What is your conscience?

M

Mind Over Matter

Registered Senior Member
Many small children are familiar with the story of Jimminy Cricket who tells Pinocchio always to let his conscience be his guide. The wisdom of this advice hits people as they grow older.

So "What is your conscience?"
 
As a standard you should be able to tell what is right or wrong based upon what you have learned over your lifetime, you won't necessarily hear a little voice telling you, you will just equate based upon passed experience.

If you hear a little voice, some will consider this normal, others will consider this a sign that you are losing your marbles, others still will consider that the voice you hear is inputted by a third-party which might be a god to them, a mischievous spirit or a bunch of crumby humans that don't know to leave well enough alone.
 
Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition, or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral evaluations of this type may reference values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human does things that go against his/her moral values, and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms. The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are, or should be, based wholly in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.

WIKI
 
Our sense of conscience is based in our subconscious mind; often when our conscious mind is trying to decide on a course of action, our sub conscious will step in if we are about to make an error (subjective error that is), but our sub conscious will step in and try to override. It is this subconscious intervention that we refer to as ‘our conscience’.

The question should be, what is our subconscious?
 
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In my view conscience is our capacity to make moral decisions using practical reason. I think it is more of an art than a science, and Aristotle is basically right when we stated in Nicomachean Ethics that we should not expect the precise definitions of mathematics in moral decision-making.
 
Conscience is a form of forethought. It's the ability of our mind to predict the impact of any behavior. If we consider doing something we believe is harmful to ourselves (either directly or indirectly) we experience a multitude of emotions designed to inhibit action such as guilt, anxiety, shock. Likewise, to do something we believe will benefit us (directly/indirectly) we experience euphoria, ease, aggression, fear (emotions designed to promote action)


To follow one's conscience is to follow their instinct. If it feels bad don't do it!
 
Conscience is the decision making process to decide between and rate the correctness or incorrectness of options. A person without a conscience would be a sociopath incapable of determining the rightness and wrongness through calculation, they have to be shown through consequence and learn by trial and error.

So if you have a conscience you can probably figure out that robbery is wrong, you'll figure out it's wrong either by the empathy, compassion or whatever emotion you feel during the act, the guilt you feel after the act, or the judicial or extrajudicial consequences.
 
Conscience is the development of the brain which deals with social acceptance and fitting into the monkey sphere.
What the conscience produces is entirely dependent on the environment and conditions and culture that the individual grew up in.

See:
Huck Finn and his guilty conscience for freeing Jim, even though he knows full well God will hate him for such an act.
 
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