Lecture notes
Conscience
Religious Studies AQA A Level. Complete Year 2 Ethics notes.
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ConscienceConscience as behaviour developed through social interaction (Lawrence Kohlberg)
- Defined six stages od moral development from birth, in three levels: pre-conventional, conventional
and post-conventional.
- The final stage is am individualised conscience where moral decisions must be consistent and
universalizable.
- To go against the conscience leads to feelings of guilt.
- Kohlberg stressed the development through encountering dilemmas.
Conscience as an aspect of the super-ego (Sigmund Freud)
o The super-ego is the controlling/restraining self: it controls impulses that are potentially damaging to
society, by judging and threatening punishment.
o The feeling of threat is the conscience.
o To go against the super-ego beings about feelings of shame, guilt and anxiety.
o If Freud is right, then the conscience cannot be seen as a source of moral authority, since is it just the
internalisation of others wishes.
o It has nothing to do with God, except where God is invented as another source of authority.
o Therefore, conscience has little to do with our desire to do what is morally right.
Conscience as sanctions or social conditioning (Émile Durkheim)
Conscience is the sanctions/social conditioning that the group brings to bear on the individual,
reinforced by the figure of God as the ultimate projection of moral authority.
Argued that societies work through a collective conscience, an act is wrong if society disapproves of
it.
Receives support from evolutionary accounts of conscience as a survival mechanism.
Conscience as the authoritarian and the humanistic conscience (Erich Fromm)
Conscience is associated with guilt, shame and fear, it is the sense of moral responsibility rising from
the fear of being rejected by society.
Society is based on rules and conformity to norms.
Argues that we have a humanistic conscience that arises from our instinctive knowledge of what
destroys life and what makes it flourish.
This can make us disobey society to bring about flourishing.
Groups improve their survivability by individuals having a conscience that compels them to maintain
group loyalty.
The authority of parents and society is a powerful tool to compel social obedience.
Conscience as the innate voice of God (Augustine and Schleiermacher)
- Conscience is innate, put into human minds by God, and so amounts to innate knowledge of God’s
moral laws.
- Augustine literally sees conscience as the voice of God.
- Problems with Augustine’s view:
o The amount of evil in the world, suggests God speaks to people selectively.
o Makes ethical discussion redundant.
o Means we cannot be morally free.
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