The Terrible Twins Within: Our Psychological vs. Moral Consciences

The Terrible Twins Within: Our Psychological vs. Moral Consciences
By
William Cottringer, Ph.D.

“The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.” ~Mahatma Gandhi.

We start out and end up at the same place in finding and knowing what is true when it comes to right vs. wrong—the voice of our moral conscience inside that speaks in simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ language. In between, we explore our psychological consciences with experiences and thinking about complex situational ethics to find a sure way to know what is right from wrong.

There are many ways we try to know what is right and wrong, but in the end it is the voice inside we start listening to, once our psychological conscience have had their say. We explore certain standards with our psychological consciences in between starting and ending places, but all these standards seem to have flaws:

HIGHER AUTHORITY

When we are not sure of our own ability to determine the absolute rightness or wrongness of something that we or someone else is doing or thinking about doing, we usually look to a higher authority. The usual higher authorities are religious or educational institutions, the ‘bibles’ of religions or spiritual groups, human laws, or experts. But we are making a very big assumption here—the correctness of the source and the correctness of our translation, interpretation and application. Too much room for error to be certain.

UTILITARIANISM

This test simply says do the thing that results in the greatest good for the greatest majority. The trouble with this thinking is that it helps the majority and hurts the minority, so it isn’t ‘right” for everybody.

RATIONALISM

We can learn to think through things rationally to get accurate and complete observations and reliable predictions about the easiest and quickest thing to do to get the best results with the least side effects. But sometimes this works out and sometimes it doesn’t. Our success rate depends upon how much we learn from our mistakes and what results we get.

PRAGMATISM

In addition to wanting to think things through rationally, we like to get practical results with practical thinking and actions. This test is also based on trying to predict the results ahead of time from what we choose to do. Again sometimes this works out and sometimes it doesn’t. And what seems to be most effective in getting practical results may change over time.

RELATIVE ABSOLUTISM

Sometimes we stumble upon a rule that appears as a self-evident truth which we really can’t seem to find any fault with. Such is the case with The Golden Rule—treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves. Another popular one is to choose the thing that costs some short term pain, but offers the best long term gain. There are problems with both these rules though because not everyone knows how they truly want to be treated themselves, and why does the right thing have to involve short-term pain or sacrifice since there is always the lure of temperance below.

TEMPERANCE

There is something appealing about temperance and balance in between the extremes of a thing. Early philosophers called this sacred place the “Golden mean,” where the most reliable truth resided. But the trouble is, there is no middle ground with some things like child abuse or abortion. A few situations never seem to meet any of the above “rightness” tests.

Apply all these tests to what Jody Foster did in her recent movie “The Brave One.” Both her and the police detective ended their moral dilemma based on what their inner voices were telling them. This seems to be a trend in police movies lately—dealing with the deep moral issue of how far do the police go in trying to protect the rights of the bad guys.

In the end, once we have exhausted our efforts to disprove the validity of our moral consciences by listening to all the distracting objections our psychological consciences raise, we are ready to return to the starting point. Then we start proving the value of our inner voices in guiding right behavior by listening to and following the advice that has always been there from the beginning.