Conscience and its Counterfeit, Part 1

Recent posts have reviewed Newman’s important teachings on conscience. Now, let us consider why his teachings are of immense contemporary relevance, and try to understand more deeply how to extend and apply those teachings to our world today.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt records the 1961 trial proceedings of Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official and major planner of mass killings in the Holocaust. Eerily, according to Eichmann, he had consciously followed an ethical principle drawn from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, namely, that “the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.” This “categorical imperative” was corrupted in two ways by Eichmann’s faulty conscience: he believed he was justified in simply following orders, and, drawing from racist pseudo-science and propaganda of the time, he believed that the extermination of Jews was a “general law” universally applicable to all people. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, a similar kind of corrupted conscientiousness seemed to lead President Harry Truman to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians by dropping hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite evidence that Japanese leaders were willing to negotiate. Perhaps by poor advice and exaggerated rhetoric about the need for “unconditional surrender,” President Truman chose to forget, or disregard, the natural moral principle that “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder,” as philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued.

How do we prevent this kind of corruption of the conscience? It would appear that Kant’s ethical principle represents a partial truth that is in need of completion. It requires an actual content of ethical beliefs, not just a method of application. Kant’s principle may not itself be bad, but left to itself can allow a “general law” to merely be a projection of a private error or justification of social evil. In the difficulties and challenges of our unique experiences and particular contexts, how can we gain a higher view of authentic ethics that can inform our decision-making?

St. John Henry Newman did not read Kant directly, but after briefly reviewing a text summarizing Kant’s philosophy, Newman wrote in his Philosophical Notebook that he rejected Kant’s sharp division between inward experience and the external world (Vol. II p. 78). Rather, Newman held that by “reasoning upon experience” of our inmost selves we can reach certain knowledge of the existence of the world, of others, of moral laws, and of God, which opens up our sense of moral responsibility. Whereas Kant struggled to reconcile the subjective and the objective, the natural and the supernatural, and left ethical decision-making more or less isolated from direct influence from God, Newman forged a path of harmony wherein human intellectual and moral life is animated by a real relationship with God, a living communion with the divine.

Scholar Reinhard Hütter in John Henry Newman on Truth and its Counterfeits assesses how Newman roots conscience in Divine law, a law that is written on the human heart, and that is fulfilled by obedience to the authorities God has established. Hütter explains how natural law (moral principles available to human reason) relates to God as creator, and how positive law (explicit legal codes) should be shaped in light of God’s laws, but cannot exhaustively codify all the moral principles which humans must obey. The conscience is not a right to decide one’s own truth, nor is it fulfilled by simply appearing to be justified before other humans. It is the “voice of God” in our souls, the active recognition of a duty to conform ourselves to a higher truth, a higher divine standard of moral conduct. Each person knows this in his heart of hearts, but may fail to listen to God’s interior voice because of the blindness of sin, habitual disregard, or failure to perseveringly inform one’s conscience.

Newman was fond of finding here a strong argument for God’s existence drawn from human experience of the conscience: if there is a law which, deep down, we know we must obey, there is also a Divine Law-giver to whom we owe obedience.

If this is not the case, then there is no real reason to tell President Truman or Adolf Eichmann that, in their cases, killing the innocent was wrong. As Hütter puts it, “Nazism and communism have taught an important lesson: deny the reality of theo-nomic [divine-law] conscience, discourage, ridicule, or even attempt to suppress its proper exercise, and the outcome is a system of moral and political barbarity.” He worries that conscience disconnected from Divine law has come to merely mean “sovereign self-determination,” the right to decide for oneself, not the duty to conform oneself to truth. Newman insists: the conscience is “dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us.”

But this is not a matter of waiting inactively for God to mystically give us simplistic answers. It requires habit, study, counsel, risk, and real moral action in ordinary life. The conscience is something like a muscle—it requires formation, cultivation, exercise, and discipline in order to be strong. To avoid a weak conscience, we must properly inform our conscience by prayer, study and counsel, and form it by courageously acting in accord with it. As Hütter summarizes, “the very possibility of an erroneous conscience entails an antecedent and a consequent personal duty.” That is, every human being has not merely a right, but a duty—a personal responsibility—to know the truth. Therefore, the “antecedent duty” of conscience is “always to seek counsel, to have one’s conscience formed by those who are wiser and better informed than oneself,” especially the great masters of philosophy, the wisdom of tradition, and the Magisterium (from magister, “teacher”) of the Church, expressed in her Scriptures, conciliar documents, creeds, and great saints and doctors. Accordingly, the “consequent” duty of conscience is that we then actually act upon knowledge of truth which we have gained, conforming our lives to it. Without this, we risk corrupting conscience into a “right” to remain in error.

This assumes a humility that is totally foreign to the modern counterfeit of conscience. If conscience is the right to decide one’s own truth, what need is there to learn anything at all or assume that anyone else might know something more? This corruption of conscience is a recipe not only for immoral action, but for narcissism, loneliness, and unhappiness. To be fulfilled is to satisfy our hunger for truth, knowledge, goodness, and God, which means avoiding “negligence and indifference,” regularly examining ourselves to see if we are self-satisfied with errors or half-truths, and to what degree we have sincerely sought to listen to wisdom, law, and the Law-giver.

It is hard to over-estimate the importance of Newman’s teaching on conscience for our world today. If we hope to avoid in the future moral atrocities like those of the 20th century, we should know and extend Newman’s wisdom. Power, wealth, and success must never be pursued at the expense of truth, especially the truth that all humans are made with dignity in God’s image and likeness, and must never be made a mere means to political or economic ends. In a world torn apart by falsehoods, divisions, and malformed consciences, Newman’s robust vision of the human conscience, the truth of God’s law written on our hearts (Jer. 31:33), contains important seeds for renewal and healing.