The Obedient Toddler & the Rebellious Teen

Conscience is often spoken of as a thing, a faculty of the human person like the will or the imagination. Conscience is not, however, a thing but an act of the intellect — or, more specifically, a judgment. A judgment is an attempt by man through reason to conform his subjective knowledge to objective reality. Whenever man is confronted with a particular question about reality, the answer he gives is a judgment of his reason. Conscience is a judgment of reason like many others, but it differs in that it is a practical moral judgment of what one ought to do in a specific situation. This is succinctly summarized in the Catechism, which defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (no. 1777).

If conscience is not a thing, then it is clearly not to be understood as something external to man, like the proverbial angel on one’s shoulder. This popular yet childish notion does not adequately explain conscience, and a great many Catholics labor under a false conception of conscience born of two distinct kinds of moral immaturity. On the one hand are the “rebellious teenagers” who must assert their freedom by embracing “the primacy of conscience”; on the other are the “obedient toddlers” who must submit to authority and be told what to do all the time. Despite the apparent opposition of these two approaches, they both make the same fundamental error: Both assume that there is an insurmountable chasm between freedom and authority. One rejects freedom in favor of authority while the other rejects authority in favor of freedom.