A former student of mine wrote to me with a query on about how institutional Church authority could co-exist with the authority of individual conscience. She argued that ultimately my conscience will decide whether the authority is to be trusted, and quoted Anscombe as saying that one cannot help but be one's own pilot.
This made me think a bit more about conscience and authority. I had recently been reading about the Charles Bonnet and Musical Ear syndromes. In these, visual or hearing loss, respectively, apparently causes the brain to confabulate visual or auditory data, respectively, to fill in the sensorily deprived blanks. In Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the sufferers see things like colored patterns, faces, cartoons, etc. In Musical Ear Syndrome, they are apt to hear music. The significant thing about both syndromes is that the sufferers are quite sane and fully realize that the incorrect sensory data they are receiving is mere hallucination (that the hallucinations are limited to a single faculty must help there). They may, however, be distressed due to worries that they are insane, particularly if they are misdiagnosed by a psychiatrist, as in a case I recall hearing of.
A reasonable sufferer from one of these two syndromes will accept the testimony of reliable others that what she visually or auditorily perceives isn't there. In so doing, she is genuinely being her own pilot. Indeed, if she were to uncritically accept the visual or auditory data, she wouldn't be being her own responsible pilot: she would be replacing considered judgment with the flow of experience. Likewise, my colorblind son defers to the color judgments of others; an object may look light green to him, but when others testify that it is light pink, he accepts their judgment, and in so doing exercises his epistemic autonomy.
I think something similar can and does happen in moral matters. We have moral intuitions. These moral intuitions can be more or less reliable. But of course raw moral intuitions do not have a final say. Even apart from authority, moral intuitions need to be harmonized. And it may turn out that the best moral theory fitting the bulk of one's moral intuitions can go against some of one's moral intuitions, and then a judgment must be made.
Moreover, there is nothing contrary to being one's own pilot in making a reasonable judgment that a family of one's moral intuitions, or even all of one's moral intuitions, are less reliable than the testimony of an individual or institution one has reason to trust. That is just much an exercise of one's epistemic autonomy as it would be to accept the moral intuitions over that testimony.
I think that sometimes we confuse conscience with moral intuitions. The deliverance of conscience is an all-things-considered judgment of what is morally to be done. It may take moral intuitions into account, but it may also take other relevant data into account as well. The deliverance of moral intuition is not, as such, the deliverance of conscience, though of course in the absence of evidence against the moral intuition, conscience is apt to reasonably accept the content of the moral intuition as true.
It is quite possible for one to reasonably come to the conclusion that one's moral intuitions are less reliable than the teaching of an authority. In such a case, when there is a conflict between one's moral intuition and a teaching of the authority, one's considered moral judgment will at least typically go with the teaching. (I say "at least typically" to leave open the possibility that, say, a particularly strong moral intuition might be judged more likely to be accurate than a teaching that the authority gives quite low weight to.) In so doing, one may very well be a responsible pilot of one's self, if the reasons for accepting the authority as reliable were very good ones.
And one is not going against conscience then. On the contrary, in such a case, it would go against conscience to follow the moral intuitions, because one's considered judgment is that the authority is more reliable than the intuitions.
Our moral intuitions while being a genuine source of moral knowledge are often distorted by the desire to find excuses for our own faults or, more excusably, those of friends. Moral intuitions should not be glorified with the name "conscience". Like a Charles Bonnet Syndrome patient, one can be reasonable in judging that one ought to submit to the judgment of another, and then the other's judgment is the deliverance of one's conscience.
At the same time, I should note that normally our moral intuitions will play a significant role in figuring out that a putative authority should be listened to. When the putative authority's teachings harmonize particularly with those moral intuitions that we take to be more reliable, that will count in favor of the claim to authority, and when they disagree, that will count against the claim to authority. Here I think there is a useful rule of thumb: moral intuitions that something is permissible are less to be trusted than moral intuitions that something is impermissible. An action is impermissible provided there is a conclusive moral reason not to do it. An action is permissible provided that there is no conclusive moral reason not to do it. Generally, perceptions of absence are less to be trusted than perceptions of presence. Moreover, the space of reasons is large, and to judge that none of the infinitely many considerations in that space gives conclusive reason not to do A is fraught witih difficulty. (Of course, judgments about permissibility are very often right, but perhaps only because of the base rate: most actions people perform are right.)
Hi Alex,
I think most of this sounds pretty right. We should distinguish the authority of conscience from the authority of intuition. Do you think, though, that there's anything to the authority of conscience idea? If the idea that your conscience is a guide is just the idea that your own beliefs about what to do guide your action, does the authority of conscience come to anything more than a psychological claim about the role a special kind of belief plays in the motivation of action? Does judging that I ought to X make it wrong not to X? (Does it have the 'power' to shift something from one deontic category (e.g., mandatory, permissible, forbidden) to another?)
Clayton,
"Do you think, though, that there's anything to the authority of conscience idea?"
Yes, but I didn't address that.
I am inclined to think that if you judge that A is forbidden, then you are forbidden to A, and that it could be that you are also required to A, in which case you are subject to a real dilemma.
Hi Alex,
No, I knew you didn't address that, but it's an interesting issue. One virtue of your view is that you have a neat way of dealing with the problem of conflicting authority. When should you follow the advice of an outside authority--not when you believe you shouldn't!
One thing that's interesting about your view (apart from generating dilemmas, perhaps) is that it seems to violate 'ought' implies 'can'. I can believe that I'm forbidden from refraining from A-ing even if I cannot A. I'm working on a paper related to this right now. My focus isn't on beliefs about obligation, but _justified_ and _rational_ beliefs about obligation. I'd be curious to know what you thought about the link between moral judgment and blame. (I can guess what your answer would be, but it's just a guess...) Suppose somebody believes that A-ing is morally forbidden, but he A's anyway. On your view, I take it that this person could easily come to know that A-ing is morally forbidden (given self-knowledge and knowledge of your principle, the knowledge of obligation is close to hand). Here's an intuitive claim about blame:
(*) If somebody intentionally, voluntarily, and not under duress A's in the knowledge that A-ing is morally impermissible, the agent's actions are blameworthy.
It looks as if your view predicts that in a wide range of cases, we should blame people who act against their own moral beliefs. The trouble cases are cases of 'inverse akrasia', cases such as the Huck Finn case where Huck releases Jim but believes that doing so is morally wrong. Intuitively, I'd want to say that (i) Huck is praiseworthy, not blameworthy (maybe you think he's both?) and that (ii) given (*) I wouldn't want to say that Huck's actions were wrong. If someone agrees that Huck's actions were forbidden and didn't want to blame him for them, I guess they might reject (*), but then I worry that it's going to be really difficult to show that it's ever the case that somebody's actions were blameworthy. So, I guess I'd be inclined to accept (*), accept (i), and accept (ii) on these grounds. I'd reject the conscience principle that links belief about obligation to obligation and respects the fallibility of conscience.
Clayton:
I haven't followed the reverse akrasia literature, except for attending one talk about a decade ago.
1. My strong inclination is to be sceptical of the attribution to Huck of the belief that it is morally forbidden to him to release Jim, and instead to attribute to him some belief closer to the idea that it is forbidden by God and society that he release Jim. (There may be an argument against some types of divine command theory in the vicinity.)
2. In any case, I think it is reasonable to attribute to Huck the belief that there is conclusive reason to act as he does. And I identify the morally obligatory with what there is conclusive reason to do. That's very controversial, of course (for me, the main worry is about supererogation).
3. It could be that Huck both believes that releasing Jim is morally forbidden and that it is morally required. This would suggest that he is both to be praised and to be blamed, unless we can find some relevant asymmetry. I am not so happy with this line of thought when it is as bare as here, but maybe it can be filled out. In fact, my next suggestion is a way of doing it.
4. Take "is (morally) required" to be a determinable, with determinates like "is required by courage" and "is required by friendship" (on a virtue ethics version of the proposal) or "is required by human dignity" and "is required by a binding promise" and "is required by obedience to legitimate authority" (on a more deontic version of the proposal). In addition, there is an indeterminate "is required by something or other", and a thin belief that something is morally required involves this predicate (more precisely, a sentence expressing this thin belief uses this predicate). The crucial thing about the proposal is that all the determinates are ultima facie obligations. To defend that, we need something like a unity of virtue thesis, but perhaps one allowing at least for conflicts between "is required by conscience" and other determinates. (I haven't thought more than about an hour about this, so this is very half-baked.)
Actually, it may be that "is required by conscience" is itself a determinable, with determinates like "is required by conscience as a requirement of courage" and an indeterminate case like "is required by conscience as a requirement of something other than conscience". I don't know if I should include things like "is required by conscience as a requirement of racial purity", but I don't want to, because it sounds terrible. Maybe the mistaken person who takes it that something is required by conscience as a requirement of racial purity is, perhaps, obligated "by conscience as a requirement of something other than conscience", but the "as" operator is intensional, so there isn't something other than conscience such that the person is obligated by conscience as a required of it. (Am I making sense? I'm making this up on the spot.)
Huck then takes himself to be in a situation of conflict, one where what is required by friendship and human dignity is incompatible with what is required by God and maybe more generally what is required by something or other.
He is praiseworthy for doing what friendship and human dignity required of him, and doing it because friendship and human dignity required it of him. In taking his action to be required by friendship and human dignity, he was taking the action to fall under a determinate of "is morally required".
But he is in a genuine dilemma. He took his obligations to be conflicting. And maybe he is not culpable for violating the obligations to conflict with these. Or maybe he is. After all, if he had grown up as a more virtuous person, perhaps he would not have had a view of morality on which what is required by friendship routinely conflicts with what is required by other things.
Here's a tough question for this proposal. Suppose Huck acted otherwise, and ensured that Jim remained a slave. Then on this proposal, he still would have done something that he was required to do by a determinate of "is required by conscience". Would he have been culpable then?
I still like the simple answer in 1.