The judgments of conscience are simple phenomena

[joe1776]

These instant judgments may not be correct. Just because the mind generates such quick judgments doesn't mean they are wise or moral. For example, there is a certain president of a certain country who acts on every impulse, causing great damage to millions.

I think a better approach is to compare the instant conclusions with a well-reasoned moral system. If they don't match, well,... the intended behavior is probably not a good idea, as it will have unintended consequences which harm others.

The axiom "All knowledge begins in the senses" is the place to start my answer to your post. Since we can't see, hear, smell or taste the difference between moral right and wrong, we must FEEL it.

Everything we know about morality, we learned from conscience. What you are suggesting is that our reasoning minds can improve on the works of conscience, the Master.

Moral philosophers have been trying for centuries to invent that well-reasoned moral system you think is a good idea. They've failed.

 

[tayla]

So, we don't know if conscience is fallible or infallible. But since we have no other moral authority do we have any choice but to assume its guidance is correct?

The contents of conscience is learned. It should not be trusted. Pangs of conscience don't guarantee good moral choices.

 

[tayla]

Moral philosophers have been trying for centuries to invent that well-reasoned moral system you think is a good idea. They've failed.

What!! There are many good systems of morality developed by philosophers.

 

[Heyo]

(1) How is my hypothesis invalidated by pointing out the infrequent moral exception which still requires intuition?

Your Hypothesis explicitly makes a generalization. "All moral decisions ..." That's like saying "All primes are odd." To invalidate a general statement, only a single counter example is needed. Basic logic.

(2) Group pride or tribalism isn't a factor in our moral guidance. It's a bias which can cause us to ignore our moral intuition (conscience).

And how do we know an (adapted) bias from an (innate) moral intuition?

I have a feeling that we might have a discrepancy in our understanding of the definition of some concepts. You keep using conscience as a synonym for instinct, do I see that right? For me conscience is the sum of the innate instincts and aquirred (taught) ethical behaviour and internalized moral thinking.

 

[joe1776]

The contents of conscience is learned. It should not be trusted. Pangs of conscience don't guarantee good moral choices.

The logical case against your position begins with the fact that the intuition of conscience emerges immediately from the unconscious. If it was taught and learned, it would emerge slowly from memory just as all acquired knowledge does.

Here's a link that identifies some of the key players involved in moral research in recent years. Scientific evidence that the wisdom of conscience is innate is slim but there is this:

According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, humans are born with a hard-wired morality. A deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

The New Science of Morality | Edge.org

 

[joe1776]

What!! There are many good systems of morality developed by philosophers.

You obviously have a low bar for success. Can you name one that has been generally accepted and has been a major influence on human morality?

 

[joe1776]

Your Hypothesis explicitly makes a generalization. "All moral decisions ..." That's like saying "All primes are odd." To invalidate a general statement, only a single counter example is needed. Basic logic.

Conscience is involved in ALL moral judgments (including moral dilemmas). You won't find me stating that ONLY conscience is involved in all moral judgments. Please quote me if you think I have.

And how do we know an (adapted) bias from an (innate) moral intuition?

One way is to compare morally advanced cultures to those that are lagging. For example, in 1850 about half the world's cultures still regarded slavery as morally justified. Currently, women are being treated as subservient to men in about half of the world's cultures. These moral biases are being eliminated over time.

I have a feeling that we might have a discrepancy in our understanding of the definition of some concepts. You keep using conscience as a synonym for instinct, do I see that right?

I use the word 'intuition' to describe conscience because that word is preferred over 'instinct' by the scientists doing research on it. However, the researchers don't use the word 'conscience.' They use "moral sense'. I use conscience because it's commonly understood.

For me conscience is the sum of the innate instincts and aquirred (taught) ethical behaviour and internalized moral thinking.

Your position would be supported by some, maybe even the majority, of social scientists involved in research but I think it's wrong because "All knowledge begins in the senses." We would know absolutely nothing about morality if we didn't first FEEL it (David Hume had this right back in the 18th Century)

 

[Heyo]

Conscience is involved in ALL moral judgments (including moral dilemmas). You won't find me stating that ONLY conscience is involved in all moral judgments. Please quote me if you think I have.

Here you go:

The bottom line: An unbiased mind and the guidance of conscience are the only requirements to know the difference between right and wrong or fair and unfair.

Your generalization is in "only requirements". Finding one situation (which I did with moral dilemmata) is enough to invalidate that statement.

One way is to compare morally advanced cultures to those that are lagging. For example, in 1850 about half the world's cultures still regarded slavery as morally justified. Currently, women are being treated as subservient to men in about half of the world's cultures. These moral biases are being eliminated over time.

That explains nothing. I see no mechanism by which the biases are eliminated and it especially can't handle any relapses of morality in a society or introduction of new biases.

I use the word 'intuition' to describe conscience because that word is preferred over 'instinct' by the scientists doing research on it. However, the researchers don't use the word 'conscience.' They use "moral sense'. I use conscience because it's commonly understood.
Your position would be supported by some, maybe even the majority, of social scientists involved in research but I think it's wrong because "All knowledge begins in the senses." We would know absolutely nothing about morality if we didn't first FEEL it (David Hume had this right back in the 18th Century)

(Emphasis by me)

That is not contested by me. I also see our innate moral instincts as the basis of all moral.
But that is not enough. Without education and introspection our conscience (moral compass) would be like that of other great apes, even less, as apes teach "morality" to their young.

Coming back to your answer of how biases get eliminated: it is an argument for my position rather than for yours. I can explain the mechanism. It is that the moral philosophers have identified the biases (or faults in our instincts) that over time have convinced societies to adapt the new morals and teach them.

 

[joe1776]

Your generalization is in "only requirements". Finding one situation (which I did with moral dilemmata) is enough to invalidate that statement.

You're right. I will edit the bottom line to read:
The bottom line: Except for the rare moral dilemma which requires the contribution of reason, an unbiased mind and the guidance of conscience are the only requirements to know the difference between right and wrong or fair and unfair.

That explains nothing. I see no mechanism by which the biases are eliminated and it especially can't handle any relapses of morality in a society or introduction of new biases.

Conscience is the mechanism by which biases are eliminated. If they didn't FEEL that slaves were mistreated, lay Catholics would have agreed with their pope who in 1866 declared that he found nothing in "Divine Law" opposed to the buying, selling and trading of slaves. According to his Bible he was right but he ignored his conscience.

Give me an example of a "moral relapse" please. I can't think of one in human history.

That is not contested by me. I also see our innate moral instincts as the basis of all moral.

And yet you think that we humans somehow have reasoned our way to a moral code that surpasses the wisdom of conscience?

Coming back to your answer of how biases get eliminated: it is an argument for my position rather than for yours. I can explain the mechanism. It is that the moral philosophers have identified the biases (or faults in our instincts) that over time have convinced societies to adapt the new morals and teach them.

That's not possible because: Moral philosophers don't write ideas in plain language that communicates with most citizens. Nor are they moral leaders. Can you name a moral philosopher who championed the cause of equality for women, for example?

The feminist movement was caused, not surprisingly, by high-spirited women who wrote or spoke on the injustice. They made people examine their conscience on the issue -- and that's how the change happened.

 

[sealchan]

The judgments of conscience are simple phenomena.

Is this specific action morally right or wrong?
Is this specific action fair or unfair?

Upon hearing the facts of a specific act, the judgments of conscience are immediate. If the act is morally wrong or unfair, we immediately get an unpleasant feeling of wrongfulness produced by the pain-pleasure function of our brain. The act feels wrong. If we don't get that unpleasant feeling, we can assume the specific act is fair or morally justified.

These judgments happen immediately and usually can't be reasonably explained. Research has shown that the attempts to reasonably explain the judgments occur after the judgment was made and often make no sense.

What we call the judgments of conscience are the product of intuition which emerges immediately from the unconscious. They are not the product of the slow, reasoning, conscious mind. Thus, most philosophers and theologians have, for centuries, built their arguments on a false premise.

College Psych courses still teach the moral theory of Lawrence Kohlberg which is based on this false premise the we reason our way to moral judgments even though research is confirming that our moral judgments are intuitive.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
1778 Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:

That "conscience is a judgement of reason" is a false premise which allows the Church to argue that it can inform-teach the conscience by offering moral guidance to its faithful. If the judgments of conscience are intuitive as I've proposed, then conscience has to be recognized as our one and only moral authority.

However, not only the Catholic Church but all traditional religions as well as moral philosophers will be put out of the moral guidance business when the science on this topic goes mainstream.

The bottom line: An unbiased mind and the guidance of conscience are the only requirements to know the difference between right and wrong or fair and unfair.

Comments and questions?

Although I agree that moral judgments are something one can come to in an immediate sense I think that there is a lot of reasoning behind our moral sense. Or at least some have a lot of reasoning behind their moral evaluations. The reasoning one does creates the "landscape" for one's ability to quickly assess in new circumstances. And those who have reasoned about moral judgments will have quicker responses in some cases to certain complex questions and in some cases they may have slower confident responses to what are generally perceived to be simple cases...it all depends on the history of their reasoning.

BUT...they've always had their ability to quickly assess regardless of how much has reasoned it out, and for this reason we have an understanding that morality is not entirely sourced in reason but is sculpted by it.

 

[joe1776]

Although I agree that moral judgments are something one can come to in an immediate sense I think that there is a lot of reasoning behind our moral sense. Or at least some have a lot of reasoning behind their moral evaluations. The reasoning one does creates the "landscape" for one's ability to quickly assess in new circumstances. And those who have reasoned about moral judgments will have quicker responses in some cases to certain complex questions and in some cases they may have slower confident responses to what are generally perceived to be simple cases...it all depends on the history of their reasoning.



BUT...they've always had their ability to quickly assess regardless of how much has reasoned it out, and for this reason we have an understanding that morality is not entirely sourced in reason but is sculpted by it.

Have you ever noticed a correlation between intelligence and moral character? I haven't. But if your hypothesis is correct, that correlation would be obvious and universally accepted.

Let's think about one act: the killing of human beings. Moral intuition (conscience) informs us that when the killer intends to harm an innocent person, the killing is an immoral act. But when the killing is done as an act of self-defense, it is justifiable.

However, when some Christians (the pacifists) reason that the commandment on killing should be interpreted to mean that killing is always wrong, they ignore the guidance of conscience and allow no justification for self-defense.

I think that reasoning about morality can only result in biases like this that conflict and cause us to ignore the judgments of conscience.

 

[Etritonakin]

The judgments of conscience are simple phenomena.

Is this specific action morally right or wrong?
Is this specific action fair or unfair?

Upon hearing the facts of a specific act, the judgments of conscience are immediate. If the act is morally wrong or unfair, we immediately get an unpleasant feeling of wrongfulness produced by the pain-pleasure function of our brain. The act feels wrong. If we don't get that unpleasant feeling, we can assume the specific act is fair or morally justified.

These judgments happen immediately and usually can't be reasonably explained. Research has shown that the attempts to reasonably explain the judgments occur after the judgment was made and often make no sense.

What we call the judgments of conscience are the product of intuition which emerges immediately from the unconscious. They are not the product of the slow, reasoning, conscious mind. Thus, most philosophers and theologians have, for centuries, built their arguments on a false premise.

College Psych courses still teach the moral theory of Lawrence Kohlberg which is based on this false premise the we reason our way to moral judgments even though research is confirming that our moral judgments are intuitive.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
1778 Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:

That "conscience is a judgement of reason" is a false premise which allows the Church to argue that it can inform-teach the conscience by offering moral guidance to its faithful. If the judgments of conscience are intuitive as I've proposed, then conscience has to be recognized as our one and only moral authority.

However, not only the Catholic Church but all traditional religions as well as moral philosophers will be put out of the moral guidance business when the science on this topic goes mainstream.

The bottom line: An unbiased mind and the guidance of conscience are the only requirements to know the difference between right and wrong or fair and unfair.

Comments and questions?

First -it's not at all simple -we are nowhere near reverse-engineering it fully. Second -it happens quickly, not instantaneously. We have a sort of instinctive conscience and emotional processes essentially encoded into us -which are very complex (along with more survival-oriented processes) -which are increasingly affected by experience and choice/consideration (mind memory as opposed to muscle memory developed with training). Our "immediate" reaction is actually a very quick reaction -but is very much based on/filtered through all of that.

The fact that our minds do things we are not consciously aware of is kinda freaky -but very reasonable.

 

[joe1776]

First -it's not at all simple -we are nowhere near reverse-engineering it fully.

What does reverse-engineering have to do with it? We only need to recognize how it works.

The process uses the brain's pain function to signal wrongfulness to simple questions (morally) right or wrong? Or, fair or unfair? If it doesn't feel wrong, it's justified.

It signals guilt whenever we remember past moral failures. Essentially, our brains are using the punishment phase of reward and punishment method to train us to become better human beings.

When we do something especially good to help others, we feel good about it. That's the reward phase of the reward and punishment method used by our brains to teach us to become better people.

We agree that our moral intuition is aligned with survival. However, I don't understand your reasoning when you posit that our individual experiences influence the judgments of conscience. Since that would result in different judgments given the same facts involved in the act, how is it possible that the different answers would all be aligned with survival?

Second -it happens quickly, not instantaneously. We have a sort of instinctive conscience and emotional processes essentially encoded into us -which are very complex (along with more survival-oriented processes) - which are increasingly affected by experience and choice/consideration (mind memory as opposed to muscle memory developed with training). Our "immediate" reaction is actually a very quick reaction -but is very much based on/filtered through all of that.

I don't understand how your explanation is possible. The brain is divided into the conscious and unconscious. According to researcher Josh Greene, when subjects consider moral dilemmas, both parts of the brain light up.

It seems likely that the unconscious quickly deals with the two action options and both feel wrong. Then the conscious reasoning mind must weigh the consequences of each to determine which causes the least harm.

If experience was a factor, as you contend, there would be major differences in moral judgments based on age, religion and cultural experiences. Harvard's Moral Sense Test, online since 2003, isn't supporting your position so far.

Intuitive moral judgments are robust across variation in gender, education, politics, and religion: A large-scale web-based study.

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/lbh24/BanerjeeEtAl.pdf

 

[sealchan]

Have you ever noticed a correlation between intelligence and moral character? I haven't. But if your hypothesis is correct, that correlation would be obvious and universally accepted.

Let's think about one act: the killing of human beings. Moral intuition (conscience) informs us that when the killer intends to harm an innocent person, the killing is an immoral act. But when the killing is done as an act of self-defense, it is justifiable.

However, when some Christians (the pacifists) reason that the commandment on killing should be interpreted to mean that killing is always wrong, they ignore the guidance of conscience and allow no justification for self-defense.

I think that reasoning about morality can only result in biases like this that conflict and cause us to ignore the judgments of conscience.

What gets a lot of people tripped up, I think, is that reasoning about morality is mainly about rules. This is a lesser sort of reasoning typically associated with logical thinking, or the consistent ordering of words. Morality is better understood through the rational analysis of values. So being concerned about a rule and how to interpret it in context is this lesser sort of reasoning. Thinking types, then, are very clever but are, as you say, not thereby necessarily morally perceptive.

But take someone who is strong at analyzing values...they have a clear sense of how they feel about things, they can empathize and ask the sort of questions of a situation that determine context most insight fully. They also dont need rules so much as they trust a long and carefully woven sense of interpersonal mutual respect that through human feeling finds its basis. A quick and skillful empathy becomes the sign of moral intelligence which often scrambles word-based logic in favor of its focus on balanced "valuations".

 

[joe1776]

What gets a lot of people tripped up, I think, is that reasoning about morality is mainly about rules. This is a lesser sort of reasoning typically associated with logical thinking, or the consistent ordering of words. Morality is better understood through the rational analysis of values. So being concerned about a rule and how to interpret it in context is this lesser sort of reasoning. Thinking types, then, are very clever but are, as you say, not thereby necessarily morally perceptive.

But take someone who is strong at analyzing values...they have a clear sense of how they feel about things, they can empathize and ask the sort of questions of a situation that determine context most insight fully. They also dont need rules so much as they trust a long and carefully woven sense of interpersonal mutual respect that through human feeling finds its basis. A quick and skillful empathy becomes the sign of moral intelligence which often scrambles word-based logic in favor of its focus on balanced "valuations".

We agree that what you describe as a "quick and skillful empathy" is needed. Lacking empathy, our minds are selfishly biased against people who don't look like us, agree with us or belong to our groups.

We disagree that "morality is mainly about rules." I see moral rules as useless at best, biases at their worst. For example, if we make the rule: "It is generally bad to kill people," it's of no help in guiding us when we need it in a specific case because that specific case might be an exception.

But, if we make an absolute rule: "Killing is always wrong," it gives us guidance in specific cases but it becomes a bias when it conflicts with our conscience given a killing in a clear case of self-defense.

Criminal laws on murder can be seen as attempts to write absolute rules to guide future juries. It's a foolish endeavor because killings happen in an almost infinite variety. It's something like trying to write rules to govern the construction of snowflakes. Moreover, the laws are completely unnecessary.

Lawmakers imagine a set of facts and then rely on their conscience to write laws to cover them. A contemporary jury, comprised of professionals, could ascertain the ACTUAL facts of a case and then rely on their conscience to determine guilt or innocence.

 

[sealchan]

We agree that what you describe as a "quick and skillful empathy" is needed. Lacking empathy, our minds are selfishly biased against people who don't look like us, agree with us or belong to our groups.

We disagree that "morality is mainly about rules." I see moral rules as useless at best, biases at their worst. For example, if we make the rule: "It is generally bad to kill people," it's of no help in guiding us when we need it in a specific case because that specific case might be an exception.

But, if we make an absolute rule: "Killing is always wrong," it gives us guidance in specific cases but it becomes a bias when it conflicts with our conscience given a killing in a clear case of self-defense.

Criminal laws on murder can be seen as attempts to write absolute rules to guide future juries. It's a foolish endeavor because killings happen in an almost infinite variety. It's something like trying to write rules to govern the construction of snowflakes. Moreover, the laws are completely unnecessary.

Lawmakers imagine a set of facts and then rely on their conscience to write laws to cover them. A contemporary jury, comprised of professionals, could ascertain the ACTUAL facts of a case and then rely on their conscience to determine guilt or innocence.

Sorry if my words were confusing...I was attempting argue, as you do, that morality in terms of rules was a lesser form moral understanding.

 

[joe1776]

Sorry if my words were confusing...I was attempting argue, as you do, that morality in terms of rules was a lesser form moral understanding.

My fault. I read your post again and realized that I misunderstood.

 

[Heyo]

You're right.

Kudos. That's an admission that I rarely read in online discussion.

Conscience is the mechanism by which biases are eliminated. If they didn't FEEL that slaves were mistreated, lay Catholics would have agreed with their pope who in 1866 declared that he found nothing in "Divine Law" opposed to the buying, selling and trading of slaves. According to his Bible he was right but he ignored his conscience.

And how did this conscience come to be in 1866? Was that a mutation in the genetics that made some people susceptible to the plead of the unfree?

Give me an example of a "moral relapse" please. I can't think of one in human history.

Athens, Rome, Baghdad had Democracy, a Republic, a very liberal Caliphate during their "golden periods". They valued rule of law and participation in government (at least for their citizens). All of them lost their values through no outer influence.

And yet you think that we humans somehow have reasoned our way to a moral code that surpasses the wisdom of conscience?

Yep. And you think we somehow evolved into more moral beings?

That's not possible because: Moral philosophers don't write ideas in plain language that communicates with most citizens. Nor are they moral leaders. Can you name a moral philosopher who championed the cause of equality for women, for example?

Moral philosophers seldom influence the public. They influence leaders and activists who in turn influence the public. A change in the moral landscape of a society usually takes decades or even centuries. A slow process that is non-the-less orders of magnitude faster than any biological evolutionary process could ever be.

 

[Twilight Hue]

My OP discusses how normal human beings make moral judgments. I didn't write about the many biases which can cause us to ignore the guidance of conscience.

A person's conscience is conditioned by one's environment , culture, and physiology.

All morality is essentially based on social stability within a group and how well people collectively get along with each other.

 

[joe1776]

And how did this conscience come to be in 1866? Was that a mutation in the genetics that made some people susceptible to the plead of the unfree?

The origin of conscience is a mystery. However, things don't change without a cause. If not conscience (moral intuition) what else could have caused the abolition of legal slavery to sweep across all the world's cultures? Can you suggest another likely cause?

Didn't noisy women cause people to examine their consciences and change their minds on whether women should be treated as equals?

Athens, Rome, Baghdad had Democracy, a Republic, a very liberal Caliphate during their "golden periods". They valued rule of law and participation in government (at least for their citizens). All of them lost their values through no outer influence.

I doubt that people backslide once they've gained moral ground. I doubt that slavery will someday return as accepted practice.

I think that some of what we think of as history are popular myths like the noble savage. The notion that primitive tribes once lived in harmony with nature has been a favorite theme of fiction writers since Rousseau. Dances With Wolves, the latest.

Moral philosophers seldom influence the public. They influence leaders and activists who in turn influence the public. A change in the moral landscape of a society usually takes decades or even centuries. A slow process that is non-the-less orders of magnitude faster than any biological evolutionary process could ever be.

But the evolutionary process is a scientific fact (or as close as science can get). You are offering an unsupported claim backed by another unsupported claim.

Yep. And you think we somehow evolved into more moral beings?

I certainly do. Here's a link to my argument in support of that position.

Global Harmony is Inevitable