1. God have granted us everything that is necessary
to help us achieve our purpose and goal – to be
truthful, good, and beautiful (Principle 4 –
Purpose of the Human Persons as a Created
Reality ).
One of the necessary things granted
us to help us achieve our goal is
human freedom.
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2. True freedom means to do what is
true, good, and beatiful. True
freedom leads to self-actualization, not
to to self-destruction or destruction of
other people in community.
3. How do we judge the goodness or
evilness of our moral acts?
What enables us to discern if our
acts make us more human, more
truly free?
What should we do to grow in this
capacity of discernment and
judgement?
Our questions point to God’s gift of Human
Conscience
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4. Conscience serves precisely this
purpose:
1. Conscience is our inherent sensitivity to
basic human needs and values supported
by rules and laws.
2. Conscience is our capacity to discern the
good from the evil, the moral from the
immoral.
3. Conscience is our ability to apply
universal moral laws to particular moral
situations.
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5. What is
conscience?
Objectives:
1. Critique and correct some
common misconceptions
about conscience;
2. Discuss the nature of human
conscience and how
conscience actually operates;
and
3. Reflect on how we can
educate and courageously
follow our conscience.
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6. What Conscience Is Not – Wrong
Understanding of Conscience
1. “It’s between me and my conscience”
• Conscience is simply doing things “ my way,”
without considering the good of others
• This notion presumed that conscience is being able
to perform an act that you personally and
individually feel good about, regardless of how it
affects other people.
• “ What matters most is not whether what I did was
morally good or evil but that I was personally the
one who made the decision” – individualistic notion
of conscience.
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7. What Conscience Is Not – Wrong
Understanding of Conscience
2. “Conscience is God’s voice within us”
• This notion presumed that conscience is a
separate, supernatural, other-worldly voice of
God that we hear with our inner ear, haviong no
connection with our own knowledge and power
of reasoning and discernment.
• We naturally relate the voice of our conscience
to God, first, because God has created us as
moral persons, and second, because God is the
perfect norm of goodness.
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8. What Conscience Is Not – Wrong
Understanding of Conscience
3. “ Conscience is the feeling of guilt”
• This notion presumed that conscience is our
feeling of guilt when we do something wrong.
• Conscience is reduced and equated to the
feeling of guilt.
• Does this mean that our conscience is
automatically correct once we no longer feel
guilty?
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9. What Conscience Is Not – Wrong
Understanding of Conscience
4. “ Conscience is an external reality”
• This notion presumed that conscience is an
another existing reality outside of ourselves.
• This implies that folowing one’s conscience is
simply an act of personal deliberation without
reference to any objective moral standard.
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