Search Results

The Greek expression for conscience meant in the 5^th century BCE: sharing with oneself, as if one were split into two, knowledge of a personal defect, not yet always a moral one. The Christian Saint Paul was to link knowledge of the personal with knowledge of a general law of both right and wrong. Gandhi paraphrased in Gujarati Plato's Apology, in which Socrates is portrayed as having an inner warning voice. Platonists were to identify it with conscience, and, like Gandhi, to discuss how it worked. Gandhi treated his own inner voice, like Socrates but unlike Saint Paul, as indubitable, but conceded that it takes practice to hear it aright. He regarded the voice as God's, but as reminding one of values, not as supplying them, and as binding, even when mistaken. Conscience, he thought, speaks only to the individual, but may tell one to change the conduct of others.

This chapter considers the writings of Ernesto Rossi, who recognized the absolute authority of moral conscience and posited it as the foundation of his religious conception of life. Sentenced to twenty years in prison for his participation in conspiratorial activity, he wrote to his mother, Elide Rossi, from the penitentiary in Piacenza, on January 20, 1933, that he was happy she no longer had any tie with the Catholic religion. For Rossi, Catholicism was at most an inferior conception of life compared to philosophical knowledge. Rossi prefered a soft religion—soft and yet capable of guiding one's action—to a revealed or bad religion. The chapter then turns to the writings of Massimo Mila, who was imprisoned in 1935 because he belonged to the Justice and Liberty movement. He believed not in the Christian religion but rather in a profound secular religion, based on the supreme value of the intrinsic intention of the one who acts and the conviction that one's faith is solely the “purity of the moral intention.”

This chapter examines and analyzes Mill's focus on Plato's attempt to reconcile the goals of creative, wise individuals and the universal good. In On Liberty, for instance, Mill's central argument lies in the objectives of freedom and justice. Nineteenth-century philosophers and commentators on Plato focused on the theme of freedom and the general good, a theme that Mill himself would also be concerned with. The chapter examines writings that focus and center on moral theory, particularly Mill's assessment of Plato's moral teachings, Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments, and Kant's conception of the moral conscience. It explains how Mills would confront Plato's moral theory with the purpose of developing a conception of justice that would challenge Kant's position. It explores all the positions that Mill tool in order to fulfil his project of harmonizing the cultivation of self-defining, self-commanding individuals and the development of higher modes of social unity.

Shirley Williams looks more specifically at the moral issues surrounding the global distribution of resources, capabilities, and incomes. She is highly critical of some of the economic policies and political regimes of some of the rich countries, and demonstrates, from Indonesian and Russian examples, how Western governments and international agencies failed to recognize and give support to the institutional reforms necessary to ensure that their transition to a market‐based economic system would be successful. She emphasizes the need for a new and more holistic approach to economic development; indeed, she avers that global social justice demands it. Williams concludes by observing that the moral conscience of society is very much alive, and reminds us of the role of the churches and private individuals that helped initiate the Jubilee 2000 movement, which was geared towards lifting the burden of debt from some of the poorest countries in the world. However, she is clearly not satisfied that either national governments or supra‐national agencies are doing enough to ensure that global capitalism works to the benefit of all the peoples of the world––and particularly to those in the greatest need.

The Moral Conscience principle claims that a conflict between the demands of a law and the demands of an individual’s sincere moral conscience provides her with a defeasible moral entitlement to an exemption. This chapter argues that this principle is vulnerable to an unfairness objection. There is nothing special about moral conscience that would justify granting an exemption, it claims, that is not shared by a variety of non-moral projects. Thus, there is no principled moral reason for a defeasible entitlement to moral conscience-based exemptions that is not an equally good reason for a defeasible entitlement to non-moral project-based exemptions. Since the chapter assumes that people are not defeasibly entitled to such project-based exemptions, it advocates scepticism about the Moral Conscience principle.

This chapter investigates yet another frontier of tragical mimesis in early Christian literary culture: the retraining of the Christian moral conscience to envision human existence in its graphically and concretely tragic dimension. Christians were to be educated in sustained awareness that they were a part of the same “vanity” to which all of creation had been subjected, a crucial discipline of which was the sympathetic contemplation of specific groups in their social and cultural foreground that lived under a seemingly constant tragic yoke. The bulk of the chapter concentrates on four such groups consistently brought to Christians’ attention, particularly by episcopal preachers. First were the indigent and diseased, whose suffering played out a tragedy into which all Christians were being called as dramatis personae engaging Christ himself through the poor. Second were social parasites, society’s “tragic comics” whose antics and theatrics in striving to make a living from more fortunate patrons tested Christians’ ability to overcome revulsion with compassion. Third were married people and ascetics/monastics: marrieds because the institution of marriage was a symbol of the tragic vulnerability and volatility of even the most intimate of human relationships, and ascetics/monastics because their religious vocation parodied both the tragedy and the comedy of human existence. Fourth were “unbelieving” Jews, long conceived in Christian eyes as the bearers of the tragic legacy of rejection of Jesus as the Christ.

This chapter describes the genesis of Maistrian historical thought in De l'état de nature and De la souveraineté du people (1794–96), two essays that refute Jean-Jacques Rousseau and contain most of Maistre's historical thought in potentia. It was in refuting Rousseau that Maistre redefined nature as a mysterious divine agent and a source of reason; he insisted that will and perfectibility are history's main agents and society's foundations; and developed the ideas on probability and moral conscience that were so important for his realist conservatism and his philosophy of history. Indeed, the essays include a sophisticated model of historical causation that constitutes an early example of moral statistical theory.

This chapter examines the fluidity of moral subjectivity by juxtaposing rinrigaku texts with moral writings by religious apologists. More specifically, it considers the conflict between the discipline of ethics and religion regarding the authority to speak for “the good,” and especially the extent to which the state should play a role in shaping the individual's moral conscience. At stake here was the question of human interiority. Rinrigaku scholars of early Meiji Japan argued that if the state is barred from such a role, moral unity will never be realized. They insisted that religion was irrational and therefore inappropriate as a basis for morality. Many religious apologists countered that the autonomy of one's conscience was inviolable. This chapter argues that the discursive exchange between rinrigaku scholars and defenders of religion reflects the way the production of the good and epistemological preconceptions were inextricably bound to one another.

This chapter argues that what makes the character of moral conscience paradigmatic as the experience of alterity and passivity is that the dimension of affirmation originally constitutes it and is inscribed directly on it. It first examines Paul Ricoeur's claim that conscience is “the most deeply hidden passivity” in contrast to other passivities that belong to the experience of the proper body and the relation to the Other. It then considers Emmanuel Levinas's argument that the Other is neither “Being” nor a “being” easily grasped by a concept, along with Martin Heidegger's statement that “ontology” is always “practical,” always “engaged,” and therefore always includes an intrinsically ethical dimension. It also asks whether it is possible to think Being and the Other without opposing them before concluding with an analysis of the dialectic of alterity and ipseity that constitutes the most fundamental level of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self.

Exemptions from laws of general application are sometimes granted on the basis of an individual’s unwillingness to comply with the law. Most such volitional exemptions involve a conflict between the law and the demands of an individual’s religious or secular moral convictions. I argue here that a limited number of volitional exemptions can be justified on the basis of a futility principle. When otherwise morally permissible penalties for violating the law cannot be expected to induce the compliance of an intransigent minority, the penalties are futile, and the state has some principled reason to exempt the minority from the law’s requirements. Since the futility principle only applies to some cases of conscientious objection, it differs in important ways from justifications grounded in a general entitlement to religious or moral exemptions.

This chapter shows how Chinese people were represented by Western missionaries as mindless and “body-ful”. It explains that this attitude of missionaries toward the foreign mind appears in various metaphors of mindlessness which pervade the earlier-nineteenth-century reportage on China. It mentions that the Chinese were also sometimes viewed as a dense homogenous mass of bodies, as unemotional and unimaginative and as liars with no higher moral conscience.

W. R. Matthews found the moral argument (along with the teleological argument) the most persuasive of all the theistic arguments. He reflects upon the “moral evolution of mankind” and asks what it implies concerning the nature of the universe; he discusses the conscience and asks, “On what grounds can we justify that sense of obligation which is the characteristic property of moral experience?” He ponders the nature of the good and asks, “What is the place of the Good in the general structure of the universe?” He finds that in each case he is led to the theistic hypothesis.