What is conscience?

As British society grapples with a wide range of protesters acting 'on conscience', I ask what this familiar term really means.

What’s the question?

What is conscience?

What’s this all about?

In 1670, William Penn and William Mead were charged with unlawful assembly after speaking at a Quaker meeting in the City of London. The jury, despite the exhortations of the judge, refused to find them guilty and one juror, Edward Bushell, was fined for contempt of court.

Bushell appealed, and the Lord Chief Justice agreed that it was wrong to punish jurors for following their conscience. This established the principle of jury equity, whereby jurors are not obliged to convict a defendant if it conflicts with their conscience.

353 years later, jury equity was thrown back into the spotlight when a retired social worker, Trudi Warner, stood outside the trial of climate activists with a sign reading, ‘Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’

When she, too, was charged with contempt of court, more and more protesters repeated her action, until courts around the country were festooned with banners articulating this obscure point of legal principle.

At a time when the British government appears to be moving in an authoritarian direction, with new anti-protest laws and little sympathy for dissent, the issue of conscience feels almost as urgent as it did in the late-seventeenth century.

But what is conscience?

What are my initial assumptions?

Like William Penn and William Mead, I’m a Quaker, so I’m sympathetic to the actions that got this whole saga underway. Quakers don’t have a fixed doctrine or dogma but believe that we all – as human beings – have access to what is often called the light within. Simply by standing around together on Gracechurch Street back in 1670, those early Quakers were posing a threat to the authorities – at a time when Britain was still recovering from a civil war in which people had slaughtered each other over matters of conscience.

At the same time, I’m sceptical about the inner light. I don’t believe in divine intervention, and I don’t believe that there are universal moral truths. I think the universe consists of matter acting on matter in an endlessly fascinating – but amoral – dance.

So, the idea of conscience is a tricky one for me. If I follow my Quakerism, I should probably believe that conscience is something like the voice of God. But if I follow my materialism, then I’m more likely to think that what we call conscience is simply the sound of our synapses rubbing against each other.

What’s the other side of the argument?

I feel like I’m already on both sides of the argument, but I suppose there are other possible positions. Maybe you could say that there is no universal moral truth, but that conscience nonetheless gives us access to some kind of moral intuition that helps us distinguish right from wrong.

This is quite appealing, but we have to accept that any such moral intuitions are massively affected by circumstance. William Penn’s conscience, for example, did not stop him from becoming complicit in the transatlantic slave trade when he founded Pennsylvania, or even from owning enslaved people himself – something that horrifies modern Quaker sensibilities.

Penn’s conscience showed him a version of right and wrong that made sense in the 1670 and 80s but seems actively corrupt in the 2020s. What is the value of such a narrow version of conscience? And if conscience is limited in this way, how can we distinguish between the conscience that leads one group of protesters to sit quietly outside a jury trial and another to blockade an asylum hotel?

What don’t I know?

The more I think about conscience, the less I seem to know.

For a start, I don’t know what other people experience as ‘conscience’. The dictionary definition is fairly straightforward: ‘Senses involving consciousness of morality or what is considered right.’ But what does this feel like for others?

And what do people have in mind when they use the word conscience? The English word is Latin in origin, from scīre – ‘to know’ – and con – ‘with’: literally ‘knowing with’. The Oxford English Dictionary has reams of examples of the term from the thirteenth century onwards, each of which could send me down a delightful rabbit hole, to explore how the meaning of conscience has evolved over the years.

I’m particularly tempted by the OED’s frequency chart – derived from Google’s Ngrams database – which shows the use of ‘conscience’ peaking in the 1820s, before steadily declining to the present day, with a small surge in the 1950s.

Could it be that we talk more about conscience at times of intense social change, when different moral systems are competing – industrialism vs feudalism in the 1820s, post-colonialism vs imperialism in the 1950s? Could this be why we’re once again talking about conscience, as a function of the culture wars and growing challenges to democratic norms?

How can I find an answer?

The more I ask myself, ‘what is conscience?’, the more complex the question becomes. I’ve realised that I could be asking any one or more of the following questions:

• What is [the personal experience that I call] conscience? Poets and novelists would answer this question by charting, as richly as possible, what happens for the self when one hears the voice of conscience. Phenomenologists might argue that this is in fact the only way we can study conscience, given that (in their view) we have no access to other minds. I can understand this approach, but it feels wrong in a world where we can only function by believing that we do have access to other minds (even if, in some senses, we don’t).

• What is [the psychological experience that we call] conscience? For Freud, conscience was the same as ‘super-ego’ – ‘the part of our personality that … takes “the form of conscience” to exercise its control over one’s impulses and instincts.’ In other words, conscience is just a name for the intrusive voice of society, stopping us from doing what we really want to do. This is neat, but it doesn’t explain why people like Edward Bushell or Trudi Warner would make life difficult for themselves by acting on conscience.

• What is [the semantic meaning of the word] conscience? Linguists would chart the etymology of the word, its relationship with other terms and its cognates in other languages to understand the semantic field within which ‘conscience’ gains meaning. I think this is important, because language has a huge impact on what and how we think. With more time, I would love to dig more deeply into this dimension of the issue.

• What is [the social and cultural meaning of the word] conscience? Sociologists would want to know how the notion of conscience is used to constitute power relations, whilst anthropologists might be particularly interested in any rituals that are associated with the experience of conscience. Again, I think this is important, because – as the example of William Penn shows – conscience is culturally contingent, so it seems likely that we deploy the idea to achieve certain social or cultural goals, rather than to describe universal moral truths.

• What is [the metaphysical nature of] conscience? Some philosophers and theologians might argue that conscience exists above and beyond any of these social or psychological dimensions and study it as a thing with ontological status – part of ultimate reality. As I’ve already admitted, I just don’t get this approach: I don’t understand how we can talk meaningfully about supposed properties of the universe that we can’t prove or disprove. This might be a big blind spot of my own thinking, but there you go. Nobody’s perfect.

So, what’s the answer?

I clearly don’t know the answer to any of these questions. But what if I try to stir together various ideas to come up with a working definition of conscience? There are three insights that have emerged for me out of this enquiry.

1. It seems that we can use the term ‘conscience’ to explain beliefs that put us at odds with many others in our society – but not with everyone in our society. For example, I could use my conscience to justify protesting about the climate crisis but not to justify protesting about the fact that the moon isn’t made of cheese. One protest makes sense in our current context whilst the other does not.

2. It also seems that conscience must be subject to some kind of logic or moral reasoning. I can’t just say that my conscience compels me to drive on the wrong side of the road because the Prime Minister is an alien. There must be a relationship between ideas to create a position of conscience.

3. And it seems that conscience can’t be used to justify any action. There is an obvious difference between holding up signs outside a court and threatening the lives of asylum-seekers in a hotel. Both protests might well be justified by a sense of right and wrong, but the actions aren’t equally legitimate.

So, if we put these three insights together, we get something like this:

What English speakers call ‘conscience’ is the experience of tension between competing notions of right and wrong in a particular social context, subject to (a) the dominant ethical and epistemic systems in that society; (b) moral reasoning; and (c) constraints on the actions that are inspired by conscience.

It’s a messy answer, but then nobody said this would be easy.

Next question, please

Throughout this enquiry, I’ve been bumping into versions of the brain/mind problem. So, I next want to ask: is my intelligence artificial?