Q&A: Conscience
Conscience
Question
Hello Rabbi, do you think conscience is a good thing? Is it advisable to acquire it or to educate the next generation in that direction? If I do a good deed because of my conscience, is that a good act on the part of the person? And isn’t conscience what the ethicists call “fear of Heaven”?
Answer
Conscience is first and foremost a fact. We have a conscience. It can certainly be sharpened through thought, but that does not change it essentially. Thought only makes it more precise (the power of natural conscience sometimes points in the wrong directions). If you do a good deed because of your conscience, then you are a good person. If you do it because there is value in being good, then you are a moral person. And if you do it because there is a divine command (which can exist alongside the command of conscience), then it also has religious value.
Discussion on Answer
A good person is someone who does good deeds. Even a sheep does good deeds because of its nature and not out of choice or decision. A person who acts well out of commitment to the moral imperative is a moral person.
You connected two components here: commitment to the moral imperative, and not acting out of nature. And it seems you’re saying that a deterministic commitment to the moral imperative arising from nature (that’s just how his consciousness is built when it identifies a moral command) seems to you more like a sheep than someone who freely chooses commitment to the moral imperative. To me that’s a strange claim.
“Commitment because of nature” is an oxymoron. If it is an action arising from nature, then there is no commitment here. I am being acted upon, not acting. Commitment is the result of my own decision.
There is a mental state of commitment; one can arrive at it as a result of choice or as a result of a natural process. You can call only choice a moral process, but I don’t see what is non-arbitrary about that.
Or maybe you’re saying something stronger: that a determinist who says thank you for something is like a recording from a can-recycling machine. A determinist who hugs his child is like the child wrapping himself in a pleasant wool blanket. And it has nothing especially to do with morality and commitment?
Exactly so.
Thank you. I didn’t understand what the difference is between a good person and a moral person.