[Return to writing page]What is the Conscience?1-18-00 A problem that seems to surface repeatedly in virtually any kind of philosophical discourse is the failure to have an adequate definition of a word. One debater can construct his or her argument on the basis of one definition of a key term, only to have the other use an entirely different definition. One can also be confused when thinking about an idea that more properly should be split into two separate concepts. This latter problem is partially responsible for my own failure to understand morality for many years. I will thus try to clear up the problem now so that no reader is forced to reinvent the wheel. The word whose definition eluded me was want. The use of this word in our everyday language is unfortunately broad. There are many particular things we want for ourselves: we want to eat when we are hungry, we want to see a certain movie, we want a successful career. There are some things we say we want, but we do not seem to achieve with much success. The world has much more conflict than one would expect based on every individual’s response to "do you want peace?" Few of the people who say they want to lose weight are ever very successful. For this second category of wants, the individual might want the goal so strongly as to be infuriated with him- or herself for being so incapable of its achievement. We also use the word want at a higher level, to decide between our particular wants. Consider this sentence for example: "Sally wanted both X and Y but was unable to have both, so she decided X was more important." While in one sense Sally wants both X and Y, in another sense she did not want Y. After all, she chose X and not Y. Sally wants X more than she wants Y. There is some characteristic in X that she wants that Y does not possess. Our thinking about this ambiguity can be cleared up if we divide the word want into two senses. Let us specify our wants to be those things for which, everything else being equal, we desire. Thus we can both want to eat because we are hungry and want to not eat because we wish to lose weight. We define a new term, metawant, to describe what we choose after weighting the importance of each particular want. While Sally wants both X and Y, she only metawants X. It should become apparent that metawant is actually quite close in meaning to do. Since a metawant is a final decision, considering all aspects of the situation, it is exactly what we end up trying to do. If we are not skilled enough we might not succeed in actually accomplishing something which we metawant, but this is fundamentally different from failure because we wanted to fail. If I attempted to build a house, I would fail because I am not presently knowledgeable in how to build one. The unsuccessful dieter, while he sincerely wants to lose weight, also wants to eat with greater force. He metawants to remain the same weight, even though he does not want to. When we say one does something "despite oneself", it is this kind of situation to which we are referring. Let us take a moment to review where we have come so far. We have not yet approached ethics at all, or made any journey into non-scientific territory. We have simply made some precise definitions for simple ideas that we can all relate to experience. Let us now relate these new definitions to the materialist view of the mind and to how we make decisions. First, let us examine one possible narrative of the decision-making process. We will consider two alternative interpretations. This first version of the story is the explanation that many of us might take to be common sense, and it is the notion that a believer in the soul might hold. A person feels certain wants. Some will give short-term gratification: "I want to eat because I am hungry now." Others delay the gratification: "I want to study my homework so that in the future I will be able to have a high-paying job. I anticipate being hungry in the future, so with my earnings I will be able to buy food at that time." We are thus faced with decisions between the many paths to follow. At any given moment there are many possible goals to pursue, so we must narrow down our wants to the one metawant we choose to accomplish. During this decision-making process, we are aware of the voice of conscience in our mind. It instructs us that we "ought" to choose one particular option over the others. We do not, however, always listen to this voice. We have the free will to select any of the options, and frequently do not opt to follow the instructions of our conscience. When we do obey it, we are virtuous; when we disobey, our actions are bad. To be a good person means to have internalized the voice of conscience as the criterion of selection among the options. A good person’s metawants accord with the selections of one’s conscience. Not only is there a voice outside the decision-making process offering advice, but the good person also strongly wants the same choices as the conscience dictates. This story is very ingrained in us. The usual conception of the conscience is illustrated well by Jiminy Cricket in Pinnochio- a voice that is separate from the actual decision-making process of the protagonist. Jiminy may nag all he wants, but Pinnochio can will whatever he likes. If one tries to base an ethical philosophy upon this foundation, many problems arise. Why would we choose to obey the conscience? If we metawant something that differs from what our conscience tells us, what have we to gain by acting good and ignoring the option that seems best? If the answer is simply that God will punish us for disobeying our conscience, then this seems at odds with the notion that we should do good for it’s own sake. Also, one must be able to explain where the voice of conscience comes from, since it is a real mental phenomenon and thus must have a real physical basis. How does the conscience assign qualities of "good" and "bad" to situations, and is its system of evaluation purely arbitrary? Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote of the is/ought barrier, that no statement about right and wrong can ever be deduced from statements of fact. Our minds seem to possess ethical knowledge, however, so where does it originate? A supernatural soul? Philosophers have struggled with these and other related dilemmas for hundreds of years, and there is no accepted answer. The problem with ethics is that our notion about the conscience and the decision-making process is starting from the wrong paradigm. We can describe a better story of how we make choices, which will not leave us asking these unanswerable questions. A person is faced with a choice. They have several competing wants which each demand a difference course of action. We must, however, expand our notion of what a want might be. A person wants to drink when thirsty, but a person might also want to share their beverage with others around them who are also thirsty. This desire to share may be called the voice of conscience, but in reality it is nothing but another want. It is not fundamentally different from the desire to have the drink to oneself. Our free will weighs the selfless motivation exactly as it does the selfish one in order to make a selection. Free will is the self-awareness of this rating process. Each individual has a strong drive to select behaviors according to the set of rules of thumb that he or she refers to as "good." We have invented the word "conscience" to describe the wants to behave according to these rules. Where do these wants come from? The answer is given to us by evolutionary sociobiology. In one sentence, cultures that possess a set of values are better able to survive than those who do not, and individuals who tend to follow these values tend to survive well within one of these societies. I have drives to behave morally, but I realize that they are not the voice of some supernatural force, or an insight into some non-physical realm of knowledge. This second story of the decision-making process does not present us with all the problems of the first narrative. There is no question of why we desire to obey the conscience, because the conscience is nothing but a set of wants. By definition we want to be good because "good" is defined to be a subclass of what we want. We are not always good because there are other competing wants. Since these desires are evolutionary in origin, we do not need to look outside the everyday world for an explanation. There is no is/ought barrier because "I ought to do X" really means "I want, among other things, to do X." With this simple paradigm shift we have brought things down to earth and vastly simplified our conceptualization of ethical decision making. Rather than conceive of the voice of conscience as some mysterious entity that offers advice to our will as it selects among wants, we must rather realize it is nothing but a set of those very wants. There is no separate realm of moral knowledge, but rather a not-necessarily-logical system with a very physical origin. We do not have to stretch the bounds of logic in order to rationalize any one system of moral epistemology, because there is no necessary logical connection among the beliefs that evolution has thrust upon us. It is much simpler to conceive of normativity as this earthly, comprehensible phenomenon. |