Stuck Statements and the Sticky Situation of Conscience Formation

We left our last post acknowledging that even if I had a talking cricket in my pocket, listening to conscience is difficult.  And now I will add that forming it is no simpler.  The aspect of conscience that O’Connell called conscience/2 is able to be formed.  What this means is that in the case of the pro-life/pro-choice drama, two people’s conscience can be formed in radically different ways.  What this also means, and I’m looking at you, reader, is that your conscience can be malformed, and wrong! *JUDGMENT*

Ok no judgment here, because my conscience tells me it’s impolite to judge other people.  But we don’t have to look too hard to find a person or a group of people whom I bet you would agree have been malformed.  Take Westboro Batpist Church as an example.  Some folks may agree with their underlying doctrine.  But I think that most people who read this blog would agree that protesting at someone’s funeral while holding up signs that say “God Hates Fags,” is an egregious form of disrespect and, to put it mildly, blasphemy.  Talk to a member of the church, and they’ll tell you they are only doing what God desires.  Persons and group of people can have consciences that are radically malformed.

One of the key questions for theological ethics is “how do we form our consciences well?”  Where can this floundering moral being find guidance among what seems to be conflicting pools of moral wisdom?   The most basic place to find guidance is in our own experience.   Once, while walking through a park, I saw a little boy enjoying his vanilla ice cream cone.  Then some rambunctious teenager walked by and knocked it onto the ground.  Seeing the little’s boy’s face, and the ache in my gut as I empathized with him, teaches me more about morality than hearing the statement, “Its rude to ruin someone’s afternoon treat.”  That’s not to say that the statements aren’t good, and that they don’t help us out.  “Thou shall not kill.”  Dead on, right?  (get it)  Statements are good, and point us to the good, but they are limited.  For example, in the midst of a moral crisis, how often do you scroll through lists of statements to inform your choices?  Additionally, statements are stuck.  Oh yeah, I’ll say it again, STATEMENTS ARE STUCK.

Statements are stuck in a lot of things and as a rule of thumb, if its stuck in something it can only be so useful.  Speaking of the rule of thumb, that illustrates this idea perfectly.   One of the origins of that phrase comes from a moral regulation that helped to curb spousal abuse.  In the 1700s a judge ruled that a man could legally beat his wife so long as the object used was less than the size of his thumb.  So the “rule of thumb” is stuck in a historical situation.  The situation includes the time period (1700s), world location (the west) the cultural norm for the family (its ok to beat your wife), a judicial process, on and on and on we could go to develop the historical situation.  Well the rule of the thumb is not really helpful anymore.   The statement is stuck.

Another statement that is stuck, but is notorious  for people trying to get it unstuck is Leviticus 19:28, “You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord.”  Raise your hand if you think that Moses had in mind that the Israelites may walk into “Ink Assassins” on the corner of 26^th and Peach St., and get “Mom” tattooed on their arm.  Probably not, as tattoo parlors were few and far between in the promised land.  They’d have to go find a group of people who use tattoos as part of the worship of their god, or find a prostitute whose profession was identifiable by her tattoos.  Getting a tattoo to honor a foreign god is a little different than memorializing your mother.  The point here is that the statement is stuck!  Don’t try to unstick it or else you will misrepresent the statement.  Ok you have issues with me suggesting that a biblical statement could be right in one situation and then wrong in another.  Let’s look at another one (tough crowd around here).

Leviticus 12:2,3: “Tell the Israelites: When a woman has a child, giving birth to a boy, she shall be unclean for seven days, with the same uncleanness as during her menstrual period.  On the eighth day, the flesh of the boy’s foreskin shall be circumcised.”  That’s a pretty straight forward statement.  When you have a baby boy, circumcise him on the eighth day.  If you are a St. Paul reading Christian you would know that Paul is not keen on circumcision.  Check out Galatians five.  So the bible makes a statement that men should be circumcised and then later the bible says we should not be circumcised.  Either 2000 years of Christians have missed this obvious contradiction OR my basic suggestion was right, statements are stuck, and a moral statement could change and be wrong, even if it’s from the bible!

In class we discussed a situation brought up by O’Connell.  Imagine being in Nazi Germany, and harboring a Jewish family in your basement.  Soldiers knock on your door and ask, “Are there any Jews inside?”  What do you do?  We could start scrambling through a list of statements to see if we could lie.  We would quickly learn that we shouldn’t lie.  So either give up the family (and probably get you and your own family killed) or lie.  I’d go for the lie myself.  O’Connell has more to say about this, but for now let’s simply acknowledge that the statement “Do no lie” is limited because it tends to get stuck in ideal situations.   I believe that in the Nazi situation, “You should lie” more aptly applies.

Sheesh, after all that it appears we are still floundering with consciences that could be wrong, and moral statements that could change!  We are not any closer to finding a moral guide that could help form conscience/2 (other than experience).

So what do you think about all this?  How do we navigate limited moral statements that contain wisdom in one age, but lack wisdom in another?  Where do we turn and how do we form our consciences?

The Cricket Inside All of Us

In the Disney classic, Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket is given the job of directing the young puppet in the right paths.  Here is his first lesson:

"Now you see the world is full of temptations."

"Temptations?"

"Yep Temptations. They’re the wrong things that seem right at the time. But uh, even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time. Or uh, visa versa. Understand"

"No, But I’m going to do right."

" 'Adda boy Pinoch. And I’m gonna help you."

If Pinocchio was confused about right and wrong, who can blame him?  Even with the help of a fairy-given conscience/cricket, he was still confused about how to be a good boy.  Looking inside ourselves we see that determining the right and actually doing it are sometimes very difficult.   Jiminy Cricket has no small task of helping the puppet to becoming fully human from the practice of good decisions.

Catholic moral theology has good news for all of us.  Every human is aided in the pursuit of good by a God-given conscience.  However you conceptualize your conscience, from a cricket, to a little angel on your shoulder, you are hopefully familiar with that small voice or inclination or feeling inside you that helps you to determine right from wrong.  So listen to your conscience and the moral life is a walk in the park. End Post.

Just kidding.  If only it were that simple!  For one thing the motivation of my conscience is sometimes suspect.  It’s a gift from God, but that doesn’t mean it always gives me the best advice.  For example the other day I thought I’d be helpful at work by replacing a light bulb.  My conscience which urged me toward helping others failed to consider the labor union and job descriptions and restrictions not to mention the dangers of hanging over a ramp to replace the bulb.  My conscience had nothing to say when I was scolded for “not doing my own job.”  So it’s from God, but not always correct.  It’s also deeply rooted in me, a human.  As the example above illustrates it sometimes makes mistakes, and can be motivated by some selfish desires.  Conscience is neither fully Divine nor fully human.  It is somewhere in the middle.

Unlike Pinocchio, humans usually obey conscience, even a selfish, mistaken conscience.  Think for a moment about the last time you did something that in retrospect you know was a bad decision.   Few of us know with certainty what is bad and decide to do it anyway.  Most of the time our conscience is simply confused.  Timothy O’Connell, whose book we read for my ethics class brought up the example of Nazi Germany.  “Were they sinners, refusing to do what they knew to be right? By no means. What must be said (and it is a universal, often tragic human weakness) is that, by and large, the people of Germany were guilty of a moral blind spot, of an inability to see and appreciate the evil of their situation.”[1]   We humans want to do what is good, but often what is good gets muddied and confused.    Thus O’Connell describes three dimensions of conscience which helps illuminate the complexity.

Conscience/1, he says, is that basic human desire to do good and avoid evil.  This is why we almost always obey our conscience, because we really want to do what is good.  This desire for the good is universal, but what is defined as good is of course not universal.  Take for example the hot button issue of abortion.  Pro-Life and Pro-Choice people both think that we should do what is good.  But they both hold up two different banners about what is right.  “All humans at all stages of development have the right to life.”  “All women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive health.”  With the many disagreements between the two camps they would both agree, “Humans have the responsibility to do what is right!”  Which is why we need conscience/2.

Conscience/2 is the process that we all undergo in determining what is right.  It is the process of consulting moral guidelines, societal stigmas, family values, personal experience, our favorite song lyrics, and any number of sources of “moral wisdom.”  You will notice that there is nothing universal about this process and people will disagree.  What this means is that conscience/2 can be formed differently for different people.  But what is certain is that every person will form her conscience.  The question is, “How well will it be formed?” and “How do we form it well?”

Lastly there is conscience/3.  Conscience/3 is an event or a particular judgment of conscience upon an act.  We would do well to listen to that judgment and do it.  For the reality is that in all cases, the human person must do what he believes is right.  What does it say about a person who believes that an act is evil, but does it anyhow, or the person who believes an act is good, but avoids doing it?  We must do only what we believe is right.  Hopefully you’ve engaged in a process of conscience formation so that what you believe is right is actually right!  Just like Pinocchio, the better your conscience is formed, and you learn to listen to it, the more fully human you will become.

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[1] O’Connell, Timothy. Principles for a Catholic Morality. New York: HarpersSanFrancisco, 1990. P 111.