93. CONSCIENCE

When we were children our parents told us what was right and wrong, school had its rules, and church had its sins. To be good, all we needed to do was obey all the dos and don'ts. If we did this, we were led to believe we were following conscience.
 
This view of conscience can carry into and through adult life so that one's perception of right and wrong is shaped primarily by the dictates of others. Is conscience just a product of nurture? Are we mere blank moral slates at birth to be written on by others, or do we have an inherent sense of ethics from the get-go?
 
Take a moment and think back to the time of earliest self-awareness. See if you do not agree that ethics has always been present within you. Have you not always made choices influenced by it? Conscience is like a homing instinct within a migrating bird breaking from the shell. Conscience is like an innate ethical compass and explains why society throughout time has had the same basic ethical grounding. Conscience and ethics are inescapable parts of being human.
 
We spend a lifetime tinkering with our conscience, testing its limits, compromising, suppressing, denying, ignoring, and passing it off to outside moral purveyors. We do this out of sheer laziness or in attempts to cheat life and gain unfair advantage. I am reminded of the storekeeper who kept the change the customer forgot to pick up, and then, out of good conscience, divided it with his business partner.
 
Perhaps we take the materialistic view that conscience is a mere epiphenomenon of brain atoms. This line of thought permits scientists to perform virtually any macabre experiment. Animals by the millions are cruelly tortured in laboratories around the world because cries of pain are considered to be nothing more than spark discharges across neurons. To materialistic scientists and laymen alike, conscience can be just troublesome and inconsequential baggage that makes us feel bad when all our other parts can feel so good.
 
As argued in the previous chapter, ethics cannot be reduced to amoral, deterministic atoms. Yet conscience is at our core and always ready to be consulted. In fact, as a Dutch proverb says, "In the courtroom of the conscience, a case is always in progress." Trying to ignore it is like reading a book on a sinking ship. We are painfully reminded of its presence when we flout it. Pangs of guilt from a violated conscience remain with us for a lifetime, teaching us to listen up when it speaks. Conscience is like a shadow that in midday, at the moment of infraction, scarcely is noticed underfoot. But in the evening of our lives how monstrous and terrible is the long shadow troubling our memory. Indeed, everything changes in the world except our good deeds and bad deeds. The bad ones are the only memories not forgotten. Unlike any other wound, time never erases nor heals them; it just makes them more painful. They are like a rough tooth to the tongue and stick in our memory like chewing gum to the sole of a shoe.
 
Discovering our true conscience requires reaching within to decide what is our conscience, as opposed to something seeded there by another person. Somebody else's rule sheet is not our conscience. Some societies practice cannibalism, infanticide, suicide bombing, or convoluted rituals because someone at some time decided such acts are of good conscience. The further the guru is in the past, and the less his words are tied to evidence, the more sure people are about the authority. But real conscience is not contingent upon where or how we are raised, and it most certainly can never contradict the facts. Although conscience should be tuned to the truth, we too often tune to somebody else's station, or just turn off our ethical receiver altogether. Nevertheless, truth and ethic are always there transmitting to us, always available for us to listen in.
 
Conscience is commonly marginalized into ethical meaninglessness by assuming it is dependent upon the whims and seasons of human desires and hopes. For example, military leaders instill patriotic 'conscience' into soldiers. Each side in a conflict sees it as moral and in good conscience to kill the enemy. Attorneys will defend the guilty and prosecute the innocent and do so in line with their trained legal 'conscience.' Physicians prescribe drugs and practice surgery and other therapies that may do more harm than good. But they do so in good 'conscience' because this is what medical school taught and it is in line with conventional standard of care. If a patient dies as a result of therapy, the doctor can take comfort in thinking he has done all that can be done as defined by accepted medical standards. If a food manufacturer makes food composed of a variety of synthetics and food fractions, and tortures it into nutritional oblivion to give it shelf-life and consumer appeal, that's considered fine as long as it meets certain regulatory requirements and the label is designed properly. The company will suffer no problems with 'conscience' regardless of the health consequences so long as their product is legal to sell.

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​On the other hand, consumers feel they only need to follow all the societal norms to be of good 'conscience.' Let doctors take care of health, the government take care of the economy, the military take care of security, the attorney take care of disputes, the accountant take care of finances, the church take care of ethics, and the food industry take care of food choices. Sit back, watch TV, overeat, pay the bills, and follow the rules. All is well and 'conscience' is served because the rules are being followed.
 
If we were to deny outside moral authority from society, school, religion, government, or parents, and be left alone with only our own conscience, would we become thieves and murderers? Rather than indulging amoral freedom, we would find the inner voice of conscience far more demanding than even the most strict outside ethical code. Besides, if one is looking for virtue, it is found in choice, not obedience. Plato so wisely said, "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
 
Sometimes a clear path to right is not always evident no matter how much we soul search. The infinite circumstances and nuances of life can create constant dilemmas. But it is that very element of uncertainty that helps us in our training to be better people standing on our own feet. If morality were reducible to a precise formula there would be only two choices in life: know the formula; follow the formula. Although that is what much of religion has tried to do, this approach can reduce people to followers, not free moral agents. We are not here to be robots, but rather thinking people, ever searching our inner sense of ethics and meeting all challenges.
 
Perhaps our most difficult task in life is to be sure we are not just moo-ing along back to the barn to be milked by the conscience merchants. Surrendering to others makes us vulnerable to their self-interests. The end result all too often is that we become pawns, victims, experimental subjects, tools, resources, and profit centers of others. Rather, our objective should be to become full human beings and help to bring the world to a better place by listening to our own cultivated inner voice.
 
Conscience is well defined as being innate; it is an instinct that serves as an ethical guide. Abraham Lincoln said, "When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad." We will never come to know our conscience, however, until we free ourselves from the imposed consciences of others. This is not to say the views of others should not be considered, just that all of us are at least as justified in deciding what is right and wrong for ourselves, as someone else is in deciding it for us. This does not mean just dropping out and being self-willed. To the contrary, it means taking on the heavy lifting of being informed and exercising judgment. A conscience nurtured by search, openness, self responsibility, and a commitment to reason, evidence, and truth (the SOLVER principles) is a heavy burden, but one each of us must shoulder.
 
Exercising conscience is not an easy task because it means looking within to a most fearsome and demanding place. There is nothing quite so humbling and terrifying as coming to know the good that lies within and how much we are capable of doing or becoming.