Conscience

Shout out to my dad on this one. After reading some of the prior blogs, my dad emailed me some thoughts. In Right & Wrong, we talked about if you are never told what is right or wrong, can something be wrong. My dad argues ignorance is no excuse.

This is a tough one for me. While I agree, ignorance of gravity doesn’t stop you from falling, we can still gain a solid understanding of gravity that universally applies. Can we say the same about right and wrong? Here I do agree with my dad that every human has a conscience that determines right and wrong. I referred to this as a moral compass.

The slight difference comes in how this conscience or compass is formed. Either it exists and is created by God, or other deity, or is formed and refined by our experiences. This is a tough one to test for. To find out, we would need to see if a human raised without any other human interaction would have a sense of right and wrong.

Being a Christian, my dad’s argument is lying is a sin as listed in the Bible and would likely therefore be universally wrong. But he also advised of an example where a woman, Rahab, lied to some guards about knowing or seeing Jewish spies in the city and was still praised for serving God. To me, this goes to show there isn’t a universal right and wrong. At least for specific actions.

Here, dad makes an interesting point by changing the perspective. We’ve been examining this from the perspective that an action (murder, lying, laundry, etc) is right or wrong and doesn’t depend on the situation. Instead, what if the right action is dependent on the situation or conditions. With this idea, there are universally right actions that are dependent on the circumstances and our conscience will help us make the right choice.

So in the sense that actions are strictly right or wrong, we seem to agree. But we’ve seem to run into an impasse with this line of thought similar to our need of a human raised by wolves as we stated before. Here, we have no way of knowing how we will be judged.

Take for instance, you are having a heated argument with someone and you become animated and are saying things you don’t really mean and maybe thinking even worse things. Then without thinking you go to hit them and they fall and split their head on something and die. Is this an accident? Is this wrong? Is this a sin? How will you be judged?

In the American legal system, we are judged by a jury of our peers who will hear evidence that either paints you in a good or bad light. These 12 people will make the best decision they can on what legal crime this would be. But what about God? How will the scales tip when your heart is weighed against the feather of Maat? My guess would be these deities would be able to see our intent. If the intent was to hurt and not murder, maybe that would weigh in your favor. But what if for a second you thought or even said ‘I wish you were dead’ prior to the hit? Are you judged in that moment? What if that moment passed before the hit?

We can’t know without meeting and conversing with our deities or inferring from the texts and clues left behind. As such, we can only do 2 things. Continue to ask the questions and arrive at our own answers.