Debates about conscience have been around at least for thousands of years. Although there is no stand-alone notion of conscience, contemporary philosophical characterizations of the notion of conscience focus on making sense of an aspect of conscience that is associated with moral sensitivity. It has been said that conscience is given to every human being. For example, a medieval-era philosopher, Peter Abelard argues that every mentally fit adult regardless of where and what period in human history they lived, naturally knows God’s moral commands, on such things as murder, theft, and adultery. No one is left behind when it comes to being endowed with a conscience. Abelard takes conscience as the ability to see how moral principles are supposed to be implemented concerning particular actions. It is also said that conscience is the sense of right and wrong in an individual which is taken by philosophers as an indicator of the voice of God, as a human faculty, as the voice of reason, or as a special moral sense. Similarly, Simon Blackburn characterizes conscience as consciousness that allows us to distinguish between morally required and morally forbidden actions. The Apostle Paul also seems to be presupposing moral sensitivity implying the notion of conscience when he asserts, “Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves…. their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them” (Romans 2:14-15).
The nature of such moral sensitivity is often spelled out employing philosophical, religious, and common-sense approaches. Mostly, these approaches give much emphasis on framing first-order ethical questions (e.g., what is right or wrong) and their relationship to conscience. These approaches answer what I call the Function question, which focuses on how conscience is taken to guide one’s behavior.
But what seems to have fallen through the cracks in these discussions is a meta-level account of the notion of conscience. Such an account requires us to deal with the base, i.e., the foundational level metaphysical questions that take at their center, the very nature of conscience and its relation to us, human beings. Let us call this the Nature Question since its primary focus is on answering the ontological question of what conscience is.
The goal of this paper is to argue why making progress in understanding the function question is entirely contingent on tackling first the nature question. To see the complexities that arise in tackling the function question, proper guidance must be sought via the nature question. To show this, I will advance a meta-level analysis of the metaphysics of conscience. In other words, I will show why first-order questions are better investigated via second-order inquiry (e.g., what does it mean to say that something is right or wrong). At the center of my discussion lie two interrelated questions: (1) is conscience part of the human nature and yet an independent, i.e., autonomous faculty in its own right?; and (2) why is it that the role of the faculty of conscience seems to be effective in some people but not in others in terms of shaping their moral sensitivity?"