By Paul Strohm
Among ethical concepts, conscience is a remarkable survivor. During the 2000 years of its existence it has had ups and downs, but has never gone away. Originating as Roman conscientia, it was adopted by the Catholic Church, redefined and competitively claimed by Luther and the Protestants during the Reformation, adapted to secular philosophy during the Enlightenment, and is still actively abroad in the world today. Yet the last few decades have been cloudy ones for conscience, a unique time of trial.
The problem for conscience has always been its precarious authorization. It is both a uniquely personal impulse and a matter of institutional consensus, a strongly felt personal view and a shared norm upon which all reasonable or ethical people are expected to agree. As a result of its mixed mandate, conscience performs in differing and even contradictory ways. It lends support to the dissenting individual or exponent of unpopular or even aberrant claims. But it is also summoned in support of the norm, and broadly accepted ethical standards.
Each of these authorizations—the personal and the institutional—has its pitfalls. The fervent individual, summoned by burning personal conviction about the rightness of his or her cause, lies open to suspicions of solipsism or arrogance. But, on the other hand, institutionally or state-sponsored conscience, or conscience speaking for settled public opinion, risk complacency or ethically stunted orthodoxy. One recalls the predicament of Huckleberry Finn, who suffers what he identifies as conscience pangs for his decision to assist Jim to escape from enslavement, when this bourgeois or ‘churchified’ conscience is obviously a false friend and enemy to his superior ethical intuitions.
Despite such issues, conscience remains a force for much good in the world. Its most crucial function, and perhaps the one most in need of support, is its encouragement to the private individual struggling with institutional tyrannies—most dramatically, with various forms of state tyranny. We have witnessed the incarceration and continued surveillance of China’s Ai Weiwei. Ai has recently been called ‘China’s conscience’, but his more urgent need might be less public and more personal, the need to enjoy his own conscience undisturbed by governmental or other external intervention. Remarkable individuals like Ai have proven willing to endure sacrifice for conscientious belief–and sacrifice they have. Recently Lasantha Wickramatunge, a courageous Sri Lankan journalist, gave his life to expose corruption. He wrote a farewell dispatch, which amounted to his own obituary letter, which concluded, ‘There is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.’ Salman Taseer, governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, declared in a 1 Jaunary 2011 television interview that ‘If I do not stand by my conscience, then who will?’—three days before his assassination. Less dramatically, but still tellingly, one may consider some of the smaller cases of conscience that people confront daily. Explaining his break with his political party to support a faltering gay marriage bill, Fred W. Thiele Jr, a New York state Assemblyman, explained, ‘There’s that little voice inside of you that tells you when you’ve done something right, and when you’ve done something wrong. . . That little voice kept gnawing away at me.’ 0 Comments on Conscience today as of 1/1/1900