CHAPTER VIII. Is Conscience Always a Pathological Phenomenon?

IS CONSCIENCE ALWAYS A PATHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON?

“When the rookery is pretty well filled, and the nest-building is in full swing, the birds have a busy and anxious time. To get enough of suitable small stones is a matter of difficulty, and may involve long journeys for each single stone. The temptation is too strong for some of them, and they become habitual thieves. The majority remain stupidly honest. Amusing complications result. The bearing of the thief clearly shows that he knows he is doing wrong. He has a conscience, at least a human conscience, i. e., the fear of being found out. Very different is the furtive look of the thief, long after he is out of danger of pursuit, from the expression of the honest penguin coming home with a hard-earned stone.

“An honest one was bringing stones from a long distance. Each stone was removed by a thief as soon as the owner’s back was turned. The honest one looked greatly troubled as he found that his heap didn’t grow, but he seemed incapable of suspecting the cause.

“A thief, sitting on his own nest, was stealing from an adjacent nest, whose honest owner was also at home, but looking unsuspectingly in another direction. Casually he turned his head and caught the thief in the act. The thief dropped the stone and pretended to be busy picking up an infinitesimal crumb from the neutral ground.”

“The Heart of the Antarctic,” SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON, Vol. II, p. 253 (Section on the Adelie Penguin, by James Murray, Biologist of the Expedition).

The word “conscience” was perhaps originally synonymous with consciousness, but it gradually came to mean self-consciousness of a very special type, namely, the silent commendation or censure which a man may bestow upon his actions or his projects. This word “conscience” replaced the Middle English term inwit,—a term made famous in the title of a book (circa 1340) called the “Ayenbite of Inwit” (that is, the “Again-bite or Remorse of Conscience”). The concept of conscience has played an important part in modern ethical theory, and it is supposed by many persons to be the foundation of all morality. What place it deserves to hold in a constructive, mechanistic ethics can be determined, however, only by careful analysis. So many extravagant claims have been advanced in its behalf as to make one suspect that none of them are true. Things which people have “always heard lauded and never discussed” are only with difficulty saved from oblivion when intellectual revolutions have altered the emphasis which man puts on the values of life. It was thus with the word “soul,” and with the word “immortality,” and it is likely to be the same with the word “conscience.” At least it will be an advantage to look at the philosophical pedigree of this once mighty shibboleth.

It may be surprising to learn that as far as ethical theory is concerned, the doctrine of an infallible conscience is the product of no less recent a time than the XVIII century. The Conscience-theory is the philosophical property of such men as Butler, Clarke, Kant, Shaftesbury, and Reid, rather than of their predecessors. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who founded critical English ethics, flatly refused to give to the then immature concept of conscience any recognition; indeed, he declared it to be nothing less than a “disease” of the state, and one “of those things that weaken or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth.” In Chapter XXIX of the “Leviathan,” he states the current notions of conscience: (1) “That every private man is judge of good and evil actions,” and (2) “That whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin.” Both of these notions Hobbes condemns. “For,” he observes with characteristic sagacity, “a man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment so also the conscience may be erroneous.”

This emphasis which Hobbes placed upon the untrustworthiness of private ethical judgments was fatal to his purpose. His successors began straightway to reanimate that which he had sought to bury once and for all, and, whether on account of their temperamental antipathy to the intellectualism of Hobbes, or because they were honestly seeking for some valid ethical principle, they asserted, first timidly, and later with a surprising boldness the very thing which Hobbes had sought especially to efface from the docket of ethical discussion.

We find this reaction beginning in Shaftesbury (1671-1713). Albeit this author gives a minor place in his ethical theory to the notion of a “moral sense,” or rational, reflex affection which approves only socially beneficial actions, yet the positive emphasis which he puts upon it is nevertheless significant. The affirmation proved to be contagious, for those who followed Shaftesbury immediately elevated conscience to a central position in their systems. We refer here to Butler, Clarke, Kant, and Reid, who are known as intuitionists.

According to Butler (1692-1752), conscience is a “principle of reflection” and not a mere feeling. And this principle of reflection is for him a natural or inherent property of man’s mind. It is the principle by which a man “approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions”; it is a faculty which “tends to restrain men from doing mischief to each other, and leads them to do good.” Be it noted here that Butler says nothing about the so-called infallibility of conscience, nor does he argue that it must be the same for all persons. Moreover, he gives a somewhat analytical definition of it, and is willing to grant that its function is utilitarian.

The old belief in the certainty of conscience now begins to reappear. It was Clarke (1675—1729) who attempted to defend it by the use of a mathematical analogy. We are all familiar with the axiom (or truism) that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. If now we keep the general form, but alter the substance of this axiom, so that it reads: “Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him,” we have Clarke’s Law of Equity. To an arm-chair philosopher such a statement sounds fairly cogent, but its empirical value is not thereby guaranteed. As every student of psychology knows, individual differences, individual preferences, and the capacity of individuals by this method of give-and-take are completely ignored in the formulation of this law. Besides, Clarke’s conception of conscience may be said to contain a hint of ethical solipsism, or the theory that oneself is the only accurate authority on social justice. We need not pause longer over the insuperable difficulties of such a point of view.

It is, however, in the writings of Kant and Reid that the conscience-theory attains its modern, sentimental form. In his “Metaphysic of Morality” Kant (1724-1804) makes the following straddling assertion: “Nothing in the whole world, or even outside of the world [sic!] can possibly be regarded as good without limitation except a good will.” But this is not the full extent to which this philosopher presses his claims. For he continues, “A man’s will is good, not because the consequences which flow from it are good, nor because it is capable of attaining the ends which it seeks, but it is good in itself, or because it wills the good. Its intrinsic value is in no way increased by success or lessened by failure.” From all of which Kant concludes that “As the will must not be moved to act from any desire for the results expected to follow from obedience to a certain law, the only principle of the will which remains is that of the conformity of actions to universal law. In all cases I must act in such a way that I can at the same time will that my maxim should become a universal law.” This last statement is the famous categorical imperative.

At first glance this appears to have profundity, but it turns out even upon the slightest analysis to be quite the opposite. For example, the first passage quoted (“Nothing ... can be regarded as good without limitation except a good will”) contains assertions that nobody can know enough to make. It is ritualistic philosophy. Moreover, the expression “good will” actually does (Kant to the contrary, notwithstanding) put a logical limitation upon the concept good, just as “good” cat, or “good” razor does. Besides, the term “will” or volition always refers to a phenomenon which is strictly dependent upon circumstances, for a man wills only when there is something to be possessed. These are not all the errors which Kant here commits. His attempt to explain why the good will is good (itself a statement exhibiting the fallacy of ambiguity) reveals that Kant was a very poorly equipped psychologist. I ask you, how many persons is it possible to find,—indeed, is it possible to find one single man except among the psychopathic cases,—who would ever be stimulated to live,—much less to subscribe to Kant’s theory,—if his successes or failures had no effect whatever upon his future volitions? We do not imply by this rhetorical question that every man is, or can be, or should be immoderately egoistical, but only that Kant had no insight whatever into the psychological problems involved in ethics.

Consequently, the categorical imperative as a deduction from Kant’s first principles is to be regarded as completely erroneous. How, indeed, can a man act in such a way as to make the maxim of his action a universal law? Suppose we offer a simple example. When I am hungry, and food is before me, I eat it. Does this imply that my will to eat becomes a universal law, namely, that all the hungry should eat? But when I learn of the many hungry who are unable to eat, my will to eat illustrates not a universal law, but an extremely particular law, that is to say, the law that if I am hungry, and if food is supplied, and, furthermore, if I am willing to risk that food, then, but only then, do I eat it. There seems to be no way to establish the validity of Kant’s imperative, regardless of the direction one’s thought takes. To cite a different example entirely, let us imagine a hungry man who, having cornered all the food of his tribe, eats it on the assumption that every other man would do the same thing if he were similarly fortunate. Here the categorical imperative appears in such a light as to shock its author profoundly. And yet in strict logic, this interpretation is a valid one for an intuitionist ethics. Do we wonder that Levy-Brühl speaks of “the ambiguous and bastard concept of the moral law,” when they who attempt to state such a law have neither comprehension nor patience enough to discover the simplest principles of human conduct?

It is, however, in the “Essays on the Active Powers of Man,” by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) that the commonplace notion of conscience receives its principal philosophical support. Concerning this “moral sense,” as Reid calls it in reminiscence of Shaftesbury, the following formidable assertions are made. In the first place, “It is without doubt far superior to every other power of the mind.” In the second place, “The testimony of this moral sense,” like that of the rest of the senses, “is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it.” In addition, just as the sense of vision is fundamental for space perception, so “The truths immediately testified by our moral faculty are the first principles of all moral reasoning.” Reid would also have us note that this reasoning is not inductive, but deductive, for he says, “The first principles of morals are the immediate dictates of the moral faculty.”

The outstanding fault of such a theory is that it assumes that every name we choose to manufacture has a reality corresponding to it. This is the fallacy of hypostatization, to which all idealistic philosophers are addicted. Granted that it is true, as Butler says, that we approve and disapprove of some of our actions, yet this does not imply that there is a transcendent faculty within us which we are at liberty to substantialize as Conscience or a Moral Sense. Such language is merely noun-worship. It is granted that the words “moral” and “sense” have each separately a meaning, but it does not follow that the compound term “moral-sense” must therefore have one. Moreover, all of these intuitionists are wilful and unperspicuous rationalists, demanding a fundamental principle in ethics before they have employed any induction or experimentation that might help them to frame such a principle correctly. They are willing to do no hard work, and to perform no crucial tests in order to see whether their guesses are facts or fictions. To complete our criticism, we must not omit to state that Reid’s elevation of conscience to a place among the senses merely reveals the extent to which he was willing to go in his defence of the testimony of the senses in general against the idealists of his age. His use of the “moral sense” was a debater’s trick. The high esteem in which conscience was held by his antagonists tempted him to turn one of their own weapons against them.

We can now better understand the statement previously made that the personification of conscience was the peculiar artifice, the “useful dodge,” of a certain school of ethical thinkers in the XVIII century. Consequently it is erroneous to suppose that the commonplace view of this phenomenon has always held undisputed sway over theoretical ethics. It had no place whatever in the minds of Greek ethical writers. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and their contemporaries founded the science of ethics without even dreaming that there was a conscience. Epictetus, Epicurus, and Marcus Aurelius showed no poverty of constructive thought for the lack of it. Even Helvetius, a contemporary of the intuitionists, rejected it as spurious when he wrote: “He who will warrant his virtue in every situation is either an impostor or a fool; characters equally to be mistrusted.”

Most people who have heard the name of John Locke will recall his arguments against the assumptions of the moral intuitionists in those passages where he combats the theory of innate moral ideas. According to Locke, all such ideas would have to be (1) independent of geographical location and climate, (2) independent of the age of the person and of his training, and (3) recognized by all persons as fundamental. But none of these conditions are found to be satisfied by anyone who makes the shortest pilgrimage through the world in the search for these statistics. And consequently the intellectually honest Locke rejects the philosophical theory of conscience, independently of his recognition of the facts of self-approval and self-disapproval.

It remained, however, for John Stuart Mill to foreshadow the beginning of the end of this fantastic theory of the moral faculty in