I Conscientious judgments

Immanuel Kant provided a good beginning at understanding the value of following one's conscience when he said:

Kant gives voice to one of the salient facts about conscience – that for many people thwarting conscience brings a person to feel shame or guilt and not to be able to tolerate seeing himself or herself in this dishonored position. In this way conscience places barriers in our way that move us to act honorably so as to live up to standards that we feel we cannot but live up to.Footnote ²

When some people consider serving in the military, they fear experiencing the shame or dishonor of failing to do what they conscientiously judge they should do. Such a reaction normally only occurs when there is a matter of importance that is the subject of such a conscientious judgment. Conscience-based judgment can be of matters great and small, and conscience can also be false in the sense that it is influenced by the prejudiced opinions of those who brought one up, or by too great a concern for the egoistic interests of the self. But there is a range of conscientious judgment that is of the utmost importance for the inner harmony of the self and that has been well recognized as grounding exemptions from military service in many Western democracies for more than a century.

Conscience, like virtue, is a capacity that leads to socially beneficial consequences in those who develop it. As Philippa Foot has said, virtues are “corrective, each one standing at a point at which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good.”Footnote ³ Similarly, conscience places barriers in one's path that can contribute to the avoidance of wrongdoing. Yet conscience, unlike the virtues, seems to be grounded in a concern for the self, for the self's inner harmony, rather than directed toward the proper end of human action. While it is quite likely that Foot is right in claiming that there is no general virtue of self-love, conscience does seem to be different from virtue in that it proceeds from and remains closely allied with a certain kind of concern for the self. Conscience begins as a concern for the self, not necessarily a psychological concern so much as a fundamental concern for the self's integrity, which nonetheless leads to restraints on selfishness.Footnote ⁴

Peter Winch came to the following understanding of conscience. “To will the good is to see a limit beyond which one cannot (or will not, I do not think it matters which one says here) go. There are certain actions which such a man could not (would not) perform, whatever the considerations in their favor.”Footnote ⁵ In this view, the main function of conscience is the setting of barriers, such as the barrier against doing harm to another person. One's recognition of wrongness is experienced as a “voice” or as an intuitive insight rather than a calculation. To achieve this realization, one must open oneself up to what can be discovered through reflective thinking, instead of narrowly focusing on means–end deliberation. This account of the experience of conscience is meant to be similar to the account provided by Socrates that we will examine in more detail in Section III.Footnote ⁶

The reflective move that characterizes conscience is the reflective judgment about how one will view oneself after one has done that which one sees as wrong. This is why when one says “my conscience won't let me do it” one means that conscience has provided such a strong motivation that it seems to disallow the putatively wrongful conduct altogether. This motivational experience seems to be fairly constant among those who have conscientious experiences, but the standards of rightness and wrongness generally vary.

While conscience is not straightforwardly cognitive, its conative aspect does result from a reflection, not from a straightforward emotional response. The feeling of shame or guilt that accompanies conscience is what occurs after one has judged that one has acted wrongly, but the role of conscience is much more concerned with projected actions. Here guilt and shame are not the main motivational components. Instead, a person fears or worries that she will experience guilt or shame, and this is much more like a predictive judgment than an emotional response.

Initially it is difficult to see how conscience could motivate effectively based on guilt or shame. The guilt or shame, which arises only after one has acted, can obviously not affect the conduct which one has already engaged in. For conscience truly to place barriers in one's path concerning future conduct it must operate independently of the actual guilt or shame that is the response to doing what is perceived to be wrong. Only if one predicts that one will be guilt-ridden or shamed later and that that will cause internal disharmony (which is itself disvalued), will one be motivated by conscience against doing wrongful acts in advance of actually doing them. There is an important difference between the expressions “my conscience won't let me do it” and “my conscience is bothering me for having done it.” Both are properly the actions of conscience but only the first will actually provide the kind of barriers to conduct that would cause one to avoid doing that which one sees as wrong.

Consider the example of a person who is faced with the question of whether she should serve her country in the military. It is often thought that the conscientious objector decides not to serve because she places her conscience over the interests of her society. Indeed this is precisely the way that C. D. Broad characterized it in his essay “Ought We to Fight for Our Country in the Next War.”Footnote ⁷ Conscientious objectors value their honor more than the collective good, Broad said. But he also admitted that some may genuinely object to serving in the military because it is thought that the military is not the sort of enterprise that is good for society.

In my view, the conscientious objector often risks great harm to himself or herself, such as being imprisoned, so as to sway the majority from engaging in a course of conduct that is believed to be wrong for them.Footnote ⁸ Insofar as this is a truly conscientious move, then it clearly is not merely a question of choosing one's honor (seen as a purely egoistic concern) over the collective good. Instead, we have a good example of the merger within conscience of concern for the self and concern for society. It is a merger because it is still the case that the motivation to act conscientiously is the worry about the integrity of the self, what Broad calls one's honor. But instead of honor being opposed to the interest of society, the two have merged together in some important sense. Of course, the interest of society here is not necessarily the declared interest of that society but the putative interest of what that society would or should value.

Judgments of conscience have been seen as some of the most important for a person's sense of integrity. And also these judgments are connected to a concern for the self. But insofar as one's integrity connects with doing what one perceives to be the right thing to do, this type of concern for the self is very often a concern for what is right for the society. This has been true of philosophical accounts of conscience as far back in time as arguably the first account provided by Plato in his portrayal of Socrates’ final speech in the Apology, which I will examine in Section III of this chapter.

Conscientious objectors often see themselves as doing the honorable thing, indeed as doing what they know to bring on difficulties for themselves, so as to advance the collective good. This is especially true of conscientious objectors who act out of principle. In Chapter 12, I will argue that selective conscientious objectors often act in no less honorable ways than those who are general conscientious objectors. The selective conscientious objector also can act on principles that are seen to be serving the collective good.

And now we come to the issue of why being forced to violate one's conscience is so disvalued. There is a core commitment of the self to act in ways that do not bring dishonor on the self. Integrity of the self is only maintained when there are not things that one does that are at odds with one's core beliefs. Being forced to act in ways that violate those core beliefs is to undermine the value of a given person's life in terms of how one sees oneself. Once the core beliefs that are fundamental to who one is are undermined there is a violation of the core of the self, which is sometimes one of the worst things that can happen to a person.Footnote ⁹

II Huck Finn's problem: false conscience

Before proceeding further to connect judgments of conscience with contingent pacifism, I must spend some time on an obvious problem, namely that some judgments of conscience are clearly at odds with any reasonable conception of what morality requires. To get as clear a case as we can of how conscience can lead us astray, I wish to follow Jonathan Bennett in discussing the case of Huck Finn's conscience-based judgment that he should turn in his best friend Jim for having run away from his slaveholder owner.

Bennett captures well the difficulty in discerning when conscience is grounded in bad versus good morality when he says:

Bennett admits that he cannot prove that his morality is good and Huck Finn's is bad, but he thinks most people will agree with him due to basic considerations of sympathy.

Here is a short passage from Mark Twain's novel that is the source of Bennett's, and my own, worries about conscience.

Here Huck feels that his conscience is judging that he should turn Jim in rather than continue to aid him in escaping from enslavement. Bennett is surely right that most people today would think that Huck has it backwards: his conscience should be telling him to continue to help Jim escape from slavery.

So, it appears that there is something wrong with Huck's conscience – it seems to be a bad conscience or to be based in a bad morality. Bennett says:

Not only does Huck's conscience seem to be based in a bad morality, Huck finds his conscience speaking to him clearly of what is right and wrong, or at least what is wrong – seemingly morally wrong.

Many people today would be inclined to focus on Huck's upbringing, as Bennett does, in order to explain how Huck's conscience could be so different from our consciences of today. But unless there is one kind of upbringing that is objectively right it is difficult not to feel the pull of Huck Finn's case since his conscience speaks to him perhaps just as strongly as ours does to us. If Huck is thwarted in his attempt to live by his conscience-based judgments, it looks like at least we must admit that his integrity has been violated just as would be true if his conscience was good rather than bad. But this also seems wrongheaded since what Huck is trying to do to Jim seems so clearly, to us, to be morally wrong.

Consider again the teenager who, because of his religious upbringing, says his conscience won't let him fight in a war. That war may be supported by a majority of his fellow citizens who think serving in the war is not only morally right but also morally required for the safety of their society. In such a case, it is fair to ask whether these teenagers aren't like Huck Finn in having consciences melded by upbringing that the rest of the society would not approve of. And this also should make us wonder what is so special, or weighty, about conscience that can withstand the cases that clearly, to us, are the sort of consciences that we should not pay deference to.

Indeed, Jonathan Bennett takes up the case of the pacifist at the end of his essay on conscience. There he says:

In Bennett's view we shouldn't let our sympathies have “a blank check in advance” but instead subject them to critical scrutiny. In other cases, as in the case of Huck Finn, Bennett praises Huck for letting his sympathies overcome his conscience. But the problem is to ascertain when to go with our sympathies and when not to give them that blank check.

The issue is especially difficult because the experience of conscience seems quite similar regardless of whether one is motivated by good or bad upbringing. Introspection isn't likely to help us figure out if we should disregard conscience because it could have been formed by bad moral upbringing as well. And introspection isn't likely to tell us when we should follow conscience just because it was formed by good moral upbringing.

Objective morality, if there is such a thing, does not normally distinguish itself by how it appears experientially. And for this reason we should be reluctant to force someone to go against his or her conscience even in those cases where it appears to us that the person's conscience is really grounded in a bad morality. As Bennett also tells us: “This is not arrogance: it is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false.”Footnote ¹⁴

There is a complex relationship between reason and sentiment in terms of how conscience is restrained. Reason can restrain conscience as it seeks to make more reasonable the often conflicting influences of upbringing that can result in what appears to be bad conscience. Similarly, but in very different ways, sympathy can humanize conscience by tempering the often harsh effects of upbringing on conscience. But for some people, no restraints seem acceptable. These people are moved so strongly by conscience on certain occasions that they cannot accept any restraints or limits on what they “know” they should do. Indeed, the emerging feelings of sympathy that Huck has for Jim could be seen as an emerging critical conscience.

For some people conscience speaks so strongly and so authoritatively that it seems to them that it must be obeyed. For such people, as we will see in later chapters, what conscience dictates requires full compliance or else the self is put in jeopardy. The integrity of the self depends on doing exactly what conscience dictates. And in addition, what conscience dictates seems to be all that morality can demand. As Bennett pointed out, for many people what conscience dictates to be right or wrong cannot appear to be any different from what is objectively right or wrong. Yet, for some other people, perhaps the majority of people, conscience is experienced as just one voice and not necessarily the loudest voice they hear. Indeed, these people seem to be able to step back and ask whether what their conscience dictates is in some sense false when considered from the alternative conscientious perspective of sympathy – as in the case of Huck Finn.

The problem is that it is very difficult to tell whether one's conscience is true or false, and even harder for those who assess us from the outside as it were, so we take a major risk when we act against conscience. The epistemic problems loom large and those who deny the legitimacy of their consciences, if they can, seem to run the risk that what they disregard is the true morality not the false morality of a twisted upbringing. It seems better to follow one's conscience than to take the risk that one not only jeopardizes one's integrity but likely acts wrongly as well. This is why Mark Twain's account of Huck being nearly paralyzed by his confrontation with conscience rings true. When we don't follow our consciences, even in those cases when clearly we should not, it still causes an internal disharmony.

III Socrates’ daimon

Discussions of conscience date back to the beginning of philosophy. In Plato's Apology, Socrates discusses why he acts as he does toward the laws of the State. His rationale is that he is driven by an internal voice. That voice only tells him what not to do; the voice does not provide positive guidance. This construal of conscience is important for understanding what might be the limits of tolerance toward conscience that could be acceptable in a society where many people have different consciences. And yet if the individual's voice of conscience were completely to replace the voice of the authority of the State, there is a real worry that social chaos would rein, with even simple co-ordination problems insoluble – a point I take up in Chapter 11 with a discussion of the connections between private conscience and public conscience, especially in cases of civil disobedience.

Socrates describes the daimon, what he says is the voice of a god, as telling him what not to do. Here is a relevant passage:

In this account, conscience only forbids but never positively commands. The voice of conscience is thus limited and may be more palatable when an individual's conscience comes up against the authority of the State. In other words, conscience is not a source for the morality of all action – in fact a person's conscience leaves a large swath of the morality of action unaddressed. Only those things seen as clearly wrong are singled out for the strong motivational pull of conscience.

Socrates adds to this account of conscience that the voice of conscience cannot be silenced even if members of one's society are silenced or even killed. At the end of the day, a person faces not other people who might condemn him or her but someone who is much more to be feared. A person confronts a voice within herself that, when not listened to, will force the self to be out of harmony with itself. The disruption of the self, where one part of the self condemns what another part of the self has done or is about to do, is much more difficult to withstand than the condemnation of one's peers or other fellow society members.

Later in this dialogue, Socrates addresses why he feels he is doing the right thing in accepting the death sentence of the State rather than fleeing. He says:

Here we come to the issue of the epistemic status of the dictates or judgments of conscience.

Socrates regards his inner voice as providing guidance to him that gives clear proof of whether what he will do or has done is wrong. The proof is drawn in experiential terms, in the terms of how it feels not to be opposed by one's inner voice. Of course this does not confront the issue of the origin of the voice. And as the Huck Finn example shows us, it may be that the voice of conscience is not the voice of a good morality. Yet in both cases, where conscience is good and where it is bad, the dictates of conscience are often experienced as just as authoritative, causing a serious problem for the person who must decide whether to heed or disregard the voice of his or her conscience.

From the standpoint of risk, it seems that it is riskier to disregard than to heed the voice of conscience, if one values internal harmony. But this is not always true. In Socrates’ own case the risk is that he died in vain. And here the uncertainty of whether the voice of conscience conforms to objective moral standards, if there are any, is especially acute. And the fact that most people cannot tell whether their conscience has any relation to objective morality makes the question of risk even harder for a given person to assess.

Socrates treats his inner voice as if it were the voice of a god, a daimon. But even at his time, a daimon could be either a good or bad spirit that guides individuals while they are on earth. Indeed, our English term “demon” is basically a transliteration of the Greek term daimon. The term is used throughout antiquity to refer to the spirits of people once alive who remain in an intermediate state after death. And the term probably gets incorporated into the term eudaimonia used by Aristotle and others to stand for a certain kind of contentment or happiness – literally being good-spirited, which of course suggests that one could also be consumed by bad spirits as well. And that is the problem. If conscience can be dated back to Socrates’ use of the term daimon, it appears that from its inception conscience was seen as either good or bad – with the individual person having a difficult time telling when his or her inner voice issues from one or the other.

Socrates may have been the first philosopher to discuss conscience. If the Apology is indeed about conscience's effect on us, there is the problem of which nearly all who have written about conscience are seemingly aware – that conscience is not the same as sympathy or reason and may be based on good upbringing or on bad upbringing. As with Huck Finn, following the dictates of conscience may be the wrong path to follow, although Socrates claims he can tell that his conscience points him in the right direction.

IV Practical problems in assessing conscience's dictates

If a person's sense of subjective moral norms is learned in large part by listening to one's conscience, then the practical problem is to discern when conscience's norms are indeed tracking a good morality, or at least what most people over time would regard as a good morality. The judgments of conscience are not like most other judgments, arrived at by a consideration of reasons. Indeed, it is not clear that the judgments of conscience are primarily cognitive at all, although it would be a mistake not to see that the judgments of conscience are at least partially rational. In many people's experience, conscience manifests itself more like a feeling than a conclusion of a bit of reasoning. It is for this reason that conscience often operates through feelings of guilt and shame.

Consider the following Cold War-inspired example provided by the philosopher Richard Hare in his book Moral Thinking:

According to Hare's analysis of this example, there is a conflict between thinking that one ought to tell a lie, given the context of the situation, and also thinking that one ought not to tell a lie. If Hare is right, some people can be aware of this conflict, although not necessarily be able easily to resolve the conflict.Footnote ¹⁸

One thing to note in Hare's case is that the voice of conscience tells him not to tell a lie, it puts up impediments to action. On the Socratic account of conscience, if one is faced with a conflict it is highly likely that the impetus not to do something is probably coming from the voice of conscience. It is the fear of feeling shame or guilt that motivates us not to do certain things rather than to do something. But why is this? One of the reasons is that conscience does not deal with the whole of the moral domain, as I said, but only a segment of morality. This may perhaps explain why conscience can be bad – the full panoply of moral considerations may tell against what the conscience is currently dictating from the perspective of just one part of this moral domain.

In this respect, let us return to Huck Finn's dilemma, of whether to turn Jim in and hence not feel guilty, or not to turn him in based on his sympathy for Jim. In this case, Huck is aware of the force of conscience but also aware of a counterforce (perhaps even an alternative voice of conscience), sympathy. Of course, Mark Twain's novel has a dramatic tension in that Huck does not know which of these two forces is for the good, although he seems to think that conscience has a kind of prima facie upper hand. When he does not follow the dictates of his conscience he feels bad because he thinks he has not done the right thing.

The practical difficulty is that people often have a hard time telling whether their conscience does in fact align with something like a good morality. Most people follow the dictates of their consciences because it is generally a very strong motivator and because the dictates of conscience and the dictates of morality are very difficult to untangle from each other. Indeed, not having any better guide to morality than conscience, this strategy seems like a good one. It would be even better if people paid more attention when there were some other motivations that did not align with conscience, such as sympathy or rationality.

One strategy is to follow the dictates of conscience in each case where there do not appear to be counterforces such as sympathy. And then in those cases where there is a conflict one should pay attention to the possible ways that one's conscience may have gone wrong. One should be especially attentive to what about one's own society might be an occasion for prejudice or other factors that could bring about bad upbringing and that could skew the conscience so that it aligns with a bad morality. Again, this is not easy to do since if one has been brought up in a society that is prejudiced, it may be very difficult to notice that there is prejudice rather than merely normal customs in that society.

What is needed is to pay attention to cues that our conscience, normally trustworthy, may be failing us at the moment. The cues are most obviously that there are other motivations that pull us strongly in a different direction than the pull of conscience. Like some taboos, conscience may be at odds with rationality. And as I indicated above, conscience can be at odds with sympathy. It seems to me that these are two of the main cases of conflict that should alert us that there might be something wrong with our judgments of conscience. And as I have suggested, conscience should have aspects of rationality and sympathy in its judgments.

One other important cue that our conscience may not be a reliable indicator of a good morality is when our society is deeply flawed, as is true of a prejudiced society. But the cues of such a society are often not as easy to discern as are those of sympathy or rationality. A person can make some headway in ascertaining whether his or her society is prejudiced by attempting to look at that society from the perspective of an outsider. In this respect, reading from magazines or books that present alternative perspectives to that of the dominant perspective in one's society is often a good start.Footnote ¹⁹

We might also consider Richard Hare's dilemma for guidance on how to ascertain whether one's society is flawed in a way that would make us distrust our upbringing and the conscience that is spawned from it. In his book, Moral Thinking, Hare proposes that our moral thinking proceed in a step-by-step manner where we first get access to our intuitions but then take on a critical stance toward those intuitions. This method is similar to the method of reflective equilibrium proposed by John Rawls in his book, A Theory of Justice. In both cases what is crucial is imaginatively to take on a critical perspective, typically the perspective of a group that is not one's own, or that one does not know to be one's own.

We can regard the dictates of conscience as a source of pre-reflective intuitions that are data on which to start our moral thinking, but only as a start. One might here wonder whether conscience really does generally provide us with a good starting point. If conscience is tied to upbringing, and upbringing is itself tied to the norms of a particular society, why think that conscience has any claim to be data of any sort for ascertaining what morality requires? My answer will not please those who already believe that morality can be ascertained directly by appeal to reason or sympathy or some combination of the two. My view is that conscience is often the only initial data we have as a source, indeed a prime source, for our moral thinking.Footnote ²⁰

Some philosophers have pointed out that conscience appears to us in such a way that its authority cannot easily be denied since we generally lack the capacity to tell for sure whether or not conscience conforms to a good one. Or to put the point differently, a good morality does not appear to us with the same authority as does conscience. Now, of course, I agree that the way things initially appear is not a foolproof indication of the way things are. One need only reflect on the appearance of the bent stick in the pool of water that turns out to be straight when removed from the pool. Like our visual images that are generally a good starting point for our understanding of the true nature of the world of things, our consciences are generally a good starting point for our understanding of morality. In both cases, there is normally nothing more reliable as a starting point to which people have access initially.

Aquinas held a view about the knowledge of God's commands that is somewhat similar to the view I am urging that we adopt about conscience. Aquinas argued that while it is true that some people could ascertain directly what God's will is, most people either lacked this ability or could not be sure that they had it. For the majority of people, appeals to the texts purporting to contain divine revelation is the best source of initial knowledge of God's will.Footnote ²¹ Of course Aquinas’ view is especially controversial today when many people doubt that there is a God, let alone one that has a will. Today, many people will attribute the view of God's existence and attributes to simple superstition. And it is interesting to note that some theorists have made the same kind of charge against the dictates of conscience. Freud, for instance, claimed that conscience was nothing more than the internalized voice of one's father.Footnote ²²

Yet even if conscience is grounded in upbringing, which is often flawed, it is unclear what else could be a reasonable substitute for the pre-reflective intuitions that moral thinking needs to proceed from. The idea of prohibitions on action that seem to be grounded deep in the self is nearly impossible for most people to shake. We have a continuous history of thinkers who have given voice to such a phenomenon, starting with Socrates. And this is not only true of theorists, but also of poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists over this 2,500 year stretch. Again, that there is such reporting of the phenomenon of conscience for so long does not make it the case that conscience is a true or a good morality. But it is evidence that we should not disregard it unless there is other evidence that is very strongly countervailing.

Throughout this chapter, I have examined the phenomenon of conscience and attempted to assess its place in moral deliberation. The results of this chapter are not conclusive. It may yet turn out that conscience is conclusively debunked, perhaps by showing that it is grounded in an illusion. But until that happens, conscience provides us with at least a good starting point for our moral deliberations. As we will see in the next chapter, when governments try to silence conscience or force people to act against their consciences, the legitimacy of the State is called into question in a powerful way.

V Objections

Let us finally consider a few objections to the view I have set out. First, it could be said that the inner experience of conscience, like all of introspection, is unlikely to tell us much about the nature of morality or even of what our own moral beliefs are. Cognitive scientists and other psychologists have recently offered evidence for thinking that introspection is not a good guide to what is believed or known by a person who is engaging in the introspection. People are not especially good at discerning what their own mental states are at any given time. Insofar as conscientious judgment relies on applying what we learn about our own moral beliefs to a certain practical problem, conscience is not a good source of judgment since it is not reliable in figuring out what a person's beliefs are. Indeed, people are especially bad at discerning what any of their mental states are that they are experiencing, such as sympathy, let alone the substance of those mental states.

In response I admit that the reliability of conscience as a guide to what our beliefs truly are has indeed been challenged significantly of late. But it is worth wondering what the problem is if conscience cannot tell us accurately about our beliefs. We may have beliefs that are simply not accessible by conscience or any other means. If so, what are we to make of the beliefs that conscience is based in? Such beliefs that conscience uncovers or relies on may nonetheless be ones that are central to how we understand ourselves. And it may still be important for the integrity and coherence of the self that a person does not act in ways that are opposed by whatever it is that conscience is grounded in.

A second objection could be that if conscience is not grounded in anything other than the peculiar beliefs that a person has come to acquire, then conscientious judgment loses any claim to be connected to objective, or a good, morality. And it is then unclear why the judgments of conscience should be given any special standing in society. People can of course hold whatever beliefs they wish. But while idiosyncratic beliefs may make people unique, these conscientious beliefs have no special claim to be morally respectable beliefs. A person should not grant to such beliefs higher or more important status than other beliefs, especially when such beliefs conflict with the beliefs of the majority of members of one's society. And without such a pedigree it is unclear why conscientious beliefs should be highly respected by the members of a person's society.

This objection goes to the heart of the main thesis of this chapter, and the next chapter as well. The special status of conscientious judgments, both for the individual and for the society, turns on the respectability of such beliefs – that they should be respected by the individual and by the society, but not that they should be seen as unassailable. The account of conscience I have set out turns on the idea that the judgments of conscience are somehow dear to the self because they issue from the self's core. But if this is not the case, then it does become hard to see why we should give the judgments of conscience any heed.

One answer to this problem is to say that the integrity of the self seems to be simply valuable in itself and hence worthy of respect on that ground. Socrates worries that if his inner voice is not listened to he will be out of harmony with himself.Footnote ²³ As a result the person who fails to heed the judgments of conscience will not be true to himself or herself and will not be able to hold others up to the judgments of morality for lack of standing to make such a claim. There is a kind of tension in the self that most people avoid so as to have the moral standing in their own lights and that of their fellow society members that comes from being true to what one believes to be the right thing to do.

A third objection thus arises to my account, namely that heeding the dictates of conscience is only important for a sense of inner peace but not for much more. If there is no connection between conscience and a good morality, or any worthy set of moral beliefs at all, then the moral value of the demands made by conscience on the self or society seems completely lost. And it seems odd to urge that people follow their consciences as if they were a good moral guide when all these people are doing is following advice about what makes them feel good. This seems pernicious as a moral doctrine and certainly not something that should be recommended to young adults trying to decide whether they should serve their countries by participating in a given war.

I would respond by pointing out that inner peace is indeed quite valuable, especially if a person is unable to discern much about the nature of a good morality. If the self is schizophrenic it will often be simply immobilized. Even if all that acting on the dictates of conscience gains is inner peace, that is something itself valuable. The person at inner peace is at least the sort of person who is able to act in ways that morality might demand down the road. Those who are torn apart by inner turmoil will not be able to help themselves or their societies.

But it is also my view that there is more to the judgments of conscience than their connection to inner peace. In addition, there is a good chance that in most cases the dictates of conscience will not lead us astray. Of course this is a probabilistic claim for which it is hard to get evidence. But over time people report that their consciences have indeed been a good guide to moral action, and while they may be mistaken we have little evidence that any other guide is better.

Fourthly, there is the objection that is raised by the story of Huck Finn – what if the judgments of conscience are not just idiosyncratic and often right but often completely wrong, where a person's conscience tells that person to do what is the wrong thing to do, and in most cases? Such a situation will arise if conscience is formed by the education one gets in one's society and that society is profoundly racist, for example. In such situations, following conscience is not the best strategy or even an especially worthy strategy for the State to give deference to.

I would respond that in such a world where the voice of conscience is known to be completely wrong, there are other sources of judgment to turn to, such as sympathy and reason, but it is true that conscience should not be respected. The problem for any given person is to discern whether he or she is indeed living in such a prejudiced society. And I would be the first to admit that such a determination is especially hard. A person must check his or her conscientious judgments against not only judgments of others in his or her society but against people from other societies as well. I will take up this issue again in other chapters. But I admit that this opens the door for yet another objection.

And here is the last of the objections. It is unclear how a person can tell if the voice of conscience is wrong or not. And if it is opaque to the person involved about even the most basic discernment of when conscience has gotten us to go off the rails, then there is considerable risk in following conscience. And the risk gets much greater if the society feels it must respect a person's conscientious beliefs – even when it appears that the public welfare will thereby suffer. These considerations are such that they outweigh the worries about disrupting the inner peace of the self. Indeed, the better bet is to disregard conscience whenever there is a strong risk that following conscience may be precisely the wrong thing to do morally.

My response to this very important objection is to admit that I do not have a strong reply. In positions of uncertainty it of course makes sense to try to avoid the worse risks. But in most cases, disregarding the voice of conscience seems like too radical a conclusion to draw from the premises concerning the inability to say for sure that conscience is guiding us properly. And as I have said, it is very unclear what would be a better guide than one's conscience, especially given the long historical record of accounts of conscience as providing such important guidance particularly in times when morality is unclear at the societal level, when the chips are down as it were.Footnote ²⁴ But of course this objection makes it clear that a person's conscientious judgments should not be given overriding significance.

Some philosophers have said that reason is and should be our only guide. Such views seem initially to be at odds with the emphasis on conscience I have supported. But as I just indicated, what I support is a plurality of sources of action, with strong emphasis on conscience, sympathy, and reason. And I have suggested that conscience would be odd indeed if it were not at least partially rational. What I would deny is that there is a good basis to act on only one of these sources. I do not have the space to defend this view here, but in many of the cases we will consider in the following chapters conscience and reason seem to push us in the same direction, not in divergent ones.

In the next chapter we explore in much more detail what to think of the clash between a person's conscience, what we will call private conscience following Thomas Hobbes, and what might be called the public conscience of the society, by looking at some of the debates in the seventeenth century as well as today about how to think of those who oppose their society, as in cases of civil disobedience. And in Chapter 12, I will then work out a view of selective conscientious refusal.