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Summary Religious Studies OCR A level Year 2 Ethics: Conscience, Aquinas and Freud Revision Booklet CA$16.56   Add to cart
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Summary Religious Studies OCR A level Year 2 Ethics: Conscience, Aquinas and Freud Revision Booklet
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  • Course
  • G582 - A2 Religious Ethics
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  • OCR

This 13 page booklet includes everything you need to know for the topic of conscience. What's inside: - Aquinas' view - Freud's view - Examples and demonstrations - Distinction between vincible and invincible ignorance with examples - Links to Fletcher - Strengths and weaknesses of A...

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Document information

  • April 17, 2024
  • 13
  • 2021/2022
  • Summary

Subjects

  • conscience
  • aquinas
  • freud
  • synderesis
  • conscientia
  • vincible ignorance
  • invincible ignorance
  • prudence
  • fletcher
  • freuds conscience
  • comparing aquinas and freud

Written for

  • A/AS Level
  • OCR
  • Religious Studies
  • G582 - A2 Religious Ethics
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Conscience (Aquinas + Freud)
Mini Summary: Aquinas’s view of the consequence (theological)
 Aquinas believes we have a natural inclination towards good (synderesis) and
we can use our reason (ratio) to achieve this
 This good = to fulfil our telos
 To fulfil our telos, we must fulfil all the primary precepts – ‘to preserve life’ ‘to
worship God’ ‘to educate’
 And use our reason to work out the secondary precepts
 Aquinas believes though, that God is involved, we have a natural inclination to
worship God
 If we reason excellently, we can reach eudomonia which is the highest good
where we achieve afterlife
 The correct way to act is called conscientia – we must use our ratio (reason) to
make the right decisions and synderesis will help us to do this
 The reason why our conscience makes mistakes is because of real and
apparent goods – when you believe something to be good when it is actually
not
 Another reason is due to vincible (morally blamed) and invincible ignorance
(not morally blamed – ignorant of the real truth)
 However, prudence is an ethical wisdom (a wisdom concerning humans) that
will help you towards the right actions – these wisdoms are taught – we have a
natural inclination towards good, but we might not internalize these teachings if
not taught.
 In order to behave morally, our prudence must be basically breaking bad habits
and getting used to behaving in the right way


Conscience
Def: Process of reasoning to understand right and wrong ‘mind of man making moral
judgements’.
Divided into 2 parts - synderesis and conscientia.
The errors of conscience = due to our ignorance.
NOTE - It is not God directly speaking to us (this is Newman) rather God gives us the
tools to work out what we ought to do.

Synderesis
Def: To follow the good and avoid the evil
 For Aquinas, the conscience is the ‘mind of man making moral judgments’ - it
comes in two parts synderesis + conscientia
 Synderesis is our natural inclination that we seek to do good and avoid evil
 It involves our awareness of what the rules are
“Synderesis is not a power, but a natural habitat” - synderesis is not a one off
act but a habit of reasoning that we develop with practice so that we will come to
understand and be able to apply the moral rules


EXAMPLE:

, One way of imagining this is to think of synderesis as a safe that we possess and
developing our reasoning is acquiring the key
 It is possible that we become confused as to what the good is and we seek an
apparent good rather than a real good - this means we have a responsibility
to:
1. Educate our conscience and become better at reasoning and thinking through
the moral rules
2. Develop our conscience through the repeated use of ‘right reason’

Conscientia
Def: a person’s reason making moral judgements
 Conscientia is the practical working out of synderesis
 It is the intellectual process of making actual moral judgements and applying
them to the situations we face
Telos
Def: end goal/purpose
 We are all aiming towards our telos (which are the 5 primary precepts) and
Aquinas believes that goodness = fulfilling our telos

Ratio
Def: “the right reasoning in acting”



The conscience making errors

Vincible ignorance
Def: A lack of knowledge for which a person is responsible.
A person knows the rules yet they pursue an apparent good e.g an if a man sleeps
with someone other than his wife because he is unaware of the moral rules about
adultery or thinks that it does not apply in this case - the error is his responsibility.
E.g. Euthanasia - if you help someone euthanise whilst knowing that the UK law is
against it.

Invincible ignorance
Def: A lack of knowledge for which a person is NOT responsible
No wrongdoing, it is a genuine if unlikely mistake. E.g a man thought he was sleeping
with his wife but later on he realised it was someone else.

EXAMPLES (of vincible and invincible ignorance)
Vincible ignorance: As with Paul, Aquinas said that a person's conscience could
error (go wrong), either 'invincibly', through no fault of their own, or 'vincibly' -
through our own fault. For example, if I give money to a man who is begging on the
streets, I have good intentions, but my actions are actually unhelpful. If I had
considered my actions carefully, I would have seen that I wasn't helping him to
improve his situation - if anything, my actions would keep him on the streets longer. I
erred 'vincibly', as I would have done differently if I'd thought about it.

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