Having a conscience

Source: C.D. Broad, Conscience and Conscientious Action. 1940.

Below is an extract from Broad’s essay:

To say that a person ‘has a conscience’, when this phrase is used in its widest sense, is equivalent to asserting the following three closely connected propositions about him.

1. That he has and exercises the cognitive power of reflecting on his own past and future actions, and considering whether they are right or wrong; of reflecting on his own motives, intentions, emotions, dispositions, and character, and considering whether they are morally good or bad; and of reflecting on the relative moral value of various alternative ideals of character and conduct.
2. That he has and exercises the emotional disposition to feel certain peculiar emotions, such as remorse, feeling of guilt, moral approval, etc., towards himself and his own actions, dispositions, etc., in respect of the moral characteristics which he believes these to have.
3. That he has and exercises the conative disposition to seek what he believes to be good and to shun what he believes to be bad, as such, and to do what he believes to be right and avoid what he believes to be wrong, as such.

I propose to describe this as ‘the phenomenological sense’ of the phrase ‘having a conscience’.

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