The Hard Problem of Conscience

The last article on the Axial Age raised a fair bit of discussion. It’s enough to ask people to follow you back to the beginning of the Common Era to seek for the roots of liberalism—going back another 1,000 years is only for the truly mad.

One of the points of discussion that arose in private channels was the relationship of conscience to antinomianism. I assume that anyone reading this already understands how liberalism becomes antinomianism, but the connection between conscience and antinomianism may be less clear, so we will clarify this relationship here.

Most of us assume that conscience was always there, the voice of God speaking to us inwardly and unmediated, the lodestone of our moral compass. Conscience is almost synonymous with morality. The moral sense is taken to be something internal and, if not quite self-directed, then at least not directed by the social environment. And yet, how society worked in earlier times proves that conscience is not something eternal or originary. Max Weber in his Sociology of Religion makes a number of useful distinctions, one of them between magic and religion. As always, the two are messy and entangled, but in general, magical phenomena can be “forced” to serve human needs by the use of rite and formula, whereas religious phenomena have agency and must be solicited by worship. This magic/religion dichotomy has its normative corollary in the distinction between taboo and ethics. Taboo is concerned mainly with the regulation of specific acts, whereas ethics is concerned with governing a general attitude or orientation which itself regulates human action. Taboo governs the letter of the law, ethics the spirit.

It’s empirically clear that taboo is older than ethics; to be more precise, because the two are entangled, it’s clear that the further back you go, the more taboo predominates over ethics. This indicates very clearly that taboo is more foundational than ethics in regulating conduct. This historical priority makes sense, because ethics is a second-order normative principle—it governs the attitude that governs acts, rather than the acts themselves. The principle of virtue ethics—e.g. asking what would Jesus do?—gives no specific prescriptions, but does provide a kind of normative framework. Crucially, however, whereas in practice taboo locates normative authority outside the individual—law and custom fully govern conduct—in practice, ethics devolves normative authority down to the level of the individual. Normativity becomes something personal; what the god wants is not given by tradition, from the outside, but is given by an internal sense only felt by—and importantly, only judged by—the moral agent. The victory of ethics over taboo is the birth of conscience.

So, conscience is not originary, but is something introduced.¹ And this introduction of conscience puts the moral agent not only in a position to evaluate his own conduct, to judge right from wrong for himself, but to judge even the tradition itself—the introduction of conscience raises the individual to ultimate lawgiver. As soon as we are in a position to judge the tradition, we are, each individually, in a position to accept or reject it; being in a position to accept or reject it, we are the ultimate moral authority; as the ultimate moral authority, we each become legislators whose conscience, having judged the tradition and determined the standard by which it is to be measured, are always in a position to overrule it. With this, moral law, something binding, becomes impossible and without force. The history of the West is, in large part, the history of the principle of conscience working through this process.

It might be objected that the individual’s conscience does not make him the ultimate moral authority, but that he is still subject to the authority of the god worshipped. However, the same process that moves from judging the tradition to legislating for the tradition applies to the god too—in judging the god as worthy of worship, we pass inevitably to legislating for the god. In practice, the final interpreter of the law is effectively the lawgiver. This is the burden of Schmitt’s quis interpretabitur—who interprets? Whether in terms of political sovereignty over a nation, or moral sovereignty over oneself, the one who interprets decides the exception to the law, and so, decides the law.

In the introduction of conscience, we have the introduction of self-legislation. But the essence of law is that it be given from without; a man can no more legislate for himself than a hand can hold itself down. So, the introduction of conscience is the death knell of law, and the beginning of antinomianism. Ideas have consequences, but those consequences are not always immediately apparent. In Aryan man deputizing himself as the authority to judge his tradition, he planted the seed that must eventually flower into sola fide. The hardness of the soil that was his native spirit may have delayed the flowering, but could not put it off indefinitely.

The question of what now? inevitably comes up. Our tradition commands us to obey the voice of conscience, which is to say, the tradition commands us to overrule it—a flat contradiction. Perhaps we can simply reject conscience as antinomian at its very core, but to do so we must overrule the tradition, and for that to be thinkable requires conscience—another contradiction. As soon as the tradition empowers the individual to judge it, to decide for himself whether to accept or reject it, it has ensured that any action at all faces a kind of liar’s paradox. This is the hard problem of conscience.

1. At least, introduced progressively into ever wider spheres of social life.