The Inconvenient Conscience

by Cormac Burke

The fear of being influenced is one of the most characteristic fears of our age. It is healthy for a man to be on his guard against undue influence or bad influence. But the fear of influence of any type is clearly unhealthy. Today it has practically reached the level of being a neurosis. It is unhealthy among other reasons because in practice it is quite impossible for a man to avoid being influenced. All he can do is to try to distinguish between positive and helpful influences, and negative or harmful influences; and to welcome the former and resist the latter.

    We are being influenced whether we like it or not or are aware of it or not. We are being influenced by fashion, by views expressed in newspapers or on television, by the comments and even the attitudes of our friends, etc. We are being influenced in our thinking, in our standards, and therefore also in our consciences. For if conscience can be defined as a faculty of moral judgment that distinguishes between right and wrong, it evidently must judge according to some standard or standards. There is a basic innate standard lo conscience, what we might call a certain instinct of rightness and wrongness (the scholastic 'synderesis'). But in the main these standards are developed precisely under the influences that surround us and affect us from earliest days: home, school. environment, friends. reading, etc.

    No one goes through life with unchanged moral standards. Some of the standards one originally held are matured and confirmed and intensified. Others perhaps give way to completely new ones. And so our conscience the elements of judgment which make up our criterion of right and wrong is constantly being formed and reformed.

    All education, just as all advertising or all political propaganda, is designed to influence. The aim of education is to inculcate a grasp of facts or principles that will make a person better prepared for life. Moral education, concretely. is designed to inculcate principles of conduct. In this sense moral education is the aim of parents, teachers, youth leaders, civil rights campaigners, etc.

    All education which seeks to inculcate some moral or civic code is aimed therefore at forming conscience, at increasing our sensitivity to right or wrong. However, the influences operating on the development of conscience are not necessarily always formative. They can be deformative-as, for instance, in the case of the parent or teacher who implants racial prejudice, or a sense of social snobbery or of class warfare.

    So there is a right way and a wrong way of forming the individual conscience. There are right norms to be inculcated; or wrong ones. People of course differ as to which exactly are the right norms, and which are the wrong; what exactly makes for a right, an enlightened, conscience in one man; and what makes for a wrong or erroneous conscience in another.

    The conscience is right when it tends to judge in accordance with objective truth. It is wrong when the principles by which it judges are, objectively speaking, false. Formation of conscience, therefore, is that process by which true principles of conduct gradually become operative in a person's mind, by which his mind gradually takes hold of true principles. Deformation of conscience is the process by which false principles gradually come to shape and govern the working of the mind.

When conscience protests

    The grasp of right principles is the first condition of the sound formation of conscience. But an equally important condition is to live according to these principles. In other words, conscience also tends to be formed by living according to conscience: and conscience tends to be deformed by living contrary to conscience. To hold certain principles in one's conscience, and then to act against them, is of the essence of moral evil or sin. Every man who knows himself has had the experience of sinning, of choosing something which his conscience tells him to be wrong.

    In such case, when the will chooses against the conscience, it may not be content with a break-away movement. Ir may attempt a take-over. It may try to manipulate conscience, to bend conscience to principles that suit its choice.

    Let us examine this further. Conscience judges that something is morally good, and ought to be done. For instance, a man feels he must tell the truth, even though, in his circumstances, he finds this very difficult. But the will is free. In his will, he may decide otherwise. He may choose to lie. To lie, of course, in such a case appears to the will as something good (not as a moral good, but as a good in the sense that it offers some immediate relief or satisfaction). Conscience may oppose this choice of the will, retaining a clear awareness that, at a deeper level, such a choice is not good. Or conscience may, after a debate, acquiesce for a moment, allowing that it seems good. But usually this acquiescence is short-lived. Once the will is satisfied in its object, its demands subside, the mind can review the situation in greater freedom and objectivity, and then conscience speaks with its voice of judgment: 'That was wrong'. And so the will stands accused. A man cannot shake off the awareness, 'I did wrong'.

    But if a man acquires the habit of doing unethical acts, if he lets his will habitually choose wrong in a particular area of conduct, then the temptation will be strong to want to find a way of silencing the accusing voice of conscience, and so letting the will out of dock...

    This is the crisis point. The will may, so to speak, 'plot' against mind and conscience. It may try to make the mind dwell on 'reasons' that seem to justify the conduct in question. And it may succeed in its attempt.

    For of course the will can choose an intellectual act as the object of its desire. Just as, for instance, it can choose to dwell on the truth taught by the Church - and on all the supernatural and human motives in favour of accepting it as true - so it can choose to dwell on some error, and on the arguments that seem to support that error .

    Conscience will protest initially. It will put up a fight; all the more strongly because it is a fight where the ultimate issue may well be its own survival, its own independence and freedom.

    But if the will wins, and if a man lets his will win time and again, they by dint of dwelling on the attractive points of error, he can cloud his own mind and deaden his conscience. If a man lets his conscience down in this fight, he ends up not with a free conscience but with one that is enslaved to his (bad) will and often, to vice; one that is ready to fall in with and approve anything the will wants. Such a man has lost his freedom of conscience.#