Before any serious reflection, most of us would likely agree that we should normally not violate our conscience by acting against its dictates and verdicts. But why do we endorse such an idea? When we begin to think through the possible reasons that we might have for agreeing with this pre-theoretical intuition, we may come to realize that we endorse such a view, for example, because we are familiar with how painful and damaging the pangs of a guilty conscience can be. We may come to realize that we endorse such a view because we know that violating our conscience is discouraged or else forbidden in our larger religious or moral tradition. For example, in the Christian tradition, many have interpreted Paul’s words in Romans 14:22–23 as an imperative to act in accordance with the dictates of one’s conscience insofar as it would be sinful and condemning to act contrary to what one otherwise approves. Still others might appeal to even further arguments or reasons for listening to the demands of their conscience. At the very least, highlighting this likely point of agreement raises an important question for us to consider: Why, exactly, shouldn’t we violate our conscience? Why is it wrong for me to violate my conscience or wrong for you to violate yours?
In this piece, I work through a few answers that are sometimes offered in response to this question. More specifically, my central and fairly modest claim is that many of the subjective features that are usually associated with and appealed to in defense of conscience are insufficient to ground some sort of all-things-considered or absolutely overriding reason to obey the demands of conscience. The subjective features that I evaluate—and ultimately reject—as providing an all-things-considered reason for obeying our conscience are: (1) that conscience beliefs are identity-conferring beliefs; (2) that conscience beliefs are integrity-maintaining beliefs; and (3) that conscience beliefs are volitional impossibilities. Admittedly, these subjective features plausibly provide otherwise good, prima facie reasons to obey the demands of conscience that may nevertheless be defeasible and overridable by other, stronger reasons. But my central claim is that none of these subjective features considered in isolation or together seem to provide an absolutely overriding reason to obey conscience. In other words, they do not seem to provide us with a reason to obey conscience that overrides every reason to disobey conscience once all the considerations relevant to the decision are taken into account—hence, they do not provide an all-things-considered reason for obeying our conscience. If the central claim of this piece is correct, then whatever overriding reason(s) we have for obeying conscience must arguably be grounded in something beyond these subjective features.
To begin working through my central claim, and to place this discussion in a uniquely bioethical context, let us consider what I will call the Roe Case:
A licensed OB-GYN physician refuses to perform an elective abortion or to refer her autonomously requesting patient because she is conscientiously opposed to providing (or else being, from her point of view, complicit with) an abortion in a setting where performing abortions is permitted by law (and referring is legally required for conscientious objectors), technologically possible, and—when performed—efficient at achieving its aims.
We can ask: Why would it be morally impermissible for this physician to act against what their conscience is disallowing them to do? At the very least, we should admit that the physician here has at least some reason to act against the demands of her conscience—even if they may not be very strong or compelling reasons. The physician is, after all, dealing with an autonomous patient request for a procedure that is permitted by law and, when conscientiously opposed, legally requires a referral. The question at hand, however, is trying to explore whether physicians like this have some sort of all-things-considered moral reason to obey their conscience that can override other, prima facie reasons like those highlighted. In other words: Does this physician have some sort of moral reason to listen to her conscience that trumps the many reasons she has to disobey her conscience? In many ways, this scenario simply raises the age-old question “Why be moral?”—or at least why should the physician do what she takes to be moral. Incidentally, this point plays on an important distinction between law and morality as well: The requirements or prohibitions of law do not always align with the requirements or prohibitions of morality even if they sometimes conceptually overlap with one another. Therefore, one may have an all-things-considered moral reason to obey their conscience that overrides even the demands of the law.
Given the centrality of the concept of conscience to this discussion, it is important to begin by clarifying its very nature. Consider that, just as it was puzzling for the men of Athens to worship an unknown god in Acts 17, so too will it be similarly puzzling for us to understand why it is wrong to violate the dictates of an unknown voice or entity. So, in a Pauline-like effort to bring knowledge to what is otherwise unknown, I believe that it is appropriate to appeal to the work of professor Sir Richard Sorabji on the historical development of the concept of conscience. In his book Moral Conscience through the Ages, Sorabji presents what he takes to be the core or most central features of conscience as developed from its birth in the early Greeks all the way to the present—providing for his readers a stable set of descriptive features that have historically constituted the concept.
According to Sorabji’s descriptive-historical account, conscience has been understood as the source of our beliefs “about what actions or attitudes had been in the past, or would be in the future, wrong or not wrong for him to adopt or not adopt in a particular situation.”[1] Such beliefs are about oneself primarily and are value beliefs insofar as they are cognitive beliefs that can—and often do—produce affective responses in the form of “sentiments of approval or disapproval and painful or comforting sensations.”[2] This underdeveloped yet innate capacity called conscience eventually produces such value beliefs in us by applying our moral values—whatever they are and however we hold them—to our actions and attitudes. In this way, then, value beliefs are something like the cognitive outworking of our antecedent moral values as applied to our actions and attitudes in various situations. Moreover, this also means that conscience has historically been understood as a value-neutral capacity (i.e., a capacity that can apply any and every moral value that its possessor happens to endorse) that is fallible and prone to error insofar as it can apply problematic values or else apply good values in problematic ways.[3]
With a clearer picture of conscience now at hand, we can again ask: Why, exactly, shouldn’t we violate our conscience? Why is it wrong for me to violate my conscience or for the physician in the Roe Case to violate hers? Providing a compelling answer to this question becomes especially crucial in light of the fallibility and value neutrality of conscience. If many of us would likely agree that we should normally act in accordance with our conscience, but yet we also agree that conscience can—and often does—err, then what reasons do we have, if any, to listen to its dictates and verdicts over, say, the requirements of the law? Why would it be wrong to act contrary to our conscience that is so prone to error and is value neutral by nature? As I hope to show in what remains, many of the subjective features usually associated with and appealed to in defense of conscience are significantly weakened by the fallibility and value neutrality of conscience. In other words, because conscience is fallible and value neutral, none of its typically associated features—e.g., that conscience beliefs are identity-conferring beliefs, that conscience beliefs are integrity-maintaining beliefs, and that conscience beliefs are volitional impossibilities—seem strong enough to provide some sort of all-things-considered or absolutely overriding reason to obey conscience. As such, those that are sympathetic to protecting the rights of conscience will likely need to appeal to something more beyond an appeal to these subjective features that suffer from the fatal flaws of fallibility and value neutrality.
First, you might think that the wrongness of violating our conscience is, in some way, related to the wrongness of undermining our identities. You might think, for example, that we have strong reasons to act in accordance with who we are—to be yourself as they say—and that acting in a way that betrays ourselves is morally problematic. And perhaps the wrongness of this betrayal adequately explains the wrongness of violating our conscience. Elaborating upon the relationship that conscience and its verdicts may have with our identities, Alberto Giubilini notes that the
subjective character of conscience delimits a sphere of personal morality that is an essential part of our sense of personal identity, understood as our sense of who we are and of what characterizes qualitatively our individuality (for instance, our character, our psychological traits, our past experience, etc.). My conscience is what makes me this particular individual in a society and cultural context that I want to keep separate from me.[4]
Similarly, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor define the convictions of conscience as “core beliefs and commitments . . . [that] include both deeply held religious beliefs and secular beliefs and are distinguished from the legitimate but less fundamental ‘preferences’ we display as individuals.”[5] In other words, the central idea here seems to be that conscience and its verdicts, in some sense, delineate or demarcate who I am as distinct from other things (e.g., society, culture, etc.) and are identified with the very core beliefs and commitments that constitute me—as distinct from, e.g., the more fleeting and fickle preferences that I may have. Therefore, perhaps we have a sufficient reason for obeying our conscience when conscience beliefs are understood as identity-conferring beliefs. We should obey conscience, then, because its verdicts are constitutive of our identity.
Although it is admittedly difficult to delineate the exact relationship between them, it nevertheless seems plausible to think that conscience and its verdicts are tied up with our identities in this relevant and significant way. Just consider, for example, how difficult it would be to talk about our identities and the beliefs and commitments that help to constitute them without referencing our conscience beliefs at all. Under the assumption that one’s values, desires, goals, plans, core beliefs, commitments, and related psychic phenomena help to constitute one’s identity, it is not clear how we can avoid talking about someone’s conscience and its beliefs about what would or would not be wrong for them to do when talking about their identity. In other words, our value beliefs seem relevantly—if not significantly—constitutive of our identities. So, under the assumption that conscience beliefs are plausibly included in our larger set of identity-conferring beliefs, we can again ask: Does this feature provide an all-things-considered reason to obey our conscience?
Even if our conscience beliefs are identity-conferring beliefs, I am skeptical that this feature can provide an absolutely overriding moral reason for obeying our conscience. My argument for this conclusion is simple: That a belief or commitment is identity conferring simply does not provide us with an all-things-considered reason to obey it. To illustrate, consider the example of what I will call the Superfan. Many of us—fortunately or not—live around people like this Superfan whose beliefs and commitments concerning their favorite sports team are unashamedly identity conferring. Perhaps the identity-conferring nature of the Superfan’s beliefs about and commitments to their favorite sports team provides some prima facie reason to act in accordance with them, e.g., by going to their games, buying their team jerseys, etc. But should the Superfan be able to override other, seemingly more important commitments with their identity-conferring beliefs and commitments to their favorite sports team because they are identity conferring? Imagine our Superfan trying to make this sort of identity argument to his soon-to-be-in-labor wife in order to attend a home game against their biggest rival. The point here is that, given the value neutrality and fallibility of conscience, the identity-conferring beliefs that it produces can be problematic and thereby fail to provide us with sufficient reason to obey them in the same way that the identity-conferring nature of the Superfan’s problematic beliefs and commitments fail to provide them with sufficient reason to obey them. And the same point seems true even of the Roe Case: It seems difficult to say that the physician should obey her conscience because its verdicts are central to or constitutive of her identity. Appeals to identity seem defeasible, therefore, even though they may provide prima facie reasons for action.
Second, and closely related to the first feature, you might think that the wrongness of violating our conscience is related to the wrongness of acting contrary to our otherwise integrated or consistent set of beliefs, values, and so forth. Acting against conscience becomes morally problematic under this view because it would make us inconsistent or self-undermining in some significant way. Perhaps it is wrong to violate the verdicts of conscience, therefore, because doing so would undermine our integrity: Disobeying our conscience would effectually dis-integrate our values, beliefs, and so on with our actions and attitudes—thereby splitting or splintering us in some morally repugnant way. Indeed, Sorabji notes that this notion of a split-self has historically been at the heart of possessing a guilty conscience: “Conscience originally involved the idea of a person split into two, with one self-hiding a guilty secret, and the other self-sharing it. The idea of conscience as involving a split person was to recur in different forms and with different rationales in Adam Smith, in Kant, and in Freud, and is found in the expression ‘I could not live with myself.’”[6] So, perhaps we have a sufficient reason for obeying our conscience when conscience beliefs are understood as integrity-maintaining beliefs. We should obey conscience, therefore, because doing so helps maintain our integrity.
In response, we can begin by noting that the concept of integrity can come in both value-non-neutral and value-neutral forms. On the one hand, a value-non-neutral notion of integrity would involve a sort of consistency with or integration between true beliefs, good values, and right actions in the face of things like, e.g., self-interested temptations or reasons to the contrary. In other words, under a value-non-neutral understanding of integrity, you have integrity when you demonstrate a consistency between your right actions, true beliefs, and good values. This notion of integrity is captured, for example, in the common proverb that integrity involves doing the right thing—even when no one is watching. On the other hand, a value-neutral understanding of integrity merely involves a sort of consistency with or integration between your actions, beliefs, and values—whatever they may be and however you came to hold them. In other words, a value-neutral understanding of integrity only requires consistency or integration between your actions and the beliefs and values that you happen to hold regardless of whether they are right, wrong, good, bad, true, false, etc. To have value-neutral integrity, then, you only need to do the consistent thing, so to speak—even when no one is watching.
Importantly, even if acting in accordance with the verdicts of conscience is crucial for maintaining our integrity—understood as either a value-neutral or value-non-neutral concept—I am skeptical that this feature can provide an all-things-considered moral reason for obeying our conscience. To see why, first consider that, when integrity is value non-neutral (i.e., integrity means doing the right thing), having integrity may therefore be intrinsically good insofar as it definitionally involves true beliefs, good values, and right actions. But following our conscience in such cases would only be instrumentally good insofar as obeying it helps to achieve this intrinsic good. The reason for following our conscience, then, would not be some feature(s) intrinsic to conscience per se but instead on its mere instrumental value of helping us acquire the intrinsic good of value-non-neutral integrity by pushing us toward the right thing through applying good values and producing true value beliefs within us.
Second, if integrity is value neutral (i.e., integrity means merely doing the consistent thing), then the intrinsic value of integrity becomes increasingly questionable—thereby making the instrumental value of following our conscience to achieve or maintain that integrity similarly questionable. When integrity is value neutral, all you really need to have is a consistent or integrated set of beliefs, values, actions, and so forth. Theoretically, you could have integrity under this view while possessing false beliefs and bad values and performing wrong actions. Perhaps we could say that this integrity-maintaining feature can provide a prima facie reason to act in accordance with the value beliefs of conscience—after all, there seems to be at least some value in refusing to split oneself. But should an integrous Nazi, for example, enjoy a license to act in accordance with their problematic conscience by appealing to a value-neutral notion of integrity? The point here is that, given the value neutrality and fallibility of conscience, a value-neutral notion of integrity being maintained by obeying such occasionally problematic value beliefs can also be morally problematic. So, just as appealing to (value-neutral) integrity seemingly fails to provide the integrous Nazi with an absolutely overriding reason to listen to their conscience, so, too does appealing to (value-neutral) integrity seemingly fail to provide the physician in the Roe Case with sufficient reason to obey their conscience. As above, appeals to integrity also seem defeasible even though they may provide prima facie reasons for action.
Finally, and in tandem with the first two features, perhaps the wrongness of violating our conscience stems from the fact that its verdicts are something like volitional impossibilities. Here we can define volitional impossibilities as done so by Christian Miller: “It is volitionally impossible for a person to perform a given action if and only if psychologically the person is strongly averse to doing the action, and she also endorses this aversion.”[7] The heart of this third feature is that it would be morally problematic to act in ways that would be as psychologically catastrophic as acting against the strong aversions that one endorses. So, perhaps we have a sufficient reason for obeying our conscience when conscience beliefs are understood as volitional impossibilities. We should obey conscience, therefore, because its verdicts are volitional impossibilities.
To clarify and better define the nature of volitional impossibilities, Miller draws upon a case developed over time in the writings of Harry Frankfurt. The first analysis of this case comes from Frankfurt’s book Volition, Necessity, and Love published in 1993:
Consider a mother who reaches the conclusion, after conscientious deliberation, that it would be best for her to give up her child for adoption, and suppose that she decides to do so. When the moment arrives for actually giving up the child, however, she may find that she cannot go through with it—not because she has reconsidered the matter and changed her mind but because she simply cannot bring herself to give her child away.[8]
The second analysis of this case comes from Frankfurt’s essay “Reply to Gary Watson,” published in the 2002 book Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt:
[The mother] may recognize her discovery as a revelation not just of the fact that keeping the child is what is most important to her, but also of the deeper fact that it is what she truly wants to be most important to her. In [this] case, she is glad to be putting her need for the relationship above what is best by a measure that she now refuses to regard as decisive.[9]
The point is that Frankfurt’s case suggests that volitional impossibilities are something like deeply held conscience value beliefs that are personally endorsed. “What is most important to her” evidences a deeply held value being applied to her actions, an “inability to go through with it” evidences a profoundly motivating value belief, and that “she wants it to be the most important thing to her” evidences her subjective endorsement of this value. By acting against her volitional impossibilities or deeply held value beliefs, the mother in this story would doubtlessly suffer from a catastrophized psychology that would inevitably manifest in embodied ways.
Nevertheless, even if the verdicts of conscience are volitional impossibilities that yield psychological and embodied consequences when disobeyed, I am similarly skeptical that this feature can provide an all-things-considered moral reason for obeying our conscience. My argument for this conclusion is also simple: That a volitional impossibility produces significant negative psychological and embodied consequences when disobeyed just does not seem to provide an all-things-considered reason to obey it. With respect to this feature, the value neutrality of conscience actually implies that we could suffer from false guilt, possess false value beliefs, and even come to regard moral requirements as volitional impossibilities. Just consider, for example, the hypothetical case of the Guilty Worshiper who suffers significant negative psychological and embodied consequences when they act against their strong and endorsed aversion to theism by worshiping the Creator of a sublime and captivating sunset. Of course, understanding the verdicts of conscience as volitional impossibilities may provide a strong, prima facie reason to act in accordance with them. However, just as appealing to the consequences that disobeying a volitional impossibility would produce fails to provide the Guilty Worshiper with an absolutely overriding reason to act in accordance with their value beliefs, so too does appealing to the consequences that disobeying a volitional impossibility would produce fail to provide the physician in the Roe Case with an all-things considered reason to act in accordance with her value beliefs. Appeals to volitional impossibilities—and the significant negative consequences of disobeying them—also seem similarly defeasible even though they may provide prima facie reasons for action.
The fairly modest claim that I have defended up to this point is that many of the subjective features usually associated with conscience—namely, that conscience beliefs are identity-conferring beliefs, that conscience beliefs are integrity-maintaining beliefs, and that conscience beliefs are volitional impossibilities—are simply insufficient in themselves to ground some sort of all-things-considered reason to obey the demands of conscience. While these subjective features typically associated with conscience may provide otherwise good, prima facie reasons to obey the demands of conscience, they nevertheless turn out to be defeasible and overridable reasons when evaluated under scrutiny. If this claim is correct, then whatever overriding reason(s) we may have for obeying conscience must be grounded in something other than these subjective features. However, let us suppose for a moment that you are still skeptical about the various cases that I have made against each feature and remain optimistic that, perhaps when taken together, this cluster of subjective features can provide something like a jointly sufficient, overriding reason to obey the verdicts of conscience.
In response to this challenge, let us conclude this piece by looking at an analogous case to the Roe Case—what I will refer to as the Dobbs Case:
A licensed OB-GYN physician must perform an elective abortion or else refer her autonomously requesting patient because she is conscientiously compelled to provide an abortion in a setting where performing (and therefore referring for) abortions is not permitted by law yet is technologically possible and—when performed—efficient at achieving its aims.
We can ask: Why would it be morally wrong for the physician in the Roe Case to act against her conscience but not morally wrong for the similarly situated physician in the Dobbs Case to act against hers? In the Roe Case, the physician is conscientiously opposed to providing or else referring her autonomously requesting patient for an abortion in a setting where it is legal. But in the Dobbs Case, the physician is conscientiously compelled toward providing or else referring her autonomously requesting patient for an abortion in a setting where it is illegal. However, in both settings, the procedure of abortion is technologically possible and, when performed, efficient at achieving its aims. And, most importantly, each physician’s conscience beliefs presumably are volitional impossibilities that are similarly identity conferring and integrity maintaining. Therefore, if we believe that, when taken together, this above cluster of subjective features can provide a jointly sufficient, overriding reason to obey the verdicts of conscience, then we must treat the Roe and Dobbs case the same by respecting the demands of each conscience. In other words, if we think that the cluster of subjective features discussed above provide a jointly sufficient, all-things-considered reason to obey the verdicts of conscience, then we must not only allow the Roe physician to abstain from aborting and referring, but we must also allow the Dobbs physician to abort or refer as well.
But this conclusion seems problematic and misguided given that the two cases seem morally distinct and should probably not be treated equally. More specifically, there seem to be compelling reasons to think that it is morally wrong for the physician in the Roe Case to act against her conscience but not morally wrong for the similarly situated physician in the Dobbs Case to act against hers. You might think, for example, that the Roe physician is permitted to follow her conscience while the Dobbs physician is not insofar as we should never be coerced to act against our negative claims of conscience (i.e., when conscience tells us what we cannot do) even though it is sometimes morally permissible to be prohibited from acting on our positive claims of conscience (i.e., when conscience tells us what we must do). The argument here is, roughly, that while being prohibited from being a perceived agent of good may leave you immune from moral culpability or blame, being forced to be a perceived agent of evil renders you morally culpable or blameworthy. Sorabji may have something like this in mind when he notes that this “connection with being in the wrong accounts for the force of, and respect for, conscience of others, for no one wants to be in the wrong. We do not have to look for something contingently and variably connected, such as its sometimes being central to people’s identity, or causing intensity of feeling, or contributing to self-direction.”[10]
Moreover, you might think that the Roe physician is permitted to follow her conscience while the Dobbs physician is not because the very act of abortion—understood as “any act that either intentionally or unjustly ends the life of an unborn human being”—is never morally permissible.[11] Thus, performing or else being complicit in such an action would always be morally wrong—regardless of what one’s conscience might say. Finally, you might think that the Roe physician is permitted to follow her conscience while the Dobbs physician is not because the former physician’s refusal is rooted in not acting inconsistently with, or else in contradiction to, her vocational commitment to the proper aim of medicine—that is, the objective good of patient health. To the contrary, the Dobbs physician may be acting inconsistent with, or else in contradiction to, her vocational commitment to the patient’s health while instead aiming at something more conceptually capacious like well-being that may outstrip her expertise.
Whether one or all of these reasons adequately explain why the Roe physician should be permitted to follow her conscience while the Dobbs physician should not—a conclusion I am sympathetic to—the central point should be clear: The reason for permitting the former while disallowing the latter seemingly has nothing to do with any of the subjective features usually associated with and appealed to in defense of conscience that have been discussed throughout this piece. This point is reinforced by the fact that, while each physician’s conscience beliefs are volitional impossibilities that are similarly identity conferring and integrity maintaining, there may be further, strong reasons to treat them differently. Therefore, this cluster of subjective features simply seem insufficient to ground some sort of all-things-considered reason to obey the demands of conscience—a conclusion that is especially clear given our rejection of the physician’s demands of conscience in the Dobbs case. If it turns out that we do have some all-things-considered reason for obeying conscience, then it must be grounded in something other than these subjective features.
[1] Richard Sorabji, Moral Conscience through the Ages: Fifth Century BCE to the Present (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 217.
[2] Sorabji, Moral Conscience through the Ages, 217.
[3] “It is not conscience (at least not conscience in the core sense) that has to supply our values in the first place. St. Paul ascribes the inner law to God; a secular view should agree that conscience is never the original source of our values, even though particular decisions of conscience can lead to new reflection on general values, without being their original source. Conscience rather applies values to the conduct and thoughts of the individual.” Sorabji, Moral Conscience through the Ages, 218.
[4] Alberto Giubilini, “Conscience,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/conscience/.
[5] Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13.
[6] Sorabji, Moral Conscience through the Ages, 36.
[7] Christian Miller, Moral Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press), 43.
[8] Harry Frankfurt, Volition, Necessity, and Love (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 111.
[9] Harry Frankfurt, “Reply to Gary Watson,” in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, eds. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 163.
[10] Sorabji, Moral Conscience through the Ages, 217.
[11] Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen, The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2021), 126. They continue: “All abortion so defined is morally impermissible, and likewise, no act is an abortion that accepts the death of an unborn human being as the justifiable side effect of an attempt to preserve the mother’s life.”
Joseph M. Dunne, “Why Is It Wrong to Violate My Conscience? Identity, Integrity, and Volitional Impossibilities,” Dignitas 29, no. 3–4 (2022): 4–9, www.cbhd.org/dignitas-articles/why-is-it-wrong-to-violate-my-conscience-identity-integrity-and-volitional-impossibilities.
