Is your conscience a good measure for doing the right thing?

This is a question that has been circling around some of the reading I've been doing lately. In a column from December, 1965, Dorothy Day reflects on the role of conscience when it comes to how one feels about participating in war. Notably, she writes that one's conscience can be wrong, or ill-formed; but you should still follow it.

“If a man truly thinks he is combating evil and striving for the good, if he truly thinks he is striving for the common good, he must follow his conscience regardless of others.”

People can have deeply set convictions on things or a passion for some sort of idealized good that they want to see in the world. I guess Day’s starting place here is that you should follow those convictions as opposed to ignoring them. However, that doesn't immediately mean that your conscience is taking you in the right direction. This is why she goes further and suggests that our conscience must be continually formed.

“But he always has the duty of forming his conscience by studying, listening, being ready to hear his opponent’s point of view.”

For our actions to be meaningful, they need to come from some deeper value or conviction; but we must keep bringing those values and convictions back to the testing ground that can only come from deeper reflection. This is the sort of thought > praxis > thought model that I remember encountering when I first read Paulo Freire many years ago. Both our convictions and our actions require ongoing formation.

That said, I believe the formation of one's conscience is a much deeper process than simply 'doing your own research.' We need something to orient ourselves, and this is my proposal for a guiding ethic (or at least an acknowledgement of my own).

My current studying has had me returning to another favourite writer and thinker of mine, William Stringfellow (who I was very close to doing a thesis on in my Masters). He writes this,

“The beginning of conscience, in a Christian sense, is realizing that every action or omission, even those which seem routine and trivial, is consequentially related to the lives of all other human beings on the face of the earth... Conscience, in other words, is knowing that people are related to, and responsible for, each other in all things." (Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society)

Stringfellow is no stranger to ethics (he has a trilogy on the topic). If you're looking for a place to orient yourself—you could do worse. This idea of interconnection, that our actions have impact, is crucial to trying to understand (and solve) big problems. It forces us to confront the reality that we participate in a system and in doing so we uphold and benefit from it. I'd personally push this even further than Stringfellow does here and suggest that we are interconnected with all things, not just humans. But his point remains.

Dorothee Sölle (another favourite) expands on this, suggesting that if you want to understand your own praxis—that is, do deep reflection on your actions—it begins by asking who is being victimized and who is profiting? These two questions have been core to my own conscience formation for many years now. And while they might not always offer easy answers, they help orient me in these complicated systems of interdependence to which we are all bound. By knowing who suffers and who profits by and in these systems, we can try and better untangle the ways we knowingly—and unknowingly—participate. This knowledge should then form our actions.

So to return to Day—yes, follow your conscience, but your conscience alone is not enough. It must be formed and reformed by deep reflection on the context you are trying to live within.