The very idea of “moral truth” is a puzzlement and offense
to many of our contemporaries. We are now paddling in the murky sea of “modern
emotivism.”
Morality has become almost totally a matter of feelings and
preferences. You have yours and I have mine. If I say that something is “wrong,”
I am expressing no more than my personal preference. “I am not comfortable with
that.” “I feel that is not right.” “I would prefer you not do that.” In short,
the making of arguments is replaced by the expression of emotions. In such a
cultural context, the appeal to “conscience” is only an appeal to my personal
preference. Conscience, I this view, does not discern moral truth but subjectively
establishes the truth. This deep shift in the understanding of conscience and
truth is addressed in the 1993 encyclical of John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).
Certain
currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute,
which would then be the source of
values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are
explicitly atheist. The individual
conscience is accorded the status of a supreme
tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the
affirmation that one has a duty to
follow one’s conscience is unduly added the affirmation
that one’s moral judgment is true merely
by the fact that it has its
origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their
place to a criterion of sincerity,
authenticity and “being at peace with oneself”, so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivist
conception of moral judgment.
As is immediately evident,
the crisis of truth is not unconnected with
this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost,
inevitably the notion of conscience also
changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person’s intelligence, the
function of which is to apply the universal
knowledge of the good in a specific situation
and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a
tendency to grant to the individual
conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook
is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth,
different from the truth of others. Taken
to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human
nature.
These
different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between
moral law and conscience, and between
nature and freedom.
The liberal idea of conscience dispenses with truth.
