The Nature and Role of the Conscience
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- Created on: 20-04-13 12:47
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- The nature and role of the conscience
- Demonstrate K&U and discuss these areas critically and their strengths and weaknesses
- the different views of the consciences as God-given, innate or the voice of reason or instilled by society, parents, authority figures
- Whether conscience is a reliable guide to ethical decision making
- Key Philosophers
- Augustine
- Influenced by Plato - God is the source of all goodness
- One one virtue called virtue, goodness and justice are just aspects of virtue
- What bind all aspects of virtue is love. Conscience comes from this divine love.
- When God's divine love is revealed, we experience inadequacy. We can do nothing about this
- This is like thinking one is good at playing a sport and suddenly an international athlete joins in the game and you realise what you thought was good was in fact ordinary
- The conscience is more important than the teachings of the church
- The conscience is the voice of God within and therefore cannot be argued with
- or is it a self-delusion?
- Does God contradict himself: leads one person to do one thing and someone else the reverse
- Aquinas
- GOLDEN MEAN
- "application of knowledge to activity'
- Method by which we work out what is morally right
- synderesis = Greek word for conscience, identified with recto ratia (right reason) intellectual process of gaining knowledge
- Conscentia (Latin for conscience) is applying the right reason to a specific issue
- Method by which we work out what is morally right
- Butler
- 'Faculty of reflection'
- influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas
- conscience develops the human reflective nature
- The voice of God within: but it is selfish
- Matt 7:12 In everything do to others as you would have done them do to you
- 'great wickedness' within the human race - struggle between conscience and desires
- Newman
- Conscience is independent of any system of authority (opposite to R. Dawkins view
- The conscience is the moral aspect of a human being's relationship with God. It steers us away from evil and in doing so is caring and loving
- Shouldn't disobey the church, but also obey the conscience, it takes the middle path
- Agent centered
- The conscience,aided by faith, leads us to knowledge of God
- Freud
- Guilt Complex
- Oedipus complex: the sexual desire of a son for his mother and the sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex
- Electra Complex: the sexual desire of a daughter for her father and the sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex
- The Electra is less strong than the Oedipus, yet there is a deep-seated feeling of guilt, the conscience develops from this guilt
- id - the unconscious part of the psyche which creates impulses and desires
- superego - the moral conscience that advises the ego and regulates the id
- ego - the conscious sense of self as presented to the external world, mediating between the id and the super ego
- The breaking of rules is linked to the super-ego. religious: break God's law. secular view: conscience is a product of male dominated society
- Guilt Complex
- Fromm
- Marxist: free will is an illusion
- Human beings are reduced from a state of obedience that we cannot see from birth
- We don not control our lives, first our parents do and then society does: middle ages the church controlled society
- TINA principle 'there is no alternative' - we believe we control our lives but we do not, our actions are predestined by the needs of society
- morality = consumer based
- Piaget
- We do not all have the same conciousnes
- You begin your life at station A and you end your life a station C , some get off at B and do not complete their moral journey and therefore their conscience is not fully developed
- two types of conscience
- autonomous morality - morality determined by the self (starts at 10 years old)
- heteronomous morality - morality determined by others, such as parents and society
- Relationships lead to the development of a moral conscience, early in life the relationships are based on control and obedience to rules
- Augustine
- Defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: A person's moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as a guide to one's behaviour.
- Demonstrate K&U and discuss these areas critically and their strengths and weaknesses
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