Conscience

Conscience is a person’s inner capacity to judge actions as right or wrong and feel responsibility for them. It can involve moral reasoning, emotional responses, and a sense of obligation.

Moral reasoning: The process of evaluating actions and principles to determine what is morally right or wrong. It supplies reasons that conscience uses to assess a contemplated or completed action.
Socrates: An ancient Greek philosopher whose questioning method shaped Western ethics and philosophy. His account of an inner divine sign helped frame early ideas about inward moral guidance.
Superego: In Freudian theory, the part of the psyche that internalizes parental and social standards. It resembles conscience but belongs to a specific psychoanalytic model of the mind.
Civil disobedience: The deliberate, public violation of a law to oppose an injustice, typically without violence. Conscience can lead people to break laws they judge morally wrong.
Moral realism: The view that at least some moral claims are objectively true. If moral truths exist independently, conscience might help people recognize them.
Guilt: A negative emotional response to believing that one has committed a wrong. It can arise when conscience judges an action as a violation of moral standards.
Thomas Aquinas: A medieval theologian and philosopher who integrated Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. He distinguished conscience as an act of applying moral knowledge from the principles behind it.
Moral intuition: An immediate moral judgment that arises without conscious step-by-step reasoning. Intuition can contribute to conscience, but conscience also includes reflection and responsibility.
Conscientious objection: Refusal to perform a required act, often military service, because it conflicts with deeply held moral or religious beliefs. It is a formal case in which conscience conflicts with a state obligation.
Moral naturalism: The view that moral facts or properties are grounded in natural facts about the world. It offers one account of what conscience could be tracking when it makes moral judgments.

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