A conversation I took part in yesterday reminded me that the idea has grown large in many modern minds that a person’s conscience is always a reliable guiding light, irrespective of that person’s environment, history and adherence (or lack thereof) to this or that particular creed.
It’s an intellectual trend worth drawing attention to, in this writer’s opinion, because I think it, number one, is plain wrong, and number two, has disastrous consequences.
The notion that we all have an angel and a devil on our shoulders when facing a decision of some moral consequence is a widely popular one, even if it wouldn’t necessarily be consciously framed that way, with the conscience understood as being something akin to the angel’s gravitational field that would naturally draw us into the good.
It’s only with a struggle that we disobey or ignore that pull towards the good, this unconscious narrative goes, the deepest evil of the devil on our shoulder being that we really and truly have to want to choose it to overcome our natural inclination to the good.
The issue with this train of thought is that the person who thinks they’re choosing something evil is rare indeed, much rarer than many of us are inclined to think. To use the obvious example of the secular Satan, Hitler – even he thought he was accomplishing some good for the world.
We, rightly, look back aghast at the crimes against humanity committed by a regime under Hitler’s direction, but it’s important to acknowledge that they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Of course, there were probably a great many people who participated in these crimes who had misgivings to the point of illness about what they were doing (Christopher Browing’s Ordinary Men is a great examination of this), and that is an example of the conscience at work, but to stick with Hitler and the Nazi regime in general, they believed themselves to be pursuing a genuine good according to their own understanding of the world.
We can take from that that it’s possible to make bad choices, to commit evil, if our worldview is off. “Off” according to what baseline, the observant reader might ask, but that veers into the fields of philosophy and theology, which are not within the scope of this article. It’s enough to recognise that our conscience can be misguided, especially if it’s operating according to misunderstandings about the actual moral shape of the world.
It is a relationship much neglected lately, the one that exists between the intellect and the conscience. The latter is better thought of as an alarm rather than as an infallible, angelic guide, an alarm that only functions properly when it’s operating according to accurate standards received from the intellect. When it doesn’t receive those, it’s entirely possible that that alarm doesn’t sound, or that it sounds for the wrong reasons.
How else are we to understand phenomena like that which the Atlantic magazine reported on in its most recent September edition?
In an article about Canada’s burgeoning euthanasia culture, we’re told that “the Quebec College of Physicians has raised the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for infants born with ‘severe malformations,’ a rare practice currently legal only in the Netherlands, the first country to adopt it since Nazi Germany did so in 1939”.
Clearly, those sitting around a table discussing what is obviously the murder of newborn babies view it as an act of compassion. Otherwise, unless they’re to a man or woman a group of psychopaths who’ve made no effort to rote-learn their rights and wrongs, they wouldn’t be discussing it. On an intellectual level, they no longer accurately grasp right and wrong, and so their consciences don’t have much to work with.
It is not a victimless mistake. To stick with the present example, euthanasia is ponderously spreading, country by country, and so too are the outrageous details that shock so many.
Likewise, the faulty perception of “gender-affirming healthcare” as correct and compassionate, despite the fact that it’s resulted in many thousands of mutilated men, women and children the world over. Surely, there are opportunists in there who saw the chance to make a quick buck off the back of a person’s confusion, but there are, I think it’s fair to say, a great many more true believers who incorrectly hold that it’s the best way to care for those experiencing gender dysphoria.
Of course, our ability to argue against this is greatly undermined if we hold to moral relativism, which argues that moral judgments are true or false only in relation to a particular context, rather than absolutely – as many of the world’s religions hold, for example. It then becomes not so much a question of rights and wrongs as a question of utility, of what works for the greatest number of people.
But that seems to be the direction we’re trending in, if reports like those contained in the Atlantic and elsewhere are to be believed. It’s not so much, this writer would contend, that our consciences are dead as they are lost, in a maze of moral confusion of our own making.