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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Conscience

Form

John Henry Newman's argument (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 1870, ch. 5), the phenomenological cousin of the moral argument:

  1. We experience conscience not as a preference but as a voice that commands and judges, and whose verdicts bring guilt, shame, and a sense of being answerable.
  2. Guilt, shame, and answerability are feelings directed at persons. One does not feel ashamed before a rule or responsible to a principle; one feels them before someone.
  3. Therefore the experience of conscience implies a Person to whom we are responsible, who sees what we do and judges it.
  4. That Person is God.

My Positions

  1. Conscience has a complete natural history. It is internalised parental and social authority (Freud's superego is the old name; the developmental psychology of Piaget and Kohlberg is the evidence), built on evolved social emotions: guilt and shame are reputation-management devices in a species that lived in small groups where being caught was fatal. It feels like a person watching because it was installed by persons, parents and tribe, and because the brain's default model for anything that judges is an agent (Hyperactive Agency Detection). Premise 2 is true, and it is the explanation, not the mystery.
  2. The voice says different things to different people. Slaveholders had untroubled consciences. Men in honour cultures feel guilt at not killing a sister. Huckleberry Finn's conscience told him to turn Jim in and he decided to go to hell instead. If conscience is the voice of God, God has told different peoples opposite things, which is the moral argument's problem of transmission again. If it is the voice of one's upbringing, the variation is what one expects (Religious Upbringing of Children).
  3. The faculty malfunctions in patterned ways. Scrupulosity, the religious form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a conscience that condemns everything. Psychopathy is its absence. Victims of abuse feel shame for what was done to them. A divine voice that fails in exactly the ways a brain function fails, with the brain's lesions and chemistry, is a brain function.
  4. Being watched is the thing to be explained, and it is explained. People behave better under a poster of a pair of eyes (Bateson, Nettle and Roberts, 2006). The sense of an observer is a cheap and effective way for a social animal to regulate itself, and it is cheap precisely because it does not require an observer.
  5. Even granted, the argument reaches a judge, not a specific one. Newman admitted it would persuade only those who already had the sense of a divine presence. That is not an argument; it is a description of belief looking for its reason (Experiential Argument).
  6. The Euthyphro Dilemma waits at the end. If conscience is God's voice, is what it commands good because he commands it, or does he command it because it is good? Either way the argument gains nothing over the moral argument it supplements.

Sources

  • Newman, J. H., An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), ch. 5
  • Freud, S., Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Haidt, J., The Righteous Mind (2012)
  • Boehm, C., Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (2012)
  • Bateson, M., Nettle, D. and Roberts, G., "Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting", Biology Letters 2 (2006)
  • Twain, M., Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), ch. 31

Also see