A free conscience: what is it, and how did we get it?
Freedom of conscience is an important topic; I have taken plenty of time to write the following articles.
Why is it so important? To put it bluntly, I consider our concept of tolerance to be the crucial issue that sets our civilisation apart from others. And among the manifestations of tolerance (religious freedom, social tolerance, etc.), I consider freedom of conscience together with behavioural tolerance to be the most essential.
Characteristic of our civilisation is that we have embraced diversity of views and behaviour. Freedom and variety are values in themselves for us. Inferior opinions and undesirable behaviour also come to the surface. You get that into the bargain, that's inevitable. But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
What I wrote about this is actually one very long article, so I have to cut it up and am publishing it in parts, one every week.
In this article we will examine how conscience gradually became an individual matter, over which even authorities such as the church and the state no longer had any control.
What is a conscience?
We judge our own behaviour with our conscience. That judgement is determined by how we see ourselves, why we act, or which moral principles we apply. It is essential that this self-knowledge, awareness or motivation comes from within, not from outside pressure. Because our conscience is so personal and subjective, and runs so deep, it is often connected to emotion.
Let's take an example. Suppose you are a vegetarian; you don't have the heart to eat meat. Although you will not necessarily seek confrontation: you actually disapprove when others eat meat.
The fact that you have a conscience says nothing about the content of that conscience. A conscience is like an empty box for morality: it can hold anything. In this case there is a judgement about eating meat. But just because eating meat is in your box of conscience does not mean that someone else's box of conscience also contains a judgement about vegetarianism. There may also be something completely different in there, for example about whether or not you are allowed to lie, while your box has no judgement about that at all. The composition of everyone's conscience box is unique.
Moreover, conscience is a morally neutral concept: if certain morality is in your conscience box, it is not necessarily better. Whether eating meat or lying is bad does not depend on whether you regard them as matters of conscience. For you, issues of conscience are emotionally charged, but that says nothing about the quality of that moral conviction.
Matters of conscience are also subjective and difficult to discuss: what matters is what you feel or think. You can perfectly take your judgement about eating meat and telling lies into your conscience and at the same time recognise that other moral considerations can also be valid (although you may quietly think that your view is better).
Matters of conscience are rarely reasoned from beginning to end. Although you will usually make an effort to justify your conscience beliefs with reasoning, they are also mixed with assumptions, intuitions and emotions.
What ends up in your 'box of conscience' depends on all kinds of factors. First of all, there is the biological morality that I wrote about before, which forms the basic ingredients. Your upbringing and culture play a major role, the knowledge and experience you gradually gain, the influence of social communities you find yourself in, opinions of friends, the media you follow, and your personality also plays a role.
The flexible conscience
Where does your conscience draw the line? That is difficult for an outsider to predict. You will notice it when you come across it yourself.
Especially as an adult, there is little chance that the content of your conscience will change drastically. But no matter how unshakable your conscience may seem to you when you encounter it, it turns out to be surprisingly flexible.
Our conscience can be stretched, especially by external pressure. Often it is peer pressure. Stanley Milgram's famous experiments showed how pressure from people in authority (in this case scientists in white coats) can stretch the conscience. In the short video below you can see what the experiment entailed.
Now this experiment was relatively short-lived and the electric shocks were not real. But if people have to stretch their conscience for a long time, they can suffer seriously psychologically, a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, accompanied by nightmares, uncontrollable thoughts, sleep disorders, severe startle reactions, emotional shutdown.
Much research has been done into the causes of war veterans suffering from PTSD. Even more than life-threatening situations, a correlation with post-traumatic stress appears to lie in experiences that gnaw at the conscience. The following question was surprisingly often answered positively among PTSD patients: “During wartime, soldiers are sometimes given orders or pressured into doing things that they thought were morally wrong. Some vets have reported that they either saw or did things that other people would consider to be excessively violent or brutal, even in wartime. Did you ever observe or participate yourself in doing any of these kinds of things (e.g., atrocities: torturing prisoners, mutilating enemy bodies, harming civilians)?”
Conscience can also be influenced sustainably. Indoctrination and brainwashing can be effective, but there are also more everyday situations in which consciences can be influenced: when you find yourself in a social environment with different moral values or circumstances. Originally I am used to being on time; a deal is a deal. But now that I often spend time in more southern countries, I have become a lot more easy-going. An agreement here is rather an intention. Although my 'inner German' sometimes flares up, a friend told me recently.
We do not know whether the conscience can be stretched indefinitely for a long time. So many atrocities have been committed by humanity, and not just by psychopaths, that our conscience is probably more elastic than we want to know. Perhaps we would be better off not exploring that boundary.
Our modern conscience
Viewed from a distance, three things stand out: the individuality of conscience, relativism, and the respect we should have for conscientious people.
To start with the latter, our respect for conscience. For us, conscience is closely intertwined with our identity, and we generally believe that someone's conscience should be respected. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses do not want to do military service and refuse blood transfusions. For us it is a matter of civilization that no coercion is applied.
An illustration of our respect for conscience is the veneration of Thomas More, chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. That king withdrew from the authority of the Pope and founded the Church of England under his own leadership. When More refused to acknowledge this in 1543, he was accused of high treason. His conscientious objections cost him, which earned him posthumous canonization by the Pope in 1935. The charming pragmatist More is depicted in popular culture as a morally high-minded, principled person, including in the film below, A man for all seasons (1966).
But More was a politician; he had already renounced so many of his principles that this one could certainly still have been added. Why do we have so much appreciation for a stubborn courtier who knows that his principled position will change nothing and will cost him his own life? Perhaps because the individual conscience can also be our last line of defence against abuse of power and cruel, authoritarian regimes.
Then the individuality of conscience. It is difficult to determine how individual our conscience is by nature. The individual conscience in antiquity only began to play an essential role after the collapse of the Greek city-states. Previously, conscience was primarily a collective matter, determined by traditions, religion, the interests of the state and who was in power. From Antiquity until the Reformation, it was believed that there was such a thing as an individual conscience, but it played a subordinate role. Of course you could have your own thoughts, but were you in a position to express them publicly? To deviate from current moral views? The contents of conscience were mainly determined for you by the authorities; in the late Middle Ages this was mainly the church.
Not that that was necessarily unliveable. People naturally have a psychological aversion to moral vacuums where all options are open and a compass is missing. Our conscience is strongly socially influenced in any case. A collective or imposed conscience sounds totalitarian, but people can thrive in it, as long as it is applied consistently. Provided that collective conscience does not violate our biological morality, I suppose. Only when people are used to forming and following their individual conscience, and then are forced to conform to a collective conscience, things start to grind.
The relativity of conscience is also striking. When you appeal to conscientious objection, you can get away with the craziest things, especially if the objections are religiously inspired. For example, in the Netherlands there are a bunch of religious christians who have conscientious objections to insurance, including social insurance such as health insurance and pensions. A special arrangement applies especially to them: instead of an insurance premium, they pay a special tax. It amounts to the same thing, but their consciences have been taken into account. A complex arrangement is maintained for a handful of believers, while no one seems to wonder whether these objections are meaningful.
In the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, such religious sensitivities are made fun of. Their followers, the Pastafarians, argue that their conscience tells them to wear a colander as a religious headgear. Governments have conducted lawsuits with Pastafarians who only want to be photographed with a colander on their head for their ID.
Conscience tested
When the former Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Ratzinger, he published an article on the role of conscience in Roman Catholic doctrine. In that article he pointed out that there is still something like truth, but that truth hardly plays a role in our civilization anymore. Everything is 'just an opinion', but if it is made a matter of conscience, we immediately jump to attention. This is how “moral anarchy” arises, according to the German Catholic philosopher Max Scheler in 1913. Consciences may well be tested, that is how I interpret Ratzinger.
We are more flexible about matters of conscience than about moral truths. If you don't want to eat meat, you have to decide that yourself, we don't make it a major issue. I'm starting to get a little nervous when you say that vegetarianism is morally superior. Then I might argue with you. And if you want to forbid me from eating meat, we won't be friends. The flexibility we show towards issues of conscience is also because we cannot see into each other's heads. Your judgement about eating meat must have been arrived at in a very complex way. As long as you limit your view to your own behaviour, I don't have to test whether your judgement deserves general application, just as I don't have to argue with you about whether petrol smells good or bad. (Good.) Moreover, issues of conscience quickly become emotional. If I tell you that your personal opinion about vegetarianism is ridiculous, and that you should not act that way, we will not become friends either.
But there is also a danger in our cautious handling of issues of conscience: it can encourage people to elevate a matter of preference or taste to a matter of conscience.
As soon as you start bothering others with your conscience, or claim privileges for yourself on the basis of your conscience, you will inevitably have to consider how much weight your conscience carries compared to the interests or beliefs of others. A discussion about, for example, whether or not to allow religious headscarves in the police and the judiciary can be seen in that light.
Our tendency to leave consciences alone also has an indifferent side. What is actually wrong with respectfully discussing someone's conscience, if, for example, we believe that someone is unnecessarily worried or isolating themselves? It can also be a sign of involvement, if you take the other person's moral emotions so seriously that you dare to question them.
In the next articles
The next articles will be about freedom of conscience. The crucial period spanned from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 17th century, roughly from Jean de Gerson to Baruch Spinoza. In it we will examine how our conscience has gradually become individualised and has become virtually inviolable.
We have already considered the social-psychological significance of conscience. Next week we will kick off with the prologue: how did the Greeks and Romans view conscience? This is followed by the Christian sources that were often referred to in the crucial period: the words of Jesus, Paul and the Church Fathers. We then switch to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where the individualisation of conscience began, conscience began to break away from absolute truth, and the ambiguity of conscience was discovered.
The break between Luther and the Church of Rome would mean a watershed. He justified his break with the Vatican by appealing to his conscience. The consequences were immense. All kinds of theologians suddenly appeared to have an individual conscience, and they fell over each other with wisdom that resulted in a fragmentation of theological doctrines. While until the 16th century the Bible was only available at the church in Latin, meaning that only an eccentric, literate few were interested in it, it was now widely read in the vernacular. Just as European countries now have millions of national football coaches, Europe suddenly had hordes of conscientious theologians in the 16th century.
What would have happened if the Church of Rome had just let it all go? Or had an agreement been reached with the Protestants? It is historical speculation, but it could well be that tolerance would have played a much less important role in our culture. Because the furious reaction from the Roman Church in turn led to a column of thinkers who stood up for freedom of conscience. And freedom of conscience has won.
We will look at the arguments that have been put forward for freedom of conscience since the Reformation. Starting with the most important one: how did the church become so sure that it was right with the use of violence against those who thought differently?
After addressing that question and a number of related issues, the next big question arises: how far should freedom of conscience go? Because freedom of conscience does not have to be limited to religious issues, and freedom of conscience can lead to serious unrest in a country, even to violence. Shouldn't one be careful that civil war breaks out if everyone is allowed to say and believe what they think? We will see that until fairly recently there was consensus that one indeed had to be careful with this, that free expression was certainly not unlimited.
The third major issue will be about the right to a free conscience. Because if you want to advocate freedom of conscience, the introduction of a human right is about the nuclear option. Could philosophers substantiate that people naturally have that right to freedom of conscience? That it is, as it were, God's will that you should be able to say what you think? As I wrote in an earlier series, it is still almost undisputed in our civilisation that we have that right by nature. I conclude the article with the interesting theory that Spinoza developed about this.
For further reading
Max Scheler, Die sogenannte Gewissenssubjektivität der sittlichen Werte, in: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913)
Alan Fontana, Robert Rosenheck, A causal model of the etiology of war-related PTSD, Journal of Traumatic Stress (1993)
Amitai Etzioni, The new golden rule: community and morality in a democratic society (1996)
Steven Hitlin, Moral selves, evil selves: the social psychology of conscience (2008)
Joseph Ratzinger, Conscience and truth, Communio (2010)
Paul Strohm, Conscience, a very short introduction (2011)
Richard Sorabji, Moral conscience through the ages: Fifth Century BCE to the present (2014)
Alberto Giubilini, Conscience, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023)
This was the seventeenth newsletter in a long series on Toleration and Christianity. An overview of all articles in this series can be found in the overview article Toleration in the history of Christianity.
The next episode will be about the meaning of the concept of freedom of conscience in the historical debate about religious toleration.