Humanity
Conscience
quick ideas about the conscience. What is the conscience? What are its foundations? Qualities of a conscience. Freedom and formation of one’s conscience.
Español1. What is conscience?
Conscience is a judgment made by our reason to recognize goodness or evil in a certain act.
2. What is necessary to have a conscience?
For conscience to judge whether an act is good or evil, intelligence is needed, together with prior knowledge on which that moral judgment can be based. Something similar occurs when the understanding judges the truth of a statement. For example, on hearing the statement “cows can fly,” our understanding immediately recognizes this as false. This judgment is based on previous knowledge about cows and flying.
3. On what does conscience base its judgments?
Judgments made by conscience are based on knowledge of human nature and of what is fitting for it. This wisdom is acquired from two sources:
- On the one hand, human nature calls for a particular way of acting, which is called the natural law. The Creator has made us in a specific way, leaving an imprint in our life that allows us to recognize good and evil.
- On the other hand, the Lord has told us exactly what is most fitting for us in the form of the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ teachings, which form our conscience.
4. How do you build a good conscience?
The accuracy of a moral judgment made by the intelligence is strengthened when a person obtains knowledge from the two previous sources.
- To learn about human nature, one needs to foster a desire to seek the truth and do good. This last idea is very important, since intelligence can become accustomed to doing evil and lose clarity of judgment.
- To learn and recall the teachings of Jesus Christ, one should turn to Christian means of formation such as talks, homilies, courses, books...
- To put this into practice, it may be a good idea to seek advice from good and wise people.
5. Is it useful to have a good and formed conscience?
It is important to distinguish good from evil. The biggest criminals have a deformed conscience and it’s said that in fact they are people without a conscience.
6. Qualities of conscience
- Conscience does not create the law, but simply applies God’s law to a specific situation. Man does not create good or evil, but emits a judgment according to the natural law imprinted in our nature. A pickpocket can convince himself that stealing is good; however, it clearly is not. He is simply wrong.
- Conscience cannot be separated from human acts. Human acts are those undertaken knowingly and freely, and therefore conscientiously. One may feel drawn toward sensible goods, but one also needs moral goodness.
- Conscience instructs us about good and leads us to act. It makes practical judgments: I can and should do this; I should avoid this other thing. In this way one also acquires experience.
- Conscience either approves or reproves. The judgment made by conscience is usually prior to acting. But a person keeps thinking after acting, and a sense of peace is felt if one acted correctly, while a sense of restlessness appears if one acted badly. That is why human beings have responsibility toward themselves.
7. Free consciences?
Freedom of conscience should be respected; however, this does not mean that conscience is independent from divine law. In this case, freedom consists in the absence of coercion when seeking the truth, not in independence from the truth. A person can convince himself that stealing is good, or that Beijing does not exist. In both cases he acts freely, but he is not stating the truth, whether moral or geographical.
8. A terrorist murders someone according to his conscience. Why is it bad? He is not acting badly because he followed his conscience, but because he has deformed it to that point. In reality, in such unnatural situations conscience still protests, and so the terrorist has to make a greater effort to convince himself that it is good.