Conscience

Conscience and Prudence

Conscience comes at the end of a rational process that includes experience, reason, understanding, and a practical judgment to do this and not that. It necessarily involves what Aristotle calls phronesis, the intellectual virtue we call today prudence. Prudence discerns the particular situation in which one is faced with a decision and the moral principles that may apply to it, examines those principles and applies them to the situation, and enables a well-formed conscience to make the practical judgment that this is the right thing to do in this situation with this good intention.

Concretely, prudence monitors the process of deliberation and judgment to ensure, for instance, that this is the right situation, the right judgment, and the good intention, to give assistance to the poor. As prudence controls the right giving of assistance to the poor, so does it also control the exercise of all other moral actions. It is a cardinal virtue around which all other virtues pivot; without the virtue of prudence, a person cannot exercise any other virtue.

Conscience and Prudence

In the human condition, all judgments, even the most prudential practical judgments of a well-formed conscience, can be in error. That raises the question of the erroneous conscience and its authority. Ethicists note that there are two poles in every moral judgment. It is always a free, rational human subject who makes a judgment, and so one pole of the judgment is a subjective pole, but every human subject makes a judgment about some objective reality—poverty or sexual activity, for instance—so there is always also an objective pole.

Subjects arrive at their judgments either by following the rational process just outlined or by somehow distorting that process. In the first case, the subject arrives at a correct moral understanding and conscience judgment about the objective reality; in the second case, the subject arrives at an erroneous moral understanding and conscience judgment about the objective reality. If a decision [Page 438]to act follows correct understanding and judgment, then conscience is also said to be correct; if it follows an erroneous understanding and judgment, then conscience is also said to be erroneous.

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