I don’t have a conscience. Neither do you. They don’t exist.

…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate it but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

                                                                             — Gottfried Leibniz

Obviously, “conscience” in the general sense of a capacity for moral deliberation exists.  However, when contemporary Catholics invoke “conscience”, they seem to refer to a particular mental faculty.  It sounds very sophisticated to say that moral rules cannot be mechanically applied to particular cases.  Each case is unique, meaning no finite number of specifications suffices for one to deductively apply general moral rules.  Even for a unique case, moral evaluations perhaps reveal themselves only from the first person perspective.  This is done through a mysterious, mystical faculty called “the conscience”, through which each person intuits whether or not the relevant general rules apply to him.  “Conscience” is thus some sort of moral authority independent of the deductive application of universal norms to specific cases.

Examples of the need for this mysterious supra-rational moral sense are unconvincing.  A popular one is the poor remarried divorcee who has to render the adultery debt to her new partner for some dire reason–to keep her partner around for the children being the only one I’ve seen.  That’s funny in itself:  there are supposed to be an infinite number of distinct situations so that we could never hope to formulate universal rules, yet very few examples (namely one) are given as evidence of this.  Couldn’t we at least try refining our general rule?  Suppose, for the sake of argument, there really are cases of morally acceptable adultery.  Then we need to alter the sixth commandment to something like “Thou shalt not commit adultery except in case of dire need of someone within one’s care”, and we’d have to define “dire need” with sufficient precision that one’s own “need” for companionship and sexual fulfillment do not qualify.  But the Church has recognized similar qualifications to “Thou shalt not steal” for centuries without the exceptions swallowing the rule.

Yet the Kasperite party, which now rules the Catholic Church, will not follow this path.  Their whole claim to orthodoxy is that they have not admitted the existence of categories of morally permitted adultery, only individual cases.  How can this claim be tenable?  If one woman is justified in committing adultery to secure some good for her children, then surely every other woman in similar situations is also so justified.  Surely we can identify the morally relevant facts of the case and use it to define a category.  To avoid this conclusion, the Kasperites must invoke “uniqueness”, i.e. that the morally relevant facts are infinite in number or somehow do not survive abstraction.  This despite the fact that, in their one example, only a few facts seemed to be needed to morally size up the situation.

The new Catholic party line conflicts with modern ethical philosophy on a deep level.  Kant, for example, saw abstraction as a key part of moral reasoning, particularly with his formulation of the categorical imperative that we must be able to consistently will our acts to be universal laws for everyone in like situations.  Morality is associated with the third-person view, of replacing the question “what should I do” with “what should one in this situation do”.  Because of our interests and passions, it has been assumed that people are less reliable moral reasoners when analyzing their own cases.

Despite the insistence of clerical hacks, the new official Catholic doctrine of “conscience” also conflicts with her own ethical tradition.  Thomas Aquinas denies that conscience is a distinct power, identifying it rather as the act of applying general moral principles to specific cases.  Moral reasoning is, for the Thomists, a deductive “top-down” affair.  Moral first principles are innately known by synderesis.  They are elaborated into secondary principles (like “don’t commit adultery”) and properly applied through the virtue of prudence.  It would be a grave misreading to assign prudence a role similar to the Kasperite conscience.  An analogy inspired by Leibniz’s quote above should make this clear.  In Euclidean geometry, all demonstrations proceed from the five axioms.  This is like the first principles of practical reasoning known by synderesis.  The truth of any conclusion depends only on the axioms and the logical validity of each step of the proof proceeding from them.  Certainly, geometric reasoning involves a sort of skill (analogous to the virtue of prudence), but this skill is not a separate source of information; it reveals nothing not logically deducible from the five axioms.  In this analogy, conscience is like the result of a geometric proof.  It is inconceivable in a system like Aquinas’ for conscience to turn against, to grant exceptions to, the moral rules of which it is only the application.  Nor should we respect a man’s conscience more than we respect his arithmetic.  An outsider can detect errors in the one as surely as he can detect errors in the other.

To deny “conscience” is to deny the existence of a moral sense that judges particulars and does not depend on general rules.  Against this, one could point out that people don’t start out with perfectly refined sets of moral principles.  Moral education proceeds by recognizing certain acts as worthy of praise or condemnation and then asking why, and how could this process get off the ground without something like “conscience”?  I suspect that moral education must start with a presentation of heroes and villains, clear cases where the synderesis can be applied even by the unpracticed.  From the case of clearly treacherous adultery, one comes to understand what is wrong with adultery in general.  Then knowledge of the general rule makes it possible to judge more complicated cases with morally irrelevant distractions to one’s sympathies (“…but her husband didn’t appreciate her, and she was lonely…”).  These “complicated cases” are not ones where we must set aside general rules and return to undifferentiated synderesis, but are in fact the ones where general rules are most important.

It’s not clear if Catholic moral theology is salvageable.  I suggest that a sane ethics of the future must drastically reduce the role played by “conscience”.  Surveying the larger history of ethics, this should not be so shocking.  Plato and Aristotle discussed ethics at length without needing it.  It was only with early 18th-century philosophers like Shaftesbury and Butler that conscience assumed the dominant role we think natural today.  We are used to hearing conscience described as an interior authority, as the ultimate authority.  However, this does not reflect our actual experience of conscience.  My conscience applies the general rule “Thou shalt not commit adultery” to “I should not have sex with Alice, the cute girl in the office next to me who is a woman other than my wife.”  The authority here is not in the application itself, but in the general rule.  Whatever authority “I shouldn’t sleep with Alice” has, it derives from “nobody should commit adultery”.  But what about the duty to obey an erring conscience?  Even here, the authority one experiences comes from the general rules one is misapplying, and the sin in failing to obey comes from the intention to violate these rules.  One cannot appeal to one’s conscience as some sort of separate authority.