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 Peg's
Polemic
Every
month, philosopher Peg Tittle casts off the calm, measured and qualified
style of her profession to deliver her opinionated and impassioned
column, exclusively for the TPM philosophy café...
Number
25. I
Don't Have a Conscience
While
I was very pleased to see in Canada the introduction of Bill C-272
regarding the use of taxes for military purposes, I was not at all
pleased with its title: The Conscientious Objection Act.
See, I object to paying for a lot of weaponry, but I don't have
a conscience.
Phrases
such as "Follow your conscience" and "Do what your
conscience tells you" suggest that one's conscience is a fixed
sort of thing, an unchanging absolute. Indeed, it often sounds like
one's conscience is innate, something we're born with. And something
quite separate from us, a sort of homonculus, or at least an 'inner
voice' (the voice of God?). Chomsky may have proven that there are
innate structures of language in the human brain, but to date, to
my knowledge, no one has proven there are, in the human brain, innate
moral principles. Nor, despite a dictionary definition of conscience
as "the moral sense of right and wrong", has such
a sixth (?) sense been established.
On
the contrary, our 'conscience' is acquired: it is the collection
of moral principles, or more accurately, since the acquisition occurs
before we have the cognitive competence to handle principles,
it is the collection of moral habits, that have been inculcated
during childhood. So our conscience is dependent on our parents'
moral principles, or habits, and to some extent on the principles
manifested by our community, our society. Our conscience amounts
to nothing more than a moral reflex. We say "Examine your conscience",
but we do not intend a critical examination; rather, we mean a simple
examination of discovery. We never say "Develop your
conscience"' or, God forbid, "Reconsider your conscience".
And
yet surely that's what our attitude toward moral principles should
be: moral principles should not be inherited by indoctrination,
but developed and maintained by careful, rational thought. I propose
therefore that we replace the word 'conscience' with 'ethics'. 'Ethics'
refers not to one's 'sense' but to one's system (hopefully
it's a system, a coherent collection) of moral principles. Bill
C-272 should have been called "The Ethical Objection Act"--for
all of us who object, on ethical grounds, to the use of taxes
for the military.
Now
many people may be reluctant to replace 'conscience' with 'ethics'
because, well, whose ethics? But that's exactly the question that
must be asked. And it should be asked of conscience as well. I suspect
there's a rather naive presumption of homogeneity with respect to
conscience: when someone advises you to follow your conscience,
my guess is that the person assumes you will choose to do the right
thing, which is the same right thing he or she would do. But what
if my conscience tells me to torture? What is the response to that--'Your
conscience must be wrong'? Until we ask whose ethics, we're
avoiding the issue, skating on the thin ice of individual relativism,
the very weakest of ethical systems: X is right because I think
it's right (I followed my conscience). It's circular and most unhelpful:
Why do you think it's right? How do you come to that thought? What
makes you think it's right? (Where did you get your conscience from?)
The
fear, of course, is that the question has no answer, that we will
set ourselves adrift on a sea of cultural relativism. Not true:
we're capable of making anchors. We must confront the fact that
we decide what's right and wrong, and surely deciding consciously
is better than deciding unconsciously. Surely it is better to identify
and compare, to critique, to evaluate, to choose our moral principles.
And then to act, and lobby, according to those principles, instead
of merely according to our 'conscience'.
.
Peg's
Polemic will next be updated early February 2003
Previous
polemics
24.
23.
22.
21.
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19.
18.
17.
16.
15.
14.
13.
12.
11.
10.
9.
8.
7.
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5.
4.
3.
2.
1.
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