The moral conscience in ethics and the contemporary crisis of authority
Delivered at the conference "The Christian Conscience in Support of the
Right to Life."
Pontifical Academy for Life
Rome (2-3 March, 2007)
Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher
*Topics
1. The
voice of conscience
1.1 What
conscience is not
1.2 What conscience is: a little history
1.3 Three
acts of conscience
1.4 The
authority of conscience
2.
The voice of the magisterium
2.1 What
is "magisterium"?
2.2
Examples of moral magisterium
2.3 Conscience versus the magisterium after Vatican
II
3.
Conscience in post-modernity
3.1 Rome
responds
3.2 Continuing division over moral conscience and
authority
3.3 A communitarian rapprochement between conscience
and magisterium
3.4 A practical reason rapprochement between
conscience and Magisterium
4. Where to from
here?
1.1 What conscience is not
It might scandalize you to hear that I keep a
lady in my car to instruct me on which way to go in
life. "In three kilometers turn left," she commands.
"Turn around," she pleads. "Coming up, on your
right, you have arrived," she advises. She is, of
course, a global positioning satellite navigator and
I would be lost without her calm voice telling me
where to go. She can be wrong at times, due to
mechanical faults or wrong information. Sometimes I
ignore her or switch her off. But usually I obey
her; and if I don't I am usually sorry later.
In lots of ways conscience might seem to function
like my satellite navigator and so we might call her
Conscientia. Though I will argue that conscience is
not like a satellite navigator, many people think it
is a sort of angelic voice distinct from our own
reasoning which comes, as it were, from outside us,
even if we hear it in our heart; it is generally
trustworthy, but we must decide to obey it or not.
There is more than a hint of this at several points
in our theological tradition. But whatever these
texts mean, they clearly do not mean a divine or
diabolical voice intrudes into our ordinary
reasoning processes, commanding or complaining, a
rival with our own moral thinking. If we experience
such voices we should probably see a doctor or an
exorcist! Were conscience really a voice from
outside our reasoning it would play no part in
philosophy and there might be some kind of double
truth in the moral sphere.
Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic
legalism took moral theology down just such a blind
alley. Magisterium became the satellite navigator
and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret
and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors
are heirs to this. For some the solution to the
crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for
submission to the navigator. Moral tax lawyers, on
the other hand, try to find ways around the moral
law, or ways to "sail as close to the wind as
possible" without actually breaking the moral law.
Can you do a little bit of abortion or embryo
experimentation or euthanasia without breaking the
moral law? Can we reclassify some of it as something
else and thereby avoid the law? What both approaches
have in common with the late schoolmen is a view of
the magisterium as a voice external to conscience
which commands things to which conscience is not
naturally disposed.
In my written paper I trace what became of
conscience in liberal modernity. By the 1960s it
meant something like strong feeling, intuition or
sincere opinion. To appeal to conscience was to
foreclose all further discussion and to claim
immunity to reasoned argument or the moral law.
"Follow your conscience" came to be code for
pursuing personal preferences over and against
Church teaching, especially in sexuality, bioethics,
remarriage and communion. Conscience was now the
highest court of appeal: it had "primacy" or
infallibility. Sophisticated consciences yielded
judgments in accord with the New York Times rather
than L'Osservatore Romano. Conscience became, as the
then-Cardinal Ratzinger put it, "a cloak thrown over
human subjectivity, allowing man to … hide from
reality."
In my written paper I trace the origins of the
Christian conception of conscience in the universal
experience of agency and the Old and New Testaments,
especially in Pauline literature, and thereafter in
the Fathers and the scholastics. While the concept
of conscience played only a minor role in Aquinas'
moral theory, in the early modern period it was
"hoisted to new heights" and a whole, lengthy tract
devoted to it in the manuals, with practical reason
and prudence accordingly diminished. Soon "all
roads, in the moral world, led to conscience."
Conscience featured especially often in the
documents of the Second Vatican Council. The Council
declared that:
-- all are bound to seek,
embrace and live the truth faithfully;
-- conscience is experienced
as an inner sanctuary or tribunal, rather than
something external, yet it mediates a universal and
objective moral law which is given rather than
invented;
-- conscience summons us to
seek good and avoid evil by loving God and neighbor,
by keeping the commandments and all universal norms
of morality;
-- conscience is common to
all human beings, not just Christians, and it is the
very dignity of man, a dignity the Gospel protects;
-- we will be judged
according to how we formed and followed our
conscience;
-- the moral law and the
particular judgments of conscience bind the human
person;
-- agents may experience
anxiety, contradictions and imbalances in
conscience; and conscience may err out of
"invincible ignorance" or by being blamefully
corrupted;
-- claims of personal freedom
or of obedience to civil laws or superiors do not
excuse a failure to abide by the universal
principles of good conscience;
-- conscience must be
properly formed and educated by ensuring it is
"dutifully conformed to the divine law and
submissive toward the Church's teaching office,
which authentically interprets that law in the light
of the Gospel"; and
-- freedom of conscience,
especially in religious matters, must be respected
by civil authorities and people not be coerced into
any religious practice.
The Catechism distinguishes three acts or
dimensions of conscience: the perception of the
principles of morality; their application in the
given circumstances by practical discernment of
reasons and goods; and finally, judgment about
concrete acts yet to be performed or already
performed. These require a little unpacking.
The first act of the conscience identified in the
Catechism with synderesis is what I call
Conscience-1. In my written paper I identify texts
from Paul, Aquinas, Newman and Vatican II which
propose a very high -- even romanticized -- doctrine
of Conscience-1 as a voice or vicar or sanctuary of
God. These authors presume a long tradition of
reflection on "the first principles of the natural
law": basic principles of practical reason
accessible to all people of good will and right
reason. Because of their "givenness" these
principles provide us with bases both for
self-criticism and for social criticism. Far from
being a cause for the subjectivism of those who
think conscience means "doing my own thing" or the
relativism of those who think it means "doing what
the group does," Conscience-1 is actually the
beginning of an antidote to these.
Conscience-2 is the application of principles to
given circumstances "by practical discernment of
reasons and goods." This requires certain habits of
mind and will, especially prudence in deliberation.
In the process of deliberation the mind often faces
temptations, dilemmas, confusion and apparent
conflicts with the teachings of the magisterium.
Conscience must therefore be both well-formed and
well-informed.
Conscience-3 is our best judgment of what to do
or refrain from doing in the here and now (or in the
past). St. Thomas mostly used the word in this
sense. Conscience-3 is only worthy of respect when
it can bite, that is when it can tell us to do what
we might otherwise be disinclined to do, or vice
versa, or give us cause for remorse. Once again,
there is plenty of ground for error here. Thus while
insisting that we must follow our last, best
judgment of conscience as the proximate norm of
action, St. Thomas wrote a great deal about how we
might ensure such a judgment is reliable. He would,
I think, have been bewildered by contemporary talk
of the 'primacy' of conscience or of any
intellective operation. Just as the value of memory
is in remembering accurately, so the value of
conscience, for Thomas, is in yielding the right
choice. Truth always had primacy for him.
The Catholic view of conscience presupposes an
optimistic view of human capacities to discern the
good, even after the Fall. But if conscience is
reduced from objective principles to subjective
sincerity or from shared principles to private ones,
it is hard to see why we would take people's
consciences so seriously. Too often in recent years
those desperate for moral education or advice have
been fobbed off with "follow your conscience" or
indulged with "do what you think is best." Too often
human rights documents have become weapons against
the rights of some people. Without shared objective
principles, "conscientious" belief becomes
window-dressing for raw preference or power and we
have no way of knowing whether our conscience is
well-formed or not, well-functioning or not,
accurate or disastrously off-course.
Thus when Vatican II uses the term conscience 52
times and its Catechism also, both texts presume a
long history and complex content not necessarily
shared by users of the word conscience or spokesmen
for the Council's "spirit." Nor does the phrase
"primacy of conscience" appear anywhere in the
Council's texts. On the contrary, the word
conscience is always qualified with adjectives such
as "right," "upright," "correct," "well-formed," or
"Christian" -- allowing, by implication, that not a
few consciences are confused, deformed or otherwise
misleading. So some other standard (by which
conscience is judged) has "primacy.' The Council
pointed out that conscience often goes wrong,
sometimes "invincibly" (i.e. by no fault of the
agent and so without losing its dignity), but at
other times "voluntarily" (i.e. due to negligence or
vice, in which case conscience is degraded).
Conscience, like any intellectual ability, can err
because the human mind can be more or less mature,
experienced, trained, healthy, sophisticated,
imaginative, prudent, integrated with passion, etc.
Conscience is only right conscience when it
accurately mediates and applies that natural law
which participates in the divine law; it is
erroneous when it does not. Thus, as I suggested
earlier, it may be more helpful to think of
conscience as a verb (a doing word), describing the
human mind thinking practically towards good or
godly choices, rather than reifying it as a noun, a
faculty or voice with divine qualities.
Despite the tendency of conscience to error, the
Church maintains its high view of the dignity of
conscience. From this several things follow:
-- that we must do our best
to cultivate a well-formed and well-informed
conscience in ourselves and those we influence;
-- that we must take
responsibility for our actions and thus always seek
seriously to discern what is the right choice to
make;
-- that we should seek to
resolve doubt rather than act upon it;
-- that we must follow the
last and best judgment of our conscience even if,
unbeknownst to us, it is objectively in error;
-- that we must do so in all
humility, aware that our choice may be wrong and so
be ready, if we later realize it is, to repent and
start afresh; and
-- that we should avoid
coercing people's consciences: People should if
possible be persuaded rather than forced to live
well and so be given a certain latitude.
Such reverence for persons and their consciences
is perfectly consistent with denying that conscience
is infallible or has "primacy" over truth or faith
or the teachings of Christ and his Church. As we
will see, the magisterium seeks to enable conscience
to achieve a more reliable mediation and application
of moral truth: It is always objective moral truth
that has primacy and only this which can be
infallibly true.
2.1 What is "magisterium"?
The teaching authority of the Church, restating
or unfolding the implications of Christ's teaching
is called "magisterium." In my written paper I trace
some of the history of and theological warrant for
this idea. Interestingly Jesus' departing promise to
be with his Church to the end of time was attached
to a charge not to teach the nations Christology or
Soteriology or even Fundamental Moral Theology, but
to teach them his commandments! By the time of
Vatican II the Church could assert that Christ's
faithful ought to give the unconditional obedience
of faith (obsequium fidei) to all that it proposes
as certainly true and could express several ways in
which this magisterium is operationalized
infallibly.
Of course to say that the Church is infallible in
certain situations is not to say that it is
omniscient or inerrant in everything it says and
does. In addition to infallible magisterial teaching
there are the much more common pronouncements of
various Church bodies or leaders proposed with a
lesser degree of authority or more tentatively. Such
teachings must be taken very seriously by believers
out of respect for the Church as an inspired
teacher; but they do not command the unconditional
"obedience of faith," only some degree of "religious
assent." What degree depends upon who teaches and
when and how. When a person's own reasons against a
particular non-infallible teaching are so convincing
to him that he cannot give an honest interior assent
to the teaching, he nonetheless remains a Catholic.
On the other hand, it must be recognized that some
teachings not yet infallibly defined do in fact
belong to the core of our tradition and may well in
the future be the object of an infallible
determination. If unsure of their own conclusions,
believers will therefore be inclined to follow even
a non-definitive teaching until such time as they
can clarify their own best judgment of what faith
and reason require.
In my written paper I argue for several examples
of infallible magisterial teaching on moral matters.
Given the academy in which we are meeting, it might
suffice to recall the three moral "dogmas" to be
found in John Paul II's encyclical on bioethics,
"Evangelium vitæ." Here he was careful to cite the
texts from Vatican II regarding the papal and
episcopal magisterium in moral matters, and to use
the language of Petrine authority. The clearest
exercise of the highest level of papal magisterium
was with respect to direct killing of the innocent.
John Paul then applied this teaching to abortion and
euthanasia, both of which he confirmed were grave
moral disorders. Though there are some differences,
in each case he claimed the authority of the natural
law, the Scriptures and the Tradition, the ordinary
and universal magisterium, the disciplinary
tradition of the Church, the unanimous agreement of
the bishops -- and, now, "the authority which Christ
conferred upon Peter and his successors".
Around the time of Vatican II, Karl Rahner wrote
that conscience is the proximate source of moral
obligation, and so must be followed even if
mistaken; but that we must form our conscience
rightly and avoid confusing it with subjective
inclination or personal preference. A Catholic must
be prepared to accept moral instruction from the
Church and never appeal to conscience to make an
exception for himself. If we realized that we may
very well have to sacrifice everything or lose our
soul, then we would not look for exceptions to be
made for us from God's law and our confessors would
not use evasions like "follow your conscience" when
some hard if sensitive teaching were needed. If in
our sinful world God's law seems unrealistic, the
trouble is not with God's law but with the world!
The early Rahner wrote on the verge of a new age
in which Christian ethics faced challenges from many
quarters, not least from within the Church. Vatican
II sought to restate and update Catholic moral
teaching. Though aware of the growing individualism
and relativism, the Council seemed optimistic to the
point of naïveté about how their words would be
received. Many people took up the Council's views on
the dignity and liberty of conscience with greater
enthusiasm than they did its teaching on the duty to
inform conscience and exercise that liberty in
accord with moral absolutes known to right reason
and proclaimed by the magisterium.
The "crisis of '68" was a crisis at least in part
over the meaning of conscience, its implications for
decision-making and its relationship to the
magisterium. In the 1970s a number of theologians
proceeded to deny that the Scriptures, the Tradition
and the hierarchy have any "strong" magisterium in
moral matters. The "situationists" echoed the
contemporary exaltation of human freedom and
rejection of appeals to nature, reason, authority or
any static, universal or objectivist standards; what
mattered, in the end, was whether the person's
"heart was in the right place." The
"proportionalists" asserted that the role of
conscience was to identify and balance upsides and
downsides of options and that the Church could
propose some "rules of thumb" for this balancing
act, but no moral absolutes. Some argued that it was
impossible for the Church to teach infallibly in
morals; others said that while it could in
principle, it never had done so; and both agreed
that the ordinary teaching of the Church is
"susceptible to error and therefore fallible."
We are all well aware of how thoroughly the
1970s-'80s style of moral thinking filtered down
through many of our societies, even if it was rarely
dressed up in the highfalutin language of "ontic
evils" and "authenticity." In a slightly more
sophisticated form it was taught to a generation of
priests and lay theology students. It will take some
time to recover a more Catholic sense of the role
and content of conscience and the magisterium.
3.1 Rome responds
John Paul II took the opportunity of the 25th
anniversary of "Humanæ vitæ" to publish his
groundbreaking encyclical "Veritatis splendor." Here
he reasserted the teaching of Vatican II that Christ
and the Church can, have and do teach definitively
in moral matters, and that a well-formed Christian
conscience will be informed by such authoritative
teaching. Here one ought to proceed with obedience
of faith, submitting one's experience, insights and
wishes to the judgment of the Gospel, prepared to
reform oneself according to the mind of Christ
authentically transmitted by the Church. Conscience
is indeed the proximate norm of personal morality,
but its dignity and authority "derive from the truth
about moral good and evil, which it is called to
listen to and to express." Sincerity cannot
establish the truth of a judgment of conscience and
freedom is never freedom from the truth but always
and only freedom in the truth. The magisterium does
not bring to the conscience truths which are
extraneous to it, but serves the Christian
conscience by highlighting and clarifying those
truths which a well-formed conscience ought already
to possess.
In subsequent documents the CDF taught that the
magisterium has the task of "discerning, by means of
judgments normative for the consciences of
believers, those acts which in themselves conform to
the demands of faith and foster their expression in
life and those acts which, on the contrary, are
incompatible with such demands because intrinsically
evil." In "Ad tuendam fidem," John Paul II
identified three categories of doctrines which I
have treated more fully in my written paper. An
example of the highest degree of authoritative
teaching -- requiring the assent of theological
faith by all the faithful -- is "the doctrine on the
grave immorality of direct and voluntary killing of
an innocent human being." Examples of the second
category of doctrines -- teachings which are
"necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the
deposit of faith" to which the faithful must give
"firm and definitive assent" lest they fall out of
full communion with the Church -- are teachings on
the illicitness of euthanasia, prostitution,
fornication and presumably abortion. The third class
are those teachings on faith and morals presented as
true or at least sure, but not solemnly defined or
definitively proposed by the magisterium, to which
"religious submission of will and intellect" are
required. Church teaching on IVF falls at least into
this class.
Cardinal Ratzinger opened his 1991 lecture on
"Conscience and Truth" by observing that conscience
is the core issue in contemporary moral theology. As
the bulwark of freedom it supposedly confers on the
agent a kind of private infallibility vis-à-vis any
other authority. But to say conscience is infallible
is contradictory, since any two persons' consciences
may differ on a particular point. The "traumatic
aversion" some have to faith-as-encumbrance affects
their whole understanding of conscience and
magisterium. For them conscience is an escape hatch
from a demanding religion -- a religion they are
very loath to preach or counsel.
When a fellow academic posited that the Nazis
were saints because they followed their conscience,
Ratzinger was convinced "that there is something
wrong with the theory of the justifying power of the
subjective conscience." His exploration of ancient
Scripture and modern psychology, Socrates and
Newman, confirmed that the notion needed to be
thoroughly purified. Why does the Psalmist beg
pardon for hidden or unknown faults? Because "the
loss of the ability to see one's guilt, the falling
silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more
dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is
recognized." Thus Ratzinger argued that the
reduction of conscience to subjective certainty does
not liberate but enslaves or abandons us, making us
totally dependent on personal taste or prevailing
opinion. Though a person's last, best judgment binds
him at the moment of acting, this cannot mean "a
canonization of subjectivity." While it is never
wrong to follow such a judgment, "guilt may very
well consist in arriving at such perverse
convictions."
The Catholic Church is far from alone today in
facing polarization over the meaning and roles of
conscience and authority. At one pole are those who
hold that if only we attended more carefully to the
magisterium instead of the zeitgeist, all would be
well. The faithful should be willing to obey and
their leaders to lead. Real conscience is the driver
obeying the ecclesial satellite navigator,
Magisterium, who tells us to turn left or right in
the next 500 meters to go to the only destination
that matters. At the opposite pole are those who
argue that conscience must have "primacy." Vatican
II opened up a new space for Catholics to follow
their own lights rather than rely too heavily on
their pastors. A renewed appreciation of personal
experience and interpretation, of individual goals
pursued freely without undue interference, is
required. Conscience, then, is the ability to switch
off the ecclesial satellite navigator and make
decisions for oneself.
It is interesting just how much these "opposite"
poles have in common. Both are convinced that the
other has betrayed Vatican II and is endangering the
Church's future. Both view the magisterium as an
authority external and often rival to personal
conscience. In the last part of my paper I want to
examine whether the best of contemporary philosophy
might offer any ways forward.
The first comes from a major move in contemporary
ethical theory known as communitarianism. The very
word conscientia might point us in this direction:
For it means, literally, to think "with," and the
"with" might refer to some community or tradition of
fellow seekers after truth. The autonomous ethics of
modernity often fail to take seriously the extent to
which these shape people's identity and values. Even
our most private life-plans are inevitably
interrelated with those of others. More
fundamentally, our sense of who we are and what
matters to us largely comes with our ties to family,
workplace, party, nation, culture and, of course,
church. Some of these ties are chosen, others simply
"received." Pre-existing models -- models (such as
Christ and the saints) and social practices (such as
how we worship God and respect and care for others)
are relied upon in our moral thinking or emulated in
our acting, and a great deal depends on what kinds
of moral communities we belong to.
While the modern emphasis upon autonomy has
helpfully encouraged individuality, initiative and
respect, it has also had very real costs in terms of
emotional distress, normative ambivalence and
political paralysis. In such situations communities
like the Church can call people back into
relationships, traditions and practices which help
to knit them together and give them a sense of
identity and destiny. The common good requires a
shared vision and lifestyle, handed down within the
community and protected by certain authoritative
figures or mechanisms.
Are our beliefs and practices therefore purely
arbitrary? Or can there be some more rational
standard by which to judge our ecclesial baggage? In
the next section I suggest some objective standards.
But we must also allow that some of it can be put
down to these more "cultural," shifting, particular
aspects of the Church's life-history. Thus from
among the range of reasonable options even
self-consciously "pluralistic" communities do not
choose randomly or value-neutrally: They stand for
and against certain things, and they do this by
their prayer and worship, their scriptures and
creeds, and, of course, their moral codes and common
projects.
Thus the faith and morals of the Church are
normative for the individual who wishes to belong to
it. Once a person has chosen (and been chosen) to
belong, certain practices "come with the package,"
so to speak. If you are pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia
and pro-cloning the Catholic Church is not for you;
or -- better -- since the Catholic Church is for
you, you should convert to being anti-abortion,
anti-euthanasia, anti-cloning and pro-life and love,
pro-the sick and disabled, and pro-the theology of
the body. Documents such as the Catechism thus
function as an authoritative articulation of "the
Catholic story." To be part of the Church is to
believe certain things but also to live in accord
with that tradition and like other members of that
community. Orthopraxis expresses orthodoxy.
The communitarian reading of magisterium might be
thought to reduce magisterium to culture and
conscience to a social construct. Recent approaches
to "practical reason" are therefore a useful
complement. The very word conscientia again provides
a hint: For it means to reason (morally) with
knowledge and not merely on the basis of opinions or
fashions. The "basic human goods" that provide the
reasons for all human actions can be specified as
the series of underived basic principles found in
"Veritatis splendor": transmit and preserve life,
refine and develop the material world, cultivate
social life, seek truth, practice good, contemplate
beauty, serve God, honor parents. This requires
openness to all human goods, even those not directly
pursued, and never choosing directly against
participation by anyone in any of them. With further
reflection a series of intermediate principles and
more specific norms can be derived. This is the
"natural" law known even to the pagans and Christian
faith recalls and confirms it. Because revelation
affects the whole way we understand God, each other,
the world and ourselves, it inevitably colors the
application of these "natural" principles and brings
some new norms. The Church comes in such a context
as teacher-counselor, helping us reach maturity.
Morality, then, is no imposition of an external
authority, but an internal pattern of life which
challenges us to be more reasonable, mature,
flourishing. The magisterium is not some external
force with which private conscience must grapple: It
informs conscience much like a soul informs a body,
giving it shape and direction from within. Any
apparent conflict between conscience and magisterium
is therefore either a conflict between what I am
convinced is right and some other view, in which
case, generally speaking, I must favor the first;
or, more likely, it is a conflict within my
conscience between some received magisterial norm
and some other part(s) of my moral reasoning
(including other received norms). If what is at
stake is taught with a high degree of authority and
certainty, the believer in that authority will
follow it or be confused. When he does not know for
sure whether or not what is taught is a matter of
faith, he properly gives that proposition his
conditional or religious assent because it might
very well be.
Of course, when the Church teaches
non-definitively, this may represent a first stage
in the development, deeper articulation or
authoritative application of the faith and morals of
the Church; or it may represent a false start. Here
the believer must assent to the Church's
non-infallible pronouncements as to all else he
knows and do his best to reason and discern. His
goal will not be to argue himself out of following
some Church-given norm or limit the "moral tax"
payable to God, but rather to try to embrace the
moral vision proposed by Christ and the Church and
to seek to resolve any uncertainties before making
an important decision.
The Church post-"Veritatis splendor" is still
struggling to recover a Catholic sense of conscience
and authority. The task is essentially an
evangelical and catechetical one, and one especially
urgent in the West where misconceptions about
conscience have been commonplace, leading to many
disastrous personal decisions. That there could
still be Catholic institutions in some places
performing or collaborating in abortion, IVF,
sterilization or euthanasia beggars belief. That
there are still Catholic theologians and pastors
supporting these or similar practices means we are
yet to recover a sense of the ecclesial vocations of
theologian and pastor. That there are still Catholic
politicians and voters willing to cooperate in those
evils means there are faulty connections between
conscience, truth and authority whether ecclesial or
civil. Wrong views of conscience have also been
pastorally ruinous, resulting in diffidence about
evangelization and catechesis, a decline of the
practice of Confession and the abuse of Holy
Communion.
Without an accurate understanding of Christian
conscience it can never be reliably at the service
of the culture of life and love or of the growth of
individuals in holiness. But even when we get this
right, there will still be much to do in properly
forming and informing our own and others'
consciences and in drawing conclusions in the face
of the complex contemporary dilemmas -- in bioethics
as elsewhere. Further, thoroughgoing philosophical
and theological analysis is required, for instance,
on questions such as biolawmaking, cooperation in
evil and conscientious objection -- questions to
which our present conference will now turn.