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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    One's conscience is binding upon oneself even when one's ... — Carmelics
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
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    42
    Home/Moral Responsibility
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    One's conscience is binding upon oneself even when one's conscience is utterly mistaken and directs awful misdeeds.

    Moral Responsibility
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    2 reasons against

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Conscience consists of judgments about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of kinds of action.
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    • 2.It is logically impossible for a person to be aware that their present judgment of conscience is mistaken.
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    • 3.Setting oneself against one's own firm judgment of conscience is setting oneself against the goods of truth and reasonableness.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.An erroneous conscience formed through culpable ignorance or willful self-deception does not generate genuine moral obligation but only apparent obligation.
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    • 2.Aquinas himself distinguishes vincible from invincible ignorance, holding that vincibly ignorant agents bear responsibility for correcting their false beliefs before acting.
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    • 3.If agents are morally required to seek correction of reasonably suspect beliefs, then a merely subjective judgment of conscience is not automatically binding in the manner the claim asserts.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Bernard Williams and externalist critics argue that moral obligations must be grounded in reasons that are accessible from an agent-neutral standpoint, not merely in the agent's own sincere deliberative commitments.
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    • 2.A conscience that directs genocide or torture cannot be binding precisely because such directives are objectively disconnected from the human goods conscience is supposed to track.
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    • 3.The claim collapses the normative authority of conscience into mere psychological compulsion, eliminating the evaluative standard that distinguishes genuine moral reasoning from rationalized pathology.
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    Topics

    Moral Responsibility

    Connections

    3 topics

    Truth & Knowledge2 linkedModality & Possibility1 linkedVirtue Ethics1 linked

    Related

    A conscience that directs genocide or torture cannot be binding precisely becaus...An erroneous conscience formed through culpable ignorance or willful self-decept...Aquinas himself distinguishes vincible from invincible ignorance, holding that v...Bernard Williams and externalist critics argue that moral obligations must be gr...
    +6 moreShow less
    Conscience consists of judgments about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of...If agents are morally required to seek correction of reasonably suspect beliefs,...

    Similar

    If one has formed one's judgment of conscience corruptly, one acts wro...86%The obligatoriness of one's conscience for oneself is not negated by t...85%Both following and violating a corruptly formed conscience can be wron...84%It is logically impossible for a person to be aware that their present...84%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: aquinas-moral-political
    View source passageHide passage
    Conscience in Aquinas’ view is not a special power or presence within us, but is our practical intelligence at work, primarily in the form of a stock of judgments about the reasonableness (rightness) or unreasonableness (wrongness) of kinds of action (kinds of option). Since each such judgment is of the form “[It is true that] action of the kind phi is always [or generally] wrong [or: is generally to be done, etc.]” or “phi is [always] [or: generally] required [or forbidden] by reason”, it must
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    It is logically impossible for a person to be aware that their present judgment ...
    Setting oneself against one's own firm judgment of conscience is setting oneself...
    Setting oneself against the goods of truth and reasonableness cannot fail to be ...
    The claim collapses the normative authority of conscience into mere psychologica...
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit