conscience Flashcards
(8 cards)
what is ratio
aquinas idea
thought that to understand conscience you have to understand ratio (reason)
st augustine of hippo thought that reason, the intellect and the mind were all one power in human beings but aquinas distinguishes ratio (reason) as a dfferent thing. he believed that it distinguishes human beings from other animals. of all creatures only humans deliberate over moral matters and therefore a fundamental part of human beings. it is a divine gift from God.
it is an act of working things out.
What is syndereisis
aquinas thought that within each human person there is a principle called synderesis, that directs us towards good and away from evil. he also noted that there is also a sensuality within each of us, which tempts us towards evil and which was operating in the garden of eden when adam and eve were tempted.
he had a positve view of humans capability to lean towards the good
syndereis rule - ‘do good and avoid evil’
what is conscientia
for aquinas, conscience is an act within a human person arising when the knowledge gained from the application of ratio to syndereisis is applied to something we do
conscientia – the actual judgement or decision a person makes which leads to a particular course of action based upon those principles
conscience is ‘reason making right decisions’ - summa theologica
what is ignorance
freud on conscience
Freud thought the conscience was just the result of psychological forces that science could understand. Freud believed the mind was divided into the Id (our unconscious animalistic desires), Ego (Our conscious decision-making self) and the Super Ego (part of the mind which reinforced the ideas of correct behaviour which is implanted when we are young.
The ethical implications is that conscience is not the voice of God in us, it is just what our society wants from us. Our society might be good or bad, therefore our conscience is not the best guide.
Freud was influenced by Nietzsche who argued that human conscious mind (what Freud called the ego) developed by necessity when humans underwent the radical change from hunter-gatherer to farmer.
Consciousness emerged as the space in-between our instincts and the outside world as a mediator which had to decide which instincts to act on and which not to, to keep society stable.
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development
oral , anal, phallic, latency and genitial stages
Each psychosexual stage is associated with a particular conflict that must be resolved before the individual can successfully advance to the next stage.
- To explain this, Freud suggested the analogy of military troops on the march. As the troops advance, they are met by opposition or conflict.
If they are highly successful in winning the battle (resolving the conflict), then most of the troops (libido) will be able to move on to the next battle (stage).
Karl Popper
Freud has been criticised by contemporary psychologists for not being empirical enough. Karl Popper criticised Freud’s theory for being ‘unfalsifiable’ as it could not say what would prove it wrong. This means it is not true empiricism. Freud studied a small sample size of patients, a poor cross-section of society and did not do proper experiments, so he is unscientific.
however Piaget was a contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud but came to similar conclusions, so can thus be seen to defend Freud to some degree from the accusation of being unscientific. He studied the development of children and argued that there occurs a fundamental shift in the nature of ‘conscience’. Before the age of 11 children have what he called heteronomous morality. This means they merely associate actions as bad because of the influence of their authority figures like parents. After 11 year old however, Piaget argued that the autonomous morality develops in children, where they can begin to have abstract cognitive moral beliefs about how one ought to act and why.
Freud’s critique of religion’s approach to developing the conscience
Maintaining social order depends on people repressing their anti-social instincts (e.g. for sex and violence). Religion encourages repression and for that Freud thought it had done “great services for human civilization” in the “taming of the asocial instincts”. Nonetheless, Freud thought that the Christian belief system had long passed its usefulness because a secular society would be far superior.
