How do we decide what is good or evil?
Why, with our conscience of course. But what exactly is our individual conscience? The term hearkens back to images of Jiminy Cricket perched upon a wayward Pinocchio's shoulder, offering him counsel through song and dance. 'Let your conscience be your guide!'. As a child I never quite understood what a conscience was, and in my teenage/early adulthood years I conflated it with reasoning, thinking good moral actions could be determined simply from the application thereof. Although utilizing your conscience to make moral decisions involves reasoning, I hope to make it evident that the two faculties are intimately related but quite distinct.
Conscience can be defined in two ways: the first being: the pressure one feels upon her will to do what she thinks is right and the second: her judgment as to what exactly right and wrong are. Conscience in this first sense is highly absolute; it is not something that can necessarily be reasoned with and it demands that you obey it. To disobey it, to go against one's own conscience, incurs massive personal guilt. There is little doubt that all of us have experienced an inadvertent or intentional betrayal of conscience before; we've all have snapped at a loved one after a long, particularly stressful day, or have neglected to study or go to the gym out of sloth. The cost of such betrayals are feelings of remorse; such negative sensations do not come from the external world, but from within.
The second definition of conscience, however, is much more malleable in nature; afterall, people could very well be mistaken in their conceptions of what's wrong and what's right. All of us have flaws in our conscience to some degree, with zero exceptions. These flaws in conscience are thankfully amenable to change through reason and engaging in honest dialogue. Now, here's where there is a key distinction between conscience and reason: while conscience aims to determine what is good and what is bad, reason aims to determine what is true and what is false.
In order to properly reason, we must have four components: facts, intuitions, proofs, and authority. The first component, facts, can be readily understood to be derived from our first-hand experience in the world. We use our senses to receive incoming data that describes the world we navigate through. Facts can also be obtained from second-hand sources such as books and scientific journals. These are essentially reports of experience from trusted authorities and form the bulk of the corpus of facts we use in our reasoning. This is simply by virtue of our experience being limited and unique to ourselves and our own circumstances, and thus unfit for generalization.
The second component, intuitions, is the act of the mind directly perceiving self-evident truths. An example of this would be something like...the identity property (A=A) or the transitive property (A=B, B=C, ∴ A=C). These are relationships that 'appear' to us. These intuitions I consider the most crucial part of reasoning and we'll explore them further in a bit.
Our third component, proofs, is the skillful arrangement of facts and intuitions so that we may determine the veracity of our propositions. Each step of the proof is an opportunity to exercise our intuitions, and while we may sometimes fail to make sense of a particular proof, that doesn't necessarily mean that the proof is lacking, but rather our intuitions. Anyone that can recall their high school geometry courses can easily understand this, as occasionally we would fail to 'see' a particular step in a proof and thus be unable to come to the conclusion of it. Failure to 'see' a particular intuition isn't due to ignorance or stupidity, but likely a lapse in attention or memory. There are too many intuitions to keep track of, afterall.
The fourth component is defaulting to authority. Anyone that is intellectually honest with themselves would admit that something like 95% of what they determined to be true or false wasn't determined from scratch at all, but rather taken for granted from authority. When we read a scientific journal article, we do not go out and collect our data and run our own experiments to verify claims each and every single time. When we calculate a derivative, we do not run through the entire proof of a derivative as developed by Pierre de Fermat, but take the given conclusion of the proof to be true. As such, it is not only constructed, worked-through proofs that offer us valid truth/falsehood claims, but also authority. It should be noted that this default to authority in lieu of reasoning via proof is not to be taken in shame, since it takes a certain amount of humility to acknowledge that there are minds that have come before, greater and more brilliant than one's own.
Any sort of correction made to reasoning are typically corrections made in the first and the third domains. Often times a new set of facts presented to a reasonable person from first-hand experience or authority can lead them to change their mind; similarly, easier, more elegant proofs can be created to convince someone that their old manner of reasoning was incorrect. Errors in reasoning that are due to an inability to see certain intuitions in a proof are much more acute, since intuitions cannot be supplied or reduced in complexity. These errors in reasoning are thankfully rare, for most of the time when they do occur, it is not due to the absolute inability to see an intuition, but rather refusal to see it because of emotional influence, or perhaps refusal to earnestly think things through. When errors of intuition genuinely do occur, argument is truly at an end for you cannot produce rational intuition from argument because argument depends on rational intuition. You cannot construct the Empire State building starting from the spire; first the foundation must be set.
Let's take our framework for reason and apply it to conscience. There are facts about the world that we use in exercising our conscience. Things such as crime, war, sexuality, purity, allegiance, justice...these subjects contain elementary facts about themselves such as 'War entails the use of force to destroy the enemy.' or 'Children are created through sexual intercourse.'. With facts such as these, we may raise the moral question such as 'Is taking human life ever justified?'. Just like with reason, we also have intuitions in the moral sphere as to what is good and what is evil. It is with these intuitions that we, again just like reason, are able to construct proofs to help us distinguish what is a good act from an evil one. The forth component--that of authority--I'd like to emphasize, for how we might rely on and trust the wisdom of Pythagoras and his theorem to calculate Euclidean distances, we similarly rely on and trust the wisdom of Solomon or the Apostles to guide our moral action without fully appreciating the underlying reasoning.
'Er, 2B? I thought you had said that conscience and reason were very distinct. You're making an awfully strong case that the two are fairly similar.' I was just about to get to pointing out the key difference, thank you for calling it to my attention. The distinction between the two lies primarily in the realm of intuition. In reason, intuitions are sometimes liable to be burdened by emotion; you either refuse to see the intuitive step or you're too lazy to think about it. In conscience, this is certainly the case, as it is invoked while we are engaged in the 'here-and-now' of deciding what we ought to do or abstain from doing; had we not some wish to do/not do something, we wouldn't be undertaking the consideration in the first place. Where there exists human desire, there are emotions infallibly present to bribe us towards one way or the other.
This key difference demonstrates the vulnerability of our intuitions in the conscience sphere, and highlights the importance of defaulting to authority when making moral decisions, rather than relying on proofs to determine what is good or evil. Hence the value of religion in the sphere of morality. To the arrogant, materialistic, hyper-rational empiricist this may cause disgust; they might turn their nose up and reject this very notion. However, those individuals are already subject to this phenomenon, of defaulting to authority rather than working through proofs, without even realizing it. It is certainly the case that a parent instills within their child what is correct moral conduct, long before the child has the intellectual wherewithall to make sense of the underlying principles. Not to mention the fact that this begs the question: from where did the parent acquire their moral intuitions? And their parents? And theirs? For the majority of the Western world, the answer lies within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Much like the intuitions of reason, the intuitions of conscience cannot be argued with. If they can, then they are likely not intuitions but matters of opinion. These intuitions are what makes us take sides in the dichotomies of preference, such as human health being preferable to human suffering or love preferable to hate. Of course, there exists people that lack these correct intuitions and thus have incorrect preferences: a sociopath might've developed their pathology by dint of their traumatic upbringing. But for the most part individuals such as these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
The strength of a moral judgment can be elevated by the strength of these individual components and the concordance between them. If the facts are clear and there is a general consensus as to their veracity, if the intuitions behind the judgment are held by all good men, if the proof that connects these intuitions together is strong, and if authority appears to agree with you, then you may safely trust in your moral judgment with high confidence. Conversely, if the facts of the matter are ambiguous and open to debate, if the moral intuitions aren't self-evident to all good men, if the logical proof is weak, and if authority is in disagreement with you, then you may very well be mistaken.
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