Conscience [ESSAY POINTS]

Question 1

What may a paragraph on Aquinas’ approach to conscience include?

Answer 1

• Rooted in telos. Our conscience helps us find natural law in order to follow it.
• Two God given faculties; synderesis and reason. It is the combination of these that creates the conscience.
• Issue with concept of telos. It is outdated and widely considered unscientific, for example by enlightenment thinker Sir Francis Bacon. The ‘God given purpose’ that Aquinas observed is in fact simply nature and natural selection.
• Sartre also rejected telos.
• If telos is unscientific and false, then Aquinas’ approach to conscience can be disregarded, considering that it is based on the conscience allowing us to fulfil telos.

Question 2

What may a paragraph on Butler’s and Newman’s approach to the conscience include?

Answer 2

• Newman: our conscience is the voice of God speaking to us. When we follow it, we are following divine law.
• Issue: how can the conscience be fallible if it is the direct voice of God?
• Butler suggests similar approach. Our conscience is a kind of intuition directly from God that allows us to intuit what it right and wrong in any given situation. We make wrong decisions by ignoring or ‘blinding’ our conscience.
• If the conscience is from God, how could it be blinded? Surely an omnipotent God would not be susceptible to human emotional manipulation.

Question 3

What would a paragraph on Freud’s approach to the conscience include?

Answer 3

• Secular approach.
• Argued the mind contains three parts. Id, ego and super ego. It is the conflict between the three parts that lead to conscience.
• The super ego punished the ego with guilt when it gives into the id.
• Issue: Freud’s claims were based on limited studies of a small group of similar people. May not apply to wider society.
• Karl Popper: statements are only valid if they can be falsified. All phycological claims cannot be proved wrong so are meaningless, according to Popper.
• Freud’s work is somewhat important however as it lead to modern psychoanalysis. The idea that childhood impacts our whole life is widely accepted.