Sorabji, Richard. Moral Conscience through the Ages.
Simpson, Peter
SORABJI, Richard. Moral Conscience through the Ages. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014. ix + 265 pp.--The story is told about an African
official who, on receiving from St. Augustine the first three books of
City of God, settled down to enjoy an intellectual feast. Readers may
rightly have similar sentiments about this book by Richard Sorabji. It
traces the historical development of the idea of conscience and of
freedom of conscience and provides a sumptuous feast running from the
ancient Greek tragedians and medieval penitentiaries to Mahatma Gandhi
and the present day.
The book is richly informative, careful in analysis, and scrupulous
in its fairness. It also contains useful summaries at the end of each
chapter, a concluding retrospect, a list of principal names by date, a
general index, and an index locorum.
One interesting fact it shows is how the same arguments about
conscience and freedom of conscience kept independently cropping up
throughout history. One such argument, which reappears in Locke, that
force used against dissident believers is necessarily ineffective
because it would produce outward conformity and not inward conviction,
had appeared before the time of Augustine, and Augustine came eventually
to reject it when he saw the effectiveness of the force used by Roman
authorities against Donatists in North Africa. Force can work to change
consciences. Locke, when his attention was drawn to Augustine's
experience, had to revise his argument.
The better argument for freedom of conscience turns out to be
ignorance. The truth is hard and difficult to know, so people should not
be forced to follow one religion or view rather than another, but should
be left free to follow and act on their consciences. This argument goes
back at least to Themistius, who added the twist that there is not one
road anyway. God has allowed many roads to him in order to excite awe
and eagerness for the search. The argument, with or without the twist,
reappears during disputes between Protestants over the imposition of
rival versions of Christianity. It is now a main argument in John Rawls
for his version of liberalism (the so-called burdens of judgment).
Another twist, added by J. S. Mill, is that truth can be properly known
only if it is allowed to be challenged.
An additional twist, popular in recent years with the U.S. Supreme
Court (though it has roots in Kantian autonomy), is that freedom to
determine for oneself what really matters in life is integral to
personal identity. Sorabji, by contrast, rightly contends that the force
and obligatoriness of conscience essentially rest in the conviction of
being in the wrong if one does not follow it.
Sorabji does a fine job illustrating this claim and many related
ones from his learned, thoughtful, critical investigations. He ends his
tour de force with a very helpful overview of the core idea of
conscience. Here are a few of his thirteen points: conscience is a
person's belief or capacity for belief about what attitudes or
actions would be wrong or not wrong for him to adopt; conscience is not
infallible, but it does motivate and does create an obligation to
conform to it; freedom of conscience is absence of forcible constraint
on one's beliefs and actions.
The fallibility of conscience, which seems undeniable, returns to
the arguments about ignorance and about knowledge needing exposure to
opposed views. These arguments are those Sorabji himself eventually
endorses in support of freedom of conscience and tolerance. Mill and
Gandhi are his heroes--Mill principally in speech and Gandhi principally
in action. But it is doubtful if the arguments work. Mill's
argument could be satisfied if the relevant freedom were confined to
experts, whose determinations others would follow until they became
experts in their turn (scholastic theologians, believers all, came up
with, and answered, more and better arguments against theism than
atheists did; Aristotelian dialectic was for them an integral part of
theological science). As to the argument from ignorance, it was used by
St. Paul in his speech to the Areopagus to argue for the need and the
fact of a divine revelation made known to all by clear miracles. A
revelation from God infallibly taught would certainly remove ignorance.
The claim to it in matters of revelation has long been made by the
Catholic Church, and insisted on, sometimes with vehemence, by popes
over the past several centuries: the miracles and supernatural signs are
so manifest that denial implies invincible ignorance or bad faith or the
like. Despite the glorious richness and learning of Sorabji's book,
the idea of conscience and the arguments for freedom of conscience that
his historical examination isolates for us do not get us over this
dispute. It remains as alive, if not as openly stated, as it ever
was.--Peter Simpson, Graduate Center, City University of New York
