Critically Assess the Claim That Conscience Is the Voice of Reason

The claim that conscience is the voice of reason is one Thomas Aquinas would agree with. He distinguished between an innate source of good and evil (synderesis) and a judgement derived from our reason (conscientia). With synderesis, Aquinas saw conscience as an innate instinct for distinguishing between right and wrong. He believed that people tended towards goodness and away from evil. Conscientia is similar to moral judgement, holding the power of reason for working out what is good and what is evil. In practical situations, we have to make choices and weigh alternatives, and we do so by using our conscience.

Aquinas’ view may be more convincing than some other religious approaches because his view involves conscience as moral judgement rather than just instinct. Joseph Butler proposes that a sense of right and wrong is innate – this would imply an objective morality that everyone has knowledge of. Yet different people’s consciences tell them to do very different things which they may claim is right but may be otherwise. With Aquinas’ view, moral judgements can be subjective, and can therefore explain why, for example, someone might commit murder for no reason thinking it was the right thing to do. Butler’s explanation for an instance like this might be that their conscience was corrupted by self-deception, but one can argue it was not necessarily the conscience that made the decision in the first place, but rather simply an error in judgement.

In opposition to Aquinas, Sigmund Freud would propose that conscience is not the voice of reason, but rather a sense of guilt. The superego develops from give years onwards and internalises and reflects disapproval of others. So when our parents praise or blame us, frown or smile, we absorb a sense of shame at disapproval and pleasure at approval. In this way, the superego forbids certain actions and produces a sense of guilt, which “expresses itself as the need for punishment” (Civilisation and its Discontents). Therefore, according to Freud, conscience is neither “reason making right decisions” nor something that is naturally in us as Aquinas claimed. It is something environmentally induced that develops when we are young, through which we identify what is right and wrong through experience/upbringing.

There is support for Freud’s view. Piaget, who modified Freud’s theory to include a mature and immature dimension, experimented to find out how conscience develops. He found that up