Morality without religion (morals, rejecting, contradiction, evolve, doctrine)

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

Originally Posted by scitsofreaky

Here is a new question: what role does the conscience play in your morality?

Conscience is the agent of morality and provides for subsequent action (including guilt)

[linwood]

Originally Posted by pah

Conscience is the agent of morality and provides for subsequent action (including guilt)

Ditto.

I`d add that conscience is formed during the search for ones own morality.

It is malleable to new data and predicaments and how the solution to them may affect moral values already in place.

[scitsofreaky]

Ok, here is my take on the conscience (thanks for the replies guys):
For me the conscience is the (well, the may be a bit too strong, I'm haven't really decided yet) moral authority. But, we are not born with a developed conscience. Our conscience grows as our morality grows. When we are young, everything is right or wrong because our moral dilemas are not very complex, and we are just starting to develop our conscience. As we grow, the situations get more and more complex/grey, if you will, so our conscience has to expand to meet our moral needs. So, our conscience learns as we learn. This also means that it can learn things that later we do not want it to. A fellow deist brought this up in a different forum, that as he left christianity he started feeling guilty because his conscience was still geared towards christianity.
This is why I haven't really settled on the conscience as being "the" moral authority, but for me personally it is the moral authority.
Oh, and now that I think of it, I may have to amend my earlier statement that we aren't born with a developed conscience. It may be developed, but we are unable to understand and/or percieve it totally, and we just grow into it. But, in reality it seems to be basically the same thing.

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

Originally Posted by scitsofreaky

Ok, here is my take on the conscience (thanks for the replies guys):...
This is why I haven't really settled on the conscience as being "the" moral authority, but for me personally it is the moral authority.
Oh, and now that I think of it, I may have to amend my earlier statement that we aren't born with a developed conscience. It may be developed, but we are unable to understand and/or percieve it totally, and we just grow into it. But, in reality it seems to be basically the same thing.

When a baby is just born it reacts with it's mother in a learning experience even to the point of learning emotion. A baby is totally self-centered with concerns only for it's well being. As it developes into a toddler, the moral principle it follows is to obey the mother in return for food and love and this continues for some time. The moral authority for a little child is the mother and very little is internalized. As the child becomes socialized outside the family situation, the moral authority is peer pressure, an adoption of the rules of the group. Sometimes these two are the only authorities for some adults. A conscience is not developed until the person can extract the principles of morality from its own history and expierence. Morality then becomes a philosophical exercise and some adults never reach that stage. The conscience is the mechanism for coordinating conflicting morals and reinforcing where there is no conflict. It is the abstaction of morality that drives the conscience. A whole person will have remnents of earlier authority but be able to develope new authority

Clear as mud -right? It's an area of study, I've begun and there is so much more to digest before I can easily speak of it. But the bottom line I have found is that there is no innateness to morality.

[scitsofreaky]

I refer you to this:

Oh, and now that I think of it, I may have to amend my earlier statement that we aren't born with a developed conscience. It may be developed, but we are unable to understand and/or percieve it totally, and we just grow into it. But, in reality it seems to be basically the same thing.

(is it sad to quote yourself?)
Not to totally disregard what you said. But, researchers are finding that there is more to the mind than we ever thought, so who knows what our mind is capable of when we are born. People seem to be all too willing to dismiss what we are capable of (not that you are doing so).