Grounding the Conscience

Abstract

Most people rely on their conscience as a source of moral intuitions needed to test ethical proposals. Assume that the conscience can deliver knowledge of moral obligations under the right conditions. What ontological resources are needed to explain such a faculty? That depends on (1) the nature of moral obligations, and (2) what it takes to be receptive to them. I argue that close attention to (1) and (2) shows that materialism cannot account for the conscience, but that Christian theism plausibly provides the requisite resources. This is because moral obligations are naturally received as commands, they are prescriptive, personal, and express a kind of universal normative necessity that cannot be grounded in the local contingencies of a materialist world. Moral obligations are expressed as commands of practical reason, and they are knowable only if the world is governed by a divine personal Logos, and there are “Logos beings”, beings like God in their receptivity to these commands. Moral obligations are themselves immaterial entities and only a being with an immaterial dimension of the right sort can be receptive to them. This argument parallels a version of the argument from reason that sees theism as the best explanation of our logical reasoning abilities.