Conscience - Secular Views

Secular Views

The secular approach to conscience includes psychological, physiological, sociological, humanitarian and authoritarian views. Lawrence Kohlberg considered critical conscience to be an important psychological stage in the proper moral development of humans, associated with the capacity to rationally weigh principles of responsibility, being best encouraged in the very young by linkage with humorous personifications (such as Jiminy Cricket) and later in adolescents by debates about individually pertinent moral dilemmas. Erik Erikson placed the development of conscience in the 'pre-schooler' phase of his eight stages of normal human personality development. The psychologist Martha Stout terms conscience "an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments." Thus a good conscience is associated with feelings of integrity, psychological wholeness and peacefulness and is often described using adjectives such as "quiet", "clear" and "easy".

Sigmund Freud regarded conscience as originating psychologically from the growth of civilisation, which periodically frustrated the external expression of aggression: this destructive impulse being forced to seek an alternative, healthy outlet, directed its energy as a superego against the person's own "ego" or selfishness (often taking its cue in this regard from parents during childhood). According to Freud, the consequence of not obeying our conscience is guilt, which can be a factor in the development of neurosis; Freud claimed that both the cultural and individual super-ego set up strict ideal demands with regard to the moral aspects of certain decisions, disobedience to which provokes a 'fear of conscience'.

In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins states that he agrees with Robert Hinde's Why Good is Good, Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, Robert Buckman's Can We Be Good Without God? and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, that our sense of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past. Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great has argued that "Modern vernacular describes conscience- not too badly- as whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking...Those who believe that the existence of conscience is a proof of a godly design are advancing an argument that simply cannot be disproved because there is no evidence for or against it."