Conscience

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CONSCIENCE

CONSCIENCE , as commonly understood, is the faculty within us that decides on the moral quality of our thoughts, words, and acts. It makes us conscious of the worth of our deeds and gives rise to a pleasurable feeling if they are good and to a painful one if they are evil.

Origin of the Notion

Three articulations of human experience appear to be at the basis of the Western notion of conscience: the Hebrew scriptures, the writings of Cicero, and the writings of Paul.

Hebrew scriptures

In the Hebrew scriptures God is presented as someone who knows and evaluates our entire being. Psalm 139 develops the theme:

O Lord, thou has searched me and known me! Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.… If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.… Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Ps. 139:1–2, 9–10, 23–24)

The pious psalmist is confident that the divine scrutiny will vindicate him. Others, the enemies of Israel, are the wicked ones who will be found wanting. (See also Job 34:21–23.)

The idea of divine omniscient scrutiny leads, however, to vigorous self-scrutiny: "the spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all his innermost parts" (Prv. 20:27). The prophet Jeremiah is appalled by what he sees when he looks inside himself:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? "I the Lord search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings." (Jer. 17:9–10)

But, here again, the prophet is confident that God is his refuge (see vv. 17–18). That God, not the self, judges the self is good news: the Strong One who sees me all (in my interiority as well as my outward acts) is a good protector, and I am safe in his hands.

Writings of Cicero

Cicero uses conscientia in another sense, to refer to an internal moral authority on important issues. Most of the time conscience is consciousness of something, agreeable consciousness of one or many good deeds (Orationes Philippicae 1.9; Res publica 6.8) or disagreeable consciousness of a trespass (Tusculanae disputationes 4.45, where he speaks metaphorically of the bite of conscience). He speaks with zeal of the force of this inner testimony: "Great is the power of conscience, great for bliss or for bane" (Pro Milone 61; see also De natura deorum 3.85, where it is specified that the workings of conscience unfold without our having to assume divine design). Some passages speak of bad conscience as if it were the internalization of a disapproval voiced by others or by public opinion in general (In Catilinam 3.25; Tusculanae 4.45). Good conscience, however, is presented as independent of public opinion. (Here, he speaks mainly of his own.) Cicero, for instance, has a good conscience about withdrawing from public life and devoting himself to writing (Epistulae ad Atticum 12.28.2) and is determined never to stray from the straight path of conscience. In such cases conscience is referred to without stating what it is consciousness of. While one text stresses to the juror that he should follow his conscience alone but that he should also take comfort from the fact that he is not alone in his judging (Pro Cluentio 159), most texts make the good conscience a rather isolated self-approval. A stunning metaphor states that no theater, no audience offers an applause that has more authority than that of conscience (Tusculanae 2.64). Finally, we should note that Cicero speaks of conscience in a rhetorical context and with moralizing intent; he inveighs against evil men, commends good ones, and voices his assurance of his own worth.

Writings of Paul

In the New Testament, Paul uses the notion of conscience (Gr., suneidēsis ) as he finds it in everyday speech and common moral reflections. He puts forward his own unshakable good conscience (Rom. 9:1, 2 Cor. 1:2; see also Acts 23:1); he urges respect for the conscience of others, especially when that conscience is weak and judges matters erroneously (1 Cor. 8:7, 8:10); he appeals to conscience (2 Cor. 4:2); he allows that in evil people conscience is corrupted (Ti. 1:15). Romans 2:15 launched a momentous new understanding of it: conscience is a witness within all men, including pagans; it states what the law of God requires (it is "the law written in their hearts"), and it accuses all men. So far, Paul speaks of suneidēsis very much like Philo (who speaks mainly of elenchos, "reproof"). The Jewish philosopher found in all men a "true man" who should be ruler and king, who is a judge and umpire, a silent witness or accuser. Human beings live thus with a court of law inside them, and they should behave in such a way as to keep their internal judge pleased. Philo, like Paul, sees this internal authority as a gift of God, but he also accepts immanent views of it (Wallis, 1975).

But there is in Paul something else that is peculiar to him and was to prove very influential on all subsequent developments. Though he seems to have had a morally rather robust conscience, not haunted by feelings of guilt (Stendahl, 1976), Paul frequently wrote in a manner that revealed a troubled self-consciousness. He feels pain at not being acknowledged for what he is (Gal. 1:10); a physical handicap humbles him (2 Cor. 12:7). We thus find in his writing a new sort of literary voice: a self-consciousness bruised by despairing self-humiliation. His will is divided; his body does not obey him; his urgent convictions are challenged by adversaries, his life's work nearly overthrown. Under his pen, all this is not trivial autobiographical detail but is made to reflect a cosmic crisis. Paul feels that he and others are caught in the transition between a passing age and a new dispensation. His inner troubles interiorize the death of Christ. Still caught up in the age that is passing, he feels impotent, worthless; but this conviction of despair is considered by him to be a form of suffering through which he—and, he believes, all men—must pass before they can share in new life with the risen Christ (Altizer, 1983). Inner pains are thus inevitable birth pangs. A subtle shift has occurred: the notion that God welcomes a contrite heart (Ps. 34:18) is in the process of becoming indistinguishable from the notion that God likes—or requires—a broken heart. In Romans, conscience, the accuser, caught up in an eschatological drama, always convicts (3:9, 7:15–20). Good conscience before God means surrender of what men call good conscience. This eschatological turmoil gives to Paul's writings on conscience a ring very different from Philo's serene utterances.

Historical Developments

The church fathers adopt the notion of conscience as an inner voice of divine origin. The assumption is that all human beings have it, and only Christians obey it and thus please God. The firmness of the Christians' conscience enables them to obey God rather than men, live as people who do not belong to this world, and accept martyrdom with joy. Augustine compares conscience to a tribunal in the mind and speaks of it with a tone of restive introspection. He thus confirms the blending, initiated by Paul, of the three notions of divine judgment, moral self-evaluation, and the troubled forays into the hidden recesses of one's heart. A classic passage links the three realities with the Latin conscientia:

"What O Lord could be hidden from you, even if I wanted not to confess it, since the abyss of human conscience is naked before your eyes? I should only be hiding you to me, not me from you. Now that my tears testify how disgusted I am with myself, you only are my light and please me; you are the object of my love and desire. I am ashamed of myself so that I cast myself aside to choose you and want to please myself or you only through you." (Confessions 10.2.2)

That God knows the self is a source of comfort that overcomes the intense discomfort the introspective self feels. The misery of self-rejection seems to be the necessary price to be paid before one reaches divine acceptance.

The Middle Ages use the notion of conscience primarily to elaborate a theory of moral judgment. In their systematic construction, the Scholastics use two terms to designate two functions. Synderesis (the word probably appears first as an erroneous reading; medieval ignorance of Greek let it become established) is the faculty that knows the moral law; it remained unaffected by the fall. The Franciscan school makes of it a potentia affectiva, namely a disposition of the heart. The Dominicans make of it a sort of cognition; it exists in the reason. Conscientia applies the moral law to concrete cases. It is a habitus of the practical intellect, say the Franciscans; an act, according to the Dominicans, which applies knowledge to action. To Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) synderesis decides; it always orients us to the good. Conscientia controls; we can set it aside. When it functions, conscientia is a witness; it says what we have done or not done. It binds or motivates; it says what we should or should not do. Finally, it excuses or accuses; it tells us whether what we have done was well or not well done. While synderesis cannot err, conscientia, a sort of decree of the mind, is fallible (Summa theologiae 1.79.12–13). Conscience now is no longer an occasional voice at important moments, but a concomitant of all morally relevant action.

Medieval theologians also examine whether one is obligated to follow an erroneous conscience. It is allowed that some consciences are invincibly erroneous, that is, their error cannot be overcome by the use of moral diligence or thorough study. Even in these circumstances the self must obey conscience. Romans 14:23 is the norm: whatever is not from faith is deemed sinful. One must, however, at all times seek to correct one's conscience by instruction. Thomas Aquinas teaches that to hold in contempt the dictates of an erroneous conscience is a mortal sin and that conscience binds, even when it contradicts the precepts of a superior, if it endures.

This intellectual clarification is accompanied by a system of practical guidance. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council made it an obligation for all Christians to confess their sins and receive the sacrament once a year. This came to be known as the tribunal of conscience. A practice was required and an occasion offered: the self had to embark upon intellectual deliberation on its behavior and could obtain expert advice or counsel. Benjamin Nelson (1981) described this system of spiritual direction under a threefold heading: conscience, casuistry, and the cure of souls. The individual, like all men, is obligated by the universal moral law. Like some other men, he has peculiar dilemmas related to his age, his class, his role in life; casuistry studies these cases of conscience and enlightens the individual by drawing upon the experience of those whose lot is comparable. Finally, the individual is unlike everyone else; he has his own sorrows and fears; his soul needs to be ministered to in a therapeutic way and comforted. The system reaped behavioral fruit: the lives of Western Christians were progressively ordered in conformity with Christian moral principles. Consciences were slowly educated. Fear of divine judgment loomed large among the motivational forces. While the theologians' synderesis and conscientia were purely moral principles, the pastoral tribunal of conscience often functioned in an atmosphere of religious anguish: God would be angry if sins were not confessed and corrected. His searching of the hearts was felt to be a perilous affair; sinners were threatened with outright condemnation.

While canon lawyers instituted the tribunal of conscience and while pastors appealed to or pounded on individual consciences, the national monarchies and the royal law of France and England developed in such a way as to give an increasing social relevance to the notion of moral conscience. Frenchmen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began to be aware of themselves as one people, living together civilly in a good land under the rule of a just and Christian king. This emergence of national consciousness came simultaneously with urbanization, with an increased practice of prudence and courtesy in social relations (the arts of peace), and with the rise of an ethics of intention, such as that discussed by Abelard (1079–1142). Now new collective representations give expression to a shared will to live together for the sake of peace and to the happy sense of forming together a good society. The sense of the sacred has begun to shift from a largely supernatural realm to the national Christian society that provides a good, secure life. A sacred bond now unites the righteous king and the loyal people. And a man can now encounter people he has never seen before (and with whom no one in his village has ever had dealings) and still have civil relations: strangers are conscious at the outset of belonging to the same people. In England, the old Aristotelian notion of equity is introduced into the royal law: law is said always to aim at justice and to be corrigible whenever principles of equity are violated, for instance, whenever the helpless are dealt with unfairly, or whenever widows and orphans are oppressed. Correction is said to be introduced "for the sake of conscience." In France and in England, society can henceforth be said to have a collective and civil conscience, to be sensitive to the moral demands of common peace and universal justice, to visualize royal power as not simply heroic but merciful as well. (This Western confidence that human beings can collectively govern themselves well is reflected in Calvin's Institutes 2.2.13.)

The stage is now set for the great crises and transformations of the sixteenth century. For the first time conscience has become a culturally central, crucial notion among Christians. The three notions of it we originally identified now merge to define the problem: the man of conscience is "spiritual," he lives "before God"; he is also moral and has obligations to his fellow men; he has a rapport with himself and feels condemned or saved. The Protestant Reformation saw itself as a defender of conscience. The word became one of its most militant terms.

The reformers spoke of conscience as being oppressed by the medieval system. While considering itself obliged to obey "the pope's commandments," conscience saw itself weighed down by the burden of bad and illegitimate laws of human origin, which it was impossible to obey. There was anguish in trying to obey and anguish in disobedience because of the nagging sense of fearsome consequences. Luther articulated his own scrupulous monastic experience of anguish over every action and involuntary impulse by indentifying with Paul. He vibrated in unison, he thought, with Paul's and Augustine's autobiographical statements. Conscience and the law jointly accused him and brought him death. (Unlike Paul, Luther was under the yoke of bad law; identifying with Paul, he overlooked the difference in the objective content of the laws.) The monk Luther, however, was not alone. Henry VIII, a Catholic king, was afraid his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was sterile because it had been cursed by God. (Catherine had been engaged to Henry's brother; even though the brother was dead, the marriage was incestuous by canonical if not dynastic rules.) Was his conscience genuinely troubled or was his second marriage expedient or self-indulgent? (It is significant that the issue is still debated.)

In any case, the medieval burden of being trapped by a guilty conscience was thrown off by many who broke their vows or changed their lifestyles. The religious authorities' guiding conscience had ceased to be credible in the eyes of many of the people of God. Most theological reformers also rejected the very principle of trying to please God with deeds (works); no action was conceivable that could give man a joyful conscience before God. Thus the Protestant Reformation also rejected the whole system of the tribunal of conscience. Freed by grace, living in faith, the Christian immediately receives a good conscience from his God. He thus recaptures the sense of the covenant found in the Hebrew scriptures: that God can fathom our hearts and that he alone judges us once again becomes good news. We are not accountable to ecclesiastical authorities, and they should not haunt our consciences and enrich themselves at our expense. Thus with good consciences, redeemed Christians walk straight in the paths of righteousness. Activities of public reform persuade these Christians that they are indeed setting up a more moral order. For its part, the Roman Catholic Church maintains the system of casuistry and cure of souls. But in time, with a more saintly clergy, the authority of the spiritual directors is restored. Consciences are again more guided than tyrannized.

It must be seen that the Protestant Reformation fostered a new Western assurance of conscience. Conscience became safe, certain. The system of casuistry was dealing in probabilities, constantly weighing pros and cons, and every authority was liable to be overthrown by other authorities. The civil conscience was also always open to correction. Reading his Bible, the Protestant Christian gained subjective certainty once and for all: he was God's child and his path was straight. (The sixteenth century began many moves toward certainty: the Protestant Reformation gave subjective assurance and the scientific revolution began to give objective certainty; Galileo did not weigh the relative merits of authorities; he knew for sure. See Nelson, 1981.) Luther's conscience is lyrical: he is ultimately safe in God's arms and above pleasing men or worrying about their opinions. All the reformers agree: he who has faith has good conscience. No human forum can accuse him. Conscience has nothing to do with a man's dealing among his fellow men but only with his reception of divine forgiveness. Paul Tillich (1948) coined the term transmoral conscience to refer to this notion of man's innerness as it meets God. Calvin is clear: conscience must not be confused with "police." Its business is not with men but with God (Institutes 3.19.15–16; 4.10.3). It must be unhappy at first. "It is necessary that conscience drive our misery home to us before we can have some sense of God" (Institutes 1.1.1 and 4.19.15–16). While Calvin as an elect does not let others challenge his own conscience, he openly distrusts the conscience of others: "Nothing is more common, just as nothing is easier than to boast of faith and a good conscience" (Neal, 1972). The notion of conscience as a subjective absolute is reinforced by the practice of religious privatism: sins are remitted by private confession to God, without confession to a fellow human being or reparation to the victim. With Calvin, the assurance of conscience among the elect is coupled with a particularly vigorous moral action in the world. The concept that had been used to detach the individual from the world now presides over the conscientious effort to shape the world according to the Christian's moral aspirations. The stage is set for the polemics in which Protestants blame Catholics for the erroneous precepts they impose on conscience, and Catholics blame Protestants for their unbridled "conscientious" energies.

The sixteenth century witnessed also the rise of a fresh, vigorous articulation of conscience in the civil tradition. Surrounded by wars waged for the sake of conscience, the French moralist Montaigne (1533–1592) inaugurated the art of writing for oneself the story of an observant, rigorously honest conscience (Brunschwicg, 1953). Both moral and introspective, this conscience ponders the actions of the self and of others and looks at the relations and roles the self is involved in. Self-critical, open to instruction and correction from those who have experience of the world, this conscience treasures selected friendships and enjoys a measure of self-acceptance. It holds on to the few truths and rare marks of humanity it believes itself to be capable of. The dramas of acceptance and rejection at the hands of the biblical God recede in the background. Front stage belongs to the dramas of human likes and dislikes. Descartes (1596–1650) puts an analysis of conscience at the center of his philosophy. In his case, conscience is troubled or disturbed by the experience of its fallibility and by the idea of the infinite; the goodness of God provides decisive reassurance on both points. In the ambit of French civilization, conscience will henceforth keep these crucial characteristics: it is autonomous, moral, and social, somewhat skeptical, worldly wise, and it has a modest but firm pride.

The authority of conscience receives its fullest religious legitimacy in the theory of inner light common to many seventeenth-century English sects. Instead of being an act of interpretation of a law, this conscience is an absolute and final insight. It is also British philosophy that gave to moral conscience its most ample philosophical underpinnings. The theory of moral sense identifies the consciousness of right and wrong with the voice of an inner moral law (the unwritten, inborn law of which Cicero spoke in Pro Milone 10). Inner voices or feelings are described as edicts of one's conscience. L. Butler (1692–1752; Sermons ) affirms that it has a natural authority; it is the voice of God within us. Conscience has become a faculty of the mind that judges immediately and finally on moral matters. In the Middle Ages conscience was a function: people had more or less of it, and tried more or less to exercise it. With the reformers it was a fact of spiritual life: people had a troubled or a joyful one; it became an individual organ—you have your conscience and I have mine, just as each of us has his own stomach. This conscience was said to be infallible and generally philanthropic. It was also inviolate. No serious conflicts of conscience were foreseen. The stage was set for the good conscience of the West to be applied in colonial expansion. All human beings have conscience, it was thought. Western Christians liberated what they deemed to be inferior races from the fears to which their idolatrous and superstitious consciences were prone; they established liberty of conscience (freedom of religion) wherever they ruled, and they did all this without violating consciences. Being most developed, the Western consciences helped others develop too. Western expansion was optimistically expected to moralize the world.

Modern Conflict between Conscience and Consciousness

Theoreticians declare what conscience always says to the inner man. Conscience may in fact behave according to theory; but also it might not. Or, more commonly, the individual realizes that what conscience pronounces clashes with some other inner state he is aware of at a given moment. Distinctions need to be made among the voices in one's inner debate. Luther translated the medieval conscientia with das Gewissen. Two centuries later, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the founder of German philosophy, translated the conscientia of the Cartesians with das Bewusstsein. In sixteenth-century English, conscience can denote authoritative, secure moral conscience or simple, trivial consciousness. (The French language still uses la conscience to speak both of the moral rationales the self fully accepts and of fleeting mental events.) With the eighteenth century, the sense of a separation between conscience and consciousness became widespread. While moral beings naively went on believing in their stable, good, unerring conscience, literature (the novel especially) increasingly explored the chasm between conscience and the vagaries of consciousness. The semiblind yet massive good conscience of the modern theoreticians of conscience and their followers could now become manifest. Moralists became aware of time, of the necessary distinction between what is abiding and what is transitory in a man's sense of himself. Conscience then came to be seen as a firm statement that the self utters before others or privately, a plea entered in a public or inner forum. Like consciousness, conscience is an event; but unlike it, it is also a moral discourse, a public claim. Hence, the critical question: is this discourse fully aware of the actualities of the case? Is conscience conscious? (Engelberg, 1972).

Nineteenth-century probings ordinarily shared the conviction that human beings should always be as fully conscious as possible, with actions completely lucid and deliberate. Rousseau (1712–1778) believed he could derive norms for political life from the assumption that politics consists of free, conscious, virtuous interaction among autonomous, independent individuals. (He even believed the whole of social life could consist of such interaction.) Kant (1724–1804) pursued the point with theoretical thoroughness. All moral action proceeds from good will and is conscientious. Das Gewissen never errs. It is "the moral faculty of judgment, passing judgment upon itself … a state of consciousness which is itself a duty" (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone 4.2.4). With each action, the individual should reflect and proceed only if he is sure that this action obeys the dictates of conscience. The consequence does not escape Hegel (1770–1833): consciences will be in conflict, each vibrating with its assurance, each alone in its certainty of obeying the moral law (Despland, 1975). Far from being a reliable guide, conscience now appears to be potentially immoral arrogance.

The nineteenth century is full of denigrations of conscience. The poet William Blake (1757–1827) is sarcastic: "Conscience in those that have it is unequivocal" ("Annotations to Watson"). Goethe (1749–1832) commends an alternative: Faust heals himself, grows by purging himself of conscience (he does not let himself be crippled by the episode with Marguerite) and ever widening his consciousness. Nietzsche (1844–1900) attempts to show that conscience only imitates ready-made values; the hard human task is to embody knowledge in ourselves, to create conscious values; and consciousness is not given gratis.

But the claims of conscience remain tenacious even in the post-Romantic age. Conscience, however, becomes more tragic, more solitary. Rare are those who see in it the workings of an other-regarding instinct. To Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the inwardness of conscience is demonic: more conscience means more consciousness and deeper despair. Such is also the case in Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground (1864): conscience has become an obsessive inner court; the self is the accuser, the accused, the judge, and the executioner. In a bizarre extension of Paul's and Luther's autobiographical pages, self-consciousness merges into compulsive self-humiliation, with no redemption in sight. Conscience is no longer active knowledge immersed in the social flow of life but purely retrospective, solitary self-condemnation, or entirely fearful anticipation.

More balanced statements of this construction are found in the writings of Coleridge (1772–1834) and Conrad (1857–1924). The poet-critic Coleridge stresses that conscience no longer acts "with the ease and uniformity of instinct"; rather, consciousness is the problem. In Lord Jim, Conrad shows us his protagonist haunted by a conscience that prevents his awareness of the good new life he has built for himself, while in Heart of Darkness we see Kurtz surrendering conscience and letting his consciousness be flooded by instinctual experience. Without conscience, Kurtz is all awareness and lacks an interpreter; he stands thus naked before horror.

Application of the Notion to the Study of Religious and Ethical Systems

Hindu and Buddhist philosophies have very articulate and complex theories of consciousness. All religious traditions have notions of moral law and moral judgment. All encourage reflectivity and offer conceptual tools and practical techniques for self-evaluation. But the notion of conscience as internal organ is not found outside of Christianity. As commonly understood, it is peculiar to the West. The generalization of the tribunal of conscience, the universal legal requirement for annual confession and penance, is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Westerners seem to have taken on a special burden of responsibility. (This was probably not particularly helpful morally.) I must have a vision of myself—of my vocation, for instance—for which I alone will be accountable. Consider, for instance, the notion of conscience found in the writings of the German existentialist philosopher Heidegger (1889–1976): that there is an objectless call of conscience that summons us, not to be in a particular manner, but to choose in what manner we shall be. The wars against guilty thoughts and the self-condemnatory forays into self-consciousness seem also linked to the unique history of Western man (the Gnostic and the celibate monastic episodes being probably particularly influential). Recall that most of the decisive articulations of conscience were autobiographical statements focusing on inner turmoils.

Nineteenth-century founders of the science of religion used the idea of evolution of conscience to bridge the gap between themselves, the Western scholars able and desirous to know all mankind, and the people they studied, whose outlook was perceived as regional, if not primitive. So they wrote about the dawn of conscience in the ancient Near East and about the various stages of conscience reached in non-Christian religions. The moral and religious dignity of man was commonly tied to the functioning of this individual organ. The evolutionary view was self-serving and is now discarded, but it had the merit of affirming a commonality among all humankind.

Articles on conscience in James Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (vol. 4, 1911) illustrate this stage of scholarship. There is a polemic against the nascent sociological reductionist view that sees in conscience an interiorization of social rules. A lengthy article seeks to establish the Jewish view of conscience. The article is not in the least embarrassed by the fact that rabbinic Judaism has no such notion. (For a respected account of Jewish morality, see Neusner, 1981: the will has some power to affect the world, and its intention should be good.) Attempts to find everywhere notions of conscience comparable to the Western one have now largely been abandoned. Current influential works in the discipline of comparative religious ethics have no recourse to it (Little and Twiss, 1978; Bird, 1981). In contrast, the concept is important in current philosophical ethics (Childress, 1979).

Anthropological and Theological Considerations

Etymology may once again be suggestive. Conscience is "knowledge-with," that is, a shared knowledge of something. The foundational experience is the awareness that somebody else is aware of what I have done; I have been seen, and I know that he knows, and I know that he knows that I know that he knows. There is, for a fleeting moment, a shared awareness between us. There is intelligence in the birth of conscience: the other can be a clever accomplice or an articulate critic. But there is also co-feeling: my action is endorsed or disapproved of. The mutual awareness is not just mental. There is also compassion: he knows how it feels to do what I have done, and I know how it feels to observe this being done. Conscience, then, is not just a matter of sight and scrutiny; there is also sensitivity and heart in it. And if conscience makes us potentially morally liable, it makes us also aware of potential moral support.

After this initial point, conscience becomes an interpretive activity. Thus, I own my act and articulate its meaning, serenely, aggressively, or defensively. But while I interpret, others (the initial fellow-feeler or some third party) also interpret. My interpretation will be happy and secure if it agrees in detail or broadly with a wider community of interpretation. It was the merit of the medieval "domestication" of conscience (Lehmann, 1963) that an authoritative, plausible community was always near. Conscience was the court of first instance to adjudicate the worth of my action, and it was the court of last instance. But there was guidance from intermediate courts, which could function in a human manner, with intellectual stability and a measure of understanding. It was the weakness of the Kantian theory that conscience became the only (first and last) tribunal. (Paul had had the good sense to admit that God, not his conscience, judges him. See 1 Corinthians 4:4.) Kant prepared the "decline and fall" of conscience: solitary conscience is either hostile to self and cruel, or self-righteous and insensitive to others. Freud (1856–1939) could only spell out the irrelevance and uselessness of this conscience (Lehmann, 1963).

The interpretive activity of conscience must therefore always be an account to the other, to others. De Jaucourt (Encyclopédie, 1765) emphasized quite soundly that what is important about conscience is the quality of the reasons it can put forward. Hegel saw quite correctly that, to be moral, an action must be owned and expressed: it must be said that it is from conscience. Accountability before somebody else (the one or those affected, or an ideal observer) is intrinsic to morality; the effort of persuasion directed toward others in their otherness is bound with the aspiration to worth. The self needs to be at least symbolically endorsed by others, to be supported at least in words. It is the utmost hypocrisy to claim that conscience can judge itself with skill and authority. Conscience does not produce a private hell or heaven but a public person. When conscience is alive it evaluates the action of the self as part of a continuing moral action (and interaction and further interaction). It is a diseased conscience that carries out nothing but introspective, retrospective self-appraisal. The healthy conscience lives in the present. (In the moment of conscience, consciousness becomes conscious of its past social unconsciousness, and moves on.) And conscience lives in the presence of another human being or beings. It forges an intention, takes an initiative, faces others with a proposal, issues forth in a public act (Jankélévitch, 1933, 1950). Wise and foolish consciences, happy and unhappy ones, are not immobile, self-enclosed realities. They are stages in conscious histories. Healthy consciences share their stories. Each narrates old stories and listens to old stories: in the process, a new story is shared and action shaped. It takes a story to account for one's conscience, and it takes a shared, ongoing story for conscience to form—and enjoy forming—action.

On the interreligious scene today, it is to be wished that dialogue and encounter shall proceed from conscience. And the notion of conscience may well be—or become—part of the account that each will give to the other of his or her own humanity. Such meeting of consciences cannot occur without the labor of consciousness: each trying to communicate over a period of time what he is aware of.

Any attempt in the West to develop a theologically relevant notion of conscience must overcome two traditional tendencies. First of all, religious conscience should be purged of its tendency to reject the fellowship of men and become absorbed in the private dialogue of the soul with God. Conscience, wrote Luther, is the place where we must live with God as man and wife (Lectures on Psalms 3.593.28–29). It must also heal itself of the tendency to assume that God will love us if we hate ourselves. From Augustine on, the notion has persisted that to lay bare before God our innermost hearts, admit we find there utter corruption, and profess to feel pain will miraculously turn a bad conscience into a good one. Such self-serving self-humiliation is either an insincere act or an abject one. Self-torture does not make man morally better. A bad conscience may prevent worse sins, but it never brings joy.

A reconstruction might proceed from the biblical sense that conscience and heart are interchangeable. Conscience is then constituted by the hearing of—or sensitivity to—a call, a commandment. The idea of conscience can be built on what happens in an encounter between persons, rather than on the notion of a moral experience. Such a notion mistakenly assumes that a moral subject is already established, before hearing the claims of the other; one might recall here that Paul told the Corinthians not to advance their own (strong) consciences but to heed the (weaker) consciences of others. What is heard in the depths of the encounter with the widows, the orphans, and the poor of the land is the infinite call of vast human need. Within the compass of being, there are persons who are not beings; that is, they are not beings one should simply adapt oneself to or exercise power on. In each person there is also an infinite with which one can and should talk, in lucid awareness of one's own strength. The primal condition of conscious human freedom is to be unfree because claimed by the presence of a weaker other. He who is conscious of the nature of ordinary human relations has just put food in his mouth and a roof over his head: he has time to think. The mere fact of his respite makes him infinitely liable to those who are still hungry. And the infinite that meets us in other concrete human beings is an infinity of demands that cannot be answered by a mere rule of what is right and sufficient; it is also an infinity of stories that cannot be reduced to one plot. Thus there is in every other being an excess of possibilities over the possibilities that are inherent in me; something new should result from our encounter. Scripture affirms that God meets us in the lowest among our brethren. Only in these meetings are found the birthplace of morality and the voice of God. (See the analyses of Lévinas, presented in Smith, 1983.) Kierkegaard praised the faith that clung to the divine promise and readied itself to disobey the law. In contrast, Emmanuel Lévinas urges us to give up the hope of a warm rapport with God and love the law instead, austerely. This is what God requires; what we (both we the strong and we the weak) most need in order to fulfill God's requirement are some firm exterior rules of justice (Lévinas, 1976, pp. 189–193).

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Encyclopedia of Religion