I grew up with such advice as “Always listen to your conscience,” “Follow your conscience,” and “Let your conscience be your guide.” Henry David Thoreau—in one of my favorite essays, “Civil Disobedience”—says the conscience is the highest authority, superseding the laws of one’s state or country. As members of the electorate, we’re often advised, “Vote your conscience.” Although all of those statements sound right and wise, they’re actually misleading. It may sound as if the conscience is the voice of the universe, which speaks the same language into the soul of every person. As we go through life, however, we learn a very different reality.
The conscience is not a single voice that speaks the same things to all, and conflicting loyalties and cross currents in life can make the conscience a confusing set of voices which don’t provide much of a guide at all. Adding to the confusion is the fact that what we believe is the conscience speaking is often our prejudices. And then there are some people whose consciences can’t be trusted at all, and we’d be scared of the results if they were to follow the advice “Let your conscience be your guide.”
Since at least the time of Socrates, philosophers have examined the concept of conscience, and so much has been written on the subject that it would take a long time to read and absorb it all. So I’m just going to select a few brief passages to illustrate the complexity of understanding the human conscience.
Larry May, in his article “On Conscience,” in the January 1983 edition of The American Philosophical Quarterly, compares conscience to virtue:
Conscience, like virtue, is a capacity which leads to socially beneficial consequences in those who develop it. . . . Conscience places barriers in one’s path which contribute to the avoidance of wrong-doing. Yet conscience, unlike the virtues, seems to be grounded in a concern for the self, for the self’s inner harmony . . . Conscience does seem to be different from virtue in that it proceeds from and remains closely allied with self-love. [Conscience is] an egoistic concern which nonetheless leads to restraints on selfishness.
According to Mr. May, the chief end of the conscience is to act as inner peace keeper, not to make the world at large a better place.
Simpler definitions are found in a variety of online dictionaries:
An inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior.
The feeling that you know and should do what is right and should avoid doing what is wrong, and that makes you feel guilty when you have done something you know is wrong.
Anyone who’s ever wrestled with a guilty conscience—and that’s all of us—knows it’s not a pleasant experience. So what Larry May says about the conscience’s primary purpose being to act as inner peace keeper sounds reasonable.
These simple definitions, however, raise more questions than they answer. If everyone follows their conscience and votes their conscience, why do we not all do the same things and vote for the same candidate? And if the conscience is the inner peace keeper, how the heck can some people do some really awful things yet never seem to feel guilty about them? Do you think Hitler had a hard time sleeping at night, tossing and turning as he thought of all the Jews and other people his minions were torturing and murdering? Most of us would feel more guilt for accidentally running over a squirrel with our cars than Hitler visibly showed for torturing and murdering millions of human beings.
Most discussions of conscience include the concepts that the conscience is those internalized social norms which help individuals make distinctions between what is right and what is wrong and which cause individuals inner guilt and pain after knowingly violating those norms. But that leads us right back to the question of why we don’t all have the same sense of what is right and what is wrong. Obviously, we’ve internalized different norms, determined by the teachings of our parents, our schools, and our religious affiliations or lack thereof, to name a few.
I know people who don’t believe in killing insects, even the scourge of Florida living: the cockroach. Their consciences would make them feel very guilty if they were to violate that social/ethical norm. I, on the other hand, can viciously murder a cockroach without the slightest twitch of guilt if it dares to invade my home. I leave them alone outside, but the occasional one that has the audacity to cross my threshold will be murdered, and I will celebrate its death. Don’t judge.
I was raised in a fundamentalist religious household; the church which my family belonged to taught us a long list of “sins”: drinking, smoking, dancing, watching Hollywood movies, and a whole lot more that you wouldn’t even believe. My first task as an adult was to begin retraining my conscience to stop feeling guilty every time I entered a movie theater or drank a glass of wine. I’ve looked over my shoulder many times in the wine aisle of the supermarket, knowing intellectually that I had nothing to feel guilty about; but that stupid conscience just wouldn’t shut up.
So for some of us, the social norms we internalized were a bit extreme, causing our consciences to be overactive and need retraining to function more normally. The vast majority of the people I know have never experienced the slightest twinge of guilt when entering a movie theater, since that taboo was never included in their social norms.
People raised in the Jim Crow South didn’t feel guilty about what we today see as blatant, extreme racism, because their social norms included the idea that the black race was inferior and that the white majority was therefore justified in not treating them as equals. That sounds outrageous—and it IS outrageous—but to many people in my youth and way before I was born, that made perfect sense.
We all know those racist attitudes didn’t simply evaporate when the Civil Rights laws acknowledged equal rights for every citizen, regardless of race or skin color. Since expressing such attitudes publicly was no longer acceptable, however, those who held onto their prejudices no longer felt free to voice them. So for them, their silence on the subject had nothing to do with their consciences; they simply didn’t want to be socially ostracized.
Other people negotiate deals with their consciences to keep them quiet: I’m justified in doing x because someone did y or z to me. As a very young woman, I worked briefly with a middle-aged woman who had engaged in a long-term extramarital affair; and even though extramarital affairs violate nearly every ethical code and set of social norms, her conscience was fine with her actions because she’d struck a deal with it. Her first husband had cheated on her, and she’d divorced him because of it; her second husband was a model of love and faithfulness, but she cheated on him. Her justification was “I never did it until it was done to me.” Never mind that the person she was doing it to was not the same person who did it to her.
This, of course, is called rationalizing, and most of us have learned that it can be quite an effective way to quiet a troublesome conscience. We justify everything from disregarding our parents’ instructions as children to shirking our professional responsibilities to treating other people with disrespect because of things they’ve done to us or because we’ve decided for the purpose of building our case that they’re not good people and not worthy of proper treatment from us.
It’s safe to conclude, then, that the conscience is an unreliable, inconsistent guide to our actions. In fact, in some cases, it’s hard to distinguish conscience from prejudice or rationalization. Hitler rationalized that certain groups of people—Jews and others—were inferior and therefore needed to be eradicated; so instead of feeling guilty, he believed he was doing the world a service by being the one to perform the extermination.
The loud, rowdy, vile chanters at some presidential campaign rallies are among those who’ve simply felt the social pressure to keep quiet about their prejudices until someone came along who created a new social environment in which bigotry and violence are the accepted norms. For them, voting their consciences would in reality be voting their prejudices, because their consciences have accepted norms that deviate from every standard of what is good and moral.
The New Testament writer Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, speaks of a seared conscience: one which has accepted so much wrongdoing that it no longer has the ability to feel guilt, as skin that has been seared, or badly burned, no longer feels the sensation of pain. Most people can relate to that idea on a limited level. You broke a house rule as a teenager, and your conscience went into full inner turmoil; but because it was so much fun or your peers encouraged you to continue participating, the guilt lessened with each repetition. I think lots of voters, particularly those at the rowdy rallies, have such numbed consciences that their conscience votes can’t be trusted at all.
Many voters’ consciences pivot on a single issue, such as their disapproval of abortion. Their consciences simply won’t allow them to vote for a candidate who openly supports legal abortion, even though that candidate—if elected—would have little to no power to affect the abortion laws one way or the other. That means that their consciences then have to accept faults in the other candidate—faults which will strongly affect that candidate’s performance if elected—and that just doesn’t make much sense to me. As I’ve said before, I support having a more rational conversation about abortion, since it is an issue that has so deeply divided us as a country for so long. But single-issue voting can’t possibly be consistent. If your conscience’s rejection of the pro-choice candidate means it has to accept the pro-bigotry, pro-violence, pro-lying, pro-cheating, pro-unethical and possibly pro-illegal business dealings candidate, your conscience is really screwed up and it really needs a reboot.
Clay Shirky, in his Huffington Post article “There’s No Such Thing as a Protest Vote,” gives all of our consciences some things to chew on:
We’re in the season of protest vote advocacy, with writers of all political stripes making arguments for third-party candidates (Jill Stein, Gary Johnson), write-in votes (Bernie Sanders, Rod Silva), or refusing to vote altogether (#NeverTrump,#BernieOrBust.) For all the eloquence and passion and rage in these arguments, however, they suffer from a common flaw: there is no such thing as a protest vote.
The authors of these pieces rarely line up their preferred Presidential voting strategies — third-party, write-in, refusal — with the electoral system as it actually exists. In 2016, that system will offer 130 million or so voters just three options:
- I prefer Donald Trump be president, rather than Hillary Clinton.
- I prefer Hillary Clinton be president, rather than Donald Trump.
- Whatever everybody else decides is OK with me.
That’s it. Those are the choices. All strategies other than a preference for Trump over Clinton or vice-versa reduce to Option C.
Voting is not all about how virtuous and moral it makes us feel; it’s about intellectually deciding what is best for the prosperity and security of our country. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about your conscience if our national security and our world standing are jeopardized because your conscience won’t allow you to vote for someone who supports Planned Parenthood. Get a grip!
I guess the only way to conclude here is to say that if you’re going to vote your conscience, you’d better first examine your conscience and, if necessary, talk some sense into it. We’re all in this together, so we owe it to each other to get it right.