)
rather than just ourselves.
 Conscience is more like an instinct…we don’t need to
think deeply about it.
 It’s “our natural guide assigned to us by the author of
nature”.
Conscience as guilt: Freud
 The human psyche has three components: ego, id and
superego.
 The id represents passions and desires.
 The ego is created in childhood as we learn to take
account of the world and society.
 The super-ego develops as we internalise the
disapproval and approval of others, particularly our
parents, who give us a sense of shame.
 Guilty conscience can grow from this, and become
pathological (irrational) eg obsessive compulsive
tidying.
 The mature conscience is the ego’s reflection on the
best ways of achieving integrity (wholeness).
Conscience as reason: Aquinas
 Aquinas saw synderesis as a capacity to exercise reason
to “do good and avoid evil” and conscientia as “reason
making right decisions” or something like practical
wisdom or phronesis - a virtue.
 Synderesis is an inclination given by God, and
phronesis a judgement practised and developed by
reason.
 So synderesis makes us aware of a moral principle like
“thou shalt not kill” and conscientia teaches us how
and when to apply it (eg we kill in time of war).
 People do evil because they pursue apparent goods
believing them to be real goods.
Dawkins: an interesting case
 Dawkins believes we have self-promoting genes (the
selfish gene) that are programmed for survival.
 But…we have also evolved an altruistic (concern for
others) gene as part of this survival strategy.
 Our ancestors found that co-operation is often more
successful than competition (as reflected eg in some
ape behaviour today).
 He calls this a lust to be nice, and says “we have the
capacity to transcend our selfish genes”.
 So conscience is biologically programmed into us.
The issues
 Where does conscience come from? God, our
upbringing or our evolved genes?
 Can we disobey our conscience? Is this a process of
development, as Freud argues, or our God-given
reason exerting itself, as Aquinas thought?
 What is guilt? As a feeling, is it our enemy (Freud) or
our friend (Butler)?
 For Eric Fromm’s theory of authoritarian conscience
click on this link:

http://www.philosophicalinvestigations.co.uk/index.php?view=article&catid=45%3Acon&id=69%3At
hree-theories-of-conscience&option=com_content&Itemid=54&limitstart=7
Evaluating conscience
 Conscience is either friend or enemy:
 Friend: guides, prompts, advises (Butler, Aquinas).
 Enemy: misleads, orders, causes pain and irrational
guilt (Freud, Fromm).
 What does it depend on?
- God
- Reason
- Irrational shame feelings
- A sense of integrity?