The nature and role of conscience, including the religious views of Aquinas and Newman and the psychological views of Freud, and whether conscience is innate or learned.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain the nature and role of conscience, contrast the religious views of Aquinas and Newman with the psychological view of Freud, and assess whether conscience is innate (God-given or rational) or learned (developed from experience and upbringing).

Aquinas: synderesis and conscientia

For Aquinas conscience is the reason making moral decisions, not a feeling or a voice; it can make mistakes if it reasons from a mistaken belief (an erroneous conscience), but Aquinas holds that even a mistaken conscience binds and should be followed in good faith, since to act against your sincere judgement of the good is itself wrong. Importantly, conscience is oriented towards real rather than apparent goods: people choose evil not because they want evil as such but because they mistake an apparent good for a real one. This makes conscience innate (the disposition synderesis is God-given) yet thoroughly rational, tying it to the natural moral law.

Newman: the voice of God

For Newman, following conscience is following God; the felt obligation, the sense of responsibility, and the guilt and shame of conscience are evidence for the existence of a moral lawgiver to whom we are answerable, since these feelings point beyond ourselves to a person. He calls conscience "the aboriginal Vicar of Christ", an inner messenger of God. Unlike Aquinas, Newman stresses the intuitive and affective side of conscience rather than its reasoning, which is why the two religious accounts are often contrasted as rational (Aquinas) and intuitive (Newman).

Freud: the super-ego

On this view conscience varies with upbringing and culture, which challenges the religious claim that it is a reliable, universal divine voice. Freud divides the psyche into the id (instinctual drives), the ego (the realistic self) and the super-ego (the internalised authority), and locates conscience in the super-ego. Later learning theory (such as Piaget on the moral development of the child) reinforces the idea that conscience is acquired through stages of socialisation. The weakness of the psychological account is that Freud's theory is largely unfalsifiable and based on a small clinical sample, and a developmental origin does not by itself prove there is no rational or divine dimension to conscience.