Individual Conscience Research Articles

The New Moral Absolutism in Catholic Moral Teaching: A Critique Based on Veritatis Splendor

This paper examines a recent shift in Catholic moral teaching, characterized by the emergence of a ‘new moral absolutism’, in which certain acts traditionally subject to prudential judgment—such as the death penalty, ecological harm, and restrictive migration policies—are increasingly portrayed as universally and gravely wrong in our age. Simultaneously, traditional moral absolutes, especially in sexual and life ethics, have experienced cautious relativization. Drawing on the framework of Veritatis Splendor (1993), the paper critiques the approach of this new moral absolutism, arguing that it undermines the proper role of individual conscience and situational discernment while failing to provide coherent guidance on complex moral dilemmas. It links its emergence to proportionalist ethics: when traditional moral absolutes are relativized, new types of wrongs take their place. The paper proposes a return to the principles of Veritatis Splendor, advocating for a nuanced approach that preserves the constant and limited set of absolute negative norms and encourages the formation and use of conscience for all other matters.

The legal boundaries of coexistence: reframing liberty of conscience as a tool of toleration in the French Wars of Religion

Abstract In histories of the Wars of Religion and narratives of rights and the rise of the state, ‘freedom of conscience’ is often treated as self-evident. However, this article demonstrates its contested meaning through French Protestant and Catholic reactions to liberty of conscience as granted by the monarchy in 1563, when its particular use as the legal framework for the toleration of Calvinists can be identified. As a malleable tool of toleration, this politicized liberty of conscience protected conscience in households, but separated it from the exercise of religion, a formula for pacification repeated in the 1598 Edict of Nantes. Not only did this usage conflict with theological interpretations of conscience, but it disrupted notions of French citizenship and reinforced royal power by framing heresy as sedition. Far from freeing individual consciences, this article concludes that royal liberty of conscience constrained the actions of Catholics and Protestants while enforcing their coexistence.

John Milton, Catholic

ABSTRACT That Milton was fiercely anti-Catholic is a commonplace, yet he never refers to those he opposed as ‘Catholics’ nor to their religion as ‘Catholicism’, and certainly not ‘Roman Catholicism’. That his terms were instead ‘Papist’, ‘Popery’, and so on, is equally well recognised, but treated merely as an accident of contemporary polemical rhetoric. Their true significance is obscured by our practice of using ‘Catholic’ to stand for all Milton’s references to the Church of Rome. This essay explores what appalled him in the ‘principalitie of Rome’ and the contrasting nature of the ‘reformed catholic church’ for which he argued, whose true catholicity, based on the liberty of the individual conscience and of independent congregations, welcomes diversity and debate and is doctrinally and ecclesiologically inclusive. However, Milton’s stress on the ‘industry of free reasoning’ and the Christian duty to ‘prove all things’ leads to a different kind of exclusivity.

Effective Management of Production Through Spirituality at Work

Purpose: This article aims to analyze why Japanese organizations have been successful over the years with the implementation of the Toyota Production System. Methods: Adopting the Shingo Model as a reference for research, the cultural facilitators found in dimension 1 of the model stand out, with a strong alignment with spirituality in the workplace, as a pillar to guarantee operational excellence aligned with the beliefs and values of the staff, in favor of organizational sustainability. For that, a bibliographical research was carried out of 41 articles from the Scopus databases, addressing the constructs Spirituality in the Work environment and the Shingo Model, within an application context associated with sustainability and added to a comparative analysis. Results and discussion: From the analysis of the results, it was possible to understand that the Spirituality at Work element is behind the model of the Toyota Production System. The proposed dimensions to characterize an EAT are based on the Shing Prize Model of Effective Management versus the EAT Model by Ashmos and Duchon (2000) versus Bella et al. (2018). Implications of the research: The article portrays a subject that is a key point for improving productivity and developing an individual's social conscience, so necessary for the sustainability of the planet. Originality / Value: It was possible to infer from the literature that no articles were found that associate the Shingo model with the theory of Spirituality at work, but the articles by Ashmos and Duchon (2000) and Bella et al. (2018) stand out within the context of organizational sustainability.

A Sufi pedagogy of community-engaged self-cultivation: contemporary approaches to training, accountability, and religious abuse in Sufism

ABSTRACT Contemporary Sufis are addressing the potential danger that stems from asymmetries of power implicit in the student-teacher relationship. This article examines approaches to Sufi pedagogy that acknowledge how gender, power, and abuse can manifest in the tradition. This article posts the emergence of a nascent approach to Sufi training, which I call community-engaged self-cultivation. This approach balances the inviolability of personal conscience (ḍamīr) and moral agency (khalīfah), accountability within community, and rigorous studies under the guidance of a Sufi teacher. The community-engaged self-cultivation model draws from several historical Sufi pedagogies, including the teaching guide (shaykh al-taʿlīm) and training guide (shaykh al-tarbiya) models. The community-engaged self-cultivation model shares three main commitments: 1) resisting patriarchal and oppressive structures discursively and socially, 2) the inviolability of individual moral agency and personal conscience and, 3) practicing shared authority. These three factors work in tandem in mutually reinforcing ways to expand the accessibility of the tradition and foreground accountability as a Sufi value.

Environmental Crisis and Religion: An Analysis of Textual Source and Practices of Sikhism

Environmental crisis particularly climate change is one of the serious problem of twenty-first century. A concerted effort in the post-1990s by all the countries of the world to deal with the problem under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol that relied on managerial and marketing techniques to address the issue of climate change. However, such an endeavor failed to yield the desired results. Subsequently, in 2015 an effort was made to address this problem through the enactment of the Paris Agreement that encourages individual governments to make the moral decision to establish their own goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The attribute of moral choice as the regulating principle for reducing carbon footprints opens up a scope for the researcher to explore the possible role of morality, ethics, and religion, which primarily deal with the individual’s inner conscience, to address the issue of climate change. The present paper is located within the above premises as it tries to comprehend and expound the perspective of Sikhism on ecological issues as an alternative institution to address the issue of climate change. The paper concludes that the ecological values which are found in Guru Nanak Dev’s teachings can awaken the conscience of individuals for reducing their respective carbon footprints if taught to the believers systematically since religion is a potent force in society that shape the behavior of individuals.

Constitutive Community, the Social Gospel, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Time to Break Silence”

Highly controversial at the time that it was delivered, lay and scholarly critics have treated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 4, 1967 “Speech at Riverside Church,” (“A Time to Break Silence”) as rhetorically eloquent but pragmatically problematic. This essay argues that King’s speech marked an important discursive turning point, as he crafted a signal message using a Social Gospel frame as he adapted previous antiwar discourse to his own purpose. In doing so, King blended a call to individual and collective conscience in a manner that seems to have resonated throughout the antiwar discourse and subsequent reactions to his speech during the last year of his life. While the speech was uniquely King’s, an analysis of its Social Gospel framework suggests that this landmark speech provided a rhetorical vocabulary that helped call forth an important discursive community.

The Impact of Faith on Social Life

In Islam, faith is the yardstick and foundation for everything. All of a person's actions, beliefs, interpersonal and social interactions, conduct, and ethics depend on their faith. If a person's faith is righteous, their actions are righteous and comply with the laws of religion. Conversely, if someone's faith is flawed, their actions yield no favorable results and do not lead to their salvation.
 On this fundamental principle, faith is intertwined with human existence and determines their fate. Happiness and adversity in a person's life are pursued based on it. When the innate call and profound intuition within a person comprehend the essence of faith and its spiritual significance, they connect with it.
 Through faith and submission to the Almighty, a person gains abundant benefits. By discovering their purpose of creation and following the guidance and perseverance on the path of truth, they surpass their desires and inclinations. By transcending their ego and selfish desires, they attain mental tranquility and the serenity of life.
 Faith places all of an individual's social interactions under its control and significantly influences the process of shaping the social norms of society. Faith awakens an individual's conscience, making them responsible. It makes them compassionate, kind, and self-sacrificing towards their fellow beings. It instills inner strength and empowerment in people. A believer becomes an active participant in the cycle of production, contributing positively to society.
 Moreover, faith shapes a society where its members collaborate, uphold one another, and strive together towards the peak of virtues, dignity, and pride, echoing the slogan: "Hold fast, all together, to the rope of Allah and do not separate." They endeavor towards their own well-being and righteousness, rescuing their society from injustice, tyranny, and unknown rights.

Theological Dialogue on The Notion of Conscience (Vicdân) in Christianity and Turkish Islamic Thought

The recent human crises in the world caused by believers of the same religions fighting amongst themselves— such as Muslims in the Middle East and Christians in the recent Russo-Ukrainian War—have once again raised the question of the function of individual conscience (the ability to distinguish bad from good) in society. How can individuals judge what is good or bad when religious communities of same faith confuse the judgment of the religion’s followers by accusing others of wrongdoing while proclaiming themselves to be right? Would a conscience enable individuals to assess the moral quality of their thoughts, words, and deeds without being affected by society? This paper attempts to answer these questions by conducting a comparative analysis of the concept of vicdân (conscience)—the Turkish and Persian equivalent of the English word “conscience”—in Christianity and Turkish Islamic thought, and concludes that, although every individual is endowed with a conscience as a potential faculty, it must be discovered and cultivated by the individual through intellectual effort and represented in the society (collective conscience) in order to function as a righteous judge distinguishing good from bad and right from wrong in difficult times.

The Concept of De-Radicalization as a Source of Confusion

The theme of the relationship between religious freedom and security has, over the last twenty years, acquired such centrality that hitherto unknown or little-used concepts have entered the public and specialized debates. Prominent among these is regarding the most concrete and important long-term public intervention in the fight against extremism on a religious matrix, i.e., de-radicalization, often simplistically understood as the opposite, or reverse, of a radicalization process. The activity of de-radicalization, therefore, must first be defined in its theoretical sense to grasp its real meaning and objectives; then, it is necessary to identify its content in practice, trying to understand its founding themes and limits. The risk of such a public intervention is interfering with the deepest sphere of the individual, with his or her religiosity and intentions, overstepping the limits derived from the different types of secularism (as Italian laicità or French laïcité) that characterize the State, requiring it to consider individual conscience as impassable territory. On the other hand, ignoring the intimate dimension of the subject can lead to complete ineffectiveness of a de-radicalization activity, which thus risks being reduced to a mere illustration of content. This contribution, starting from these difficulties, intends to outline, from a juridical perspective and specifically from a law and religion perspective, a hypothesis for a public de-radicalization strategy, capable of achieving concrete results but simultaneously respectful of the constitutional principles in which it is necessarily embedded, focused on the concept of responsibility.

Conscience and the Moral Law

The concept of an intrinsically immoral act is unattractive and widely rejected in modern moral theory, with some even going so far as to suggest that no such thing can exist. Such thinkers insist that two distinct realms exist: the moral law and the individual conscience. However, Veritatis splendor expressly rejects this stance and accurately foresees its incoherence and the threat accepting it poses to the credibility of Catholic moral teaching. This article examines the writings of Thomas Aquinas as well as several other important church documents to show that personal conscience cannot be separated from the objective moral law.

The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy

This essay argues that the use of conscience as a justification for dissent has an even longer history than has often been assumed by intellectual historians of the Reformation. Through a close examination of the English Wycliffite Sermons (c.1380s–1390s) and the Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), it offers the first extended consideration of the use of the word “conscience” in Wycliffite texts, using this as the point of departure for an assessment of Lollard characterisations of human interiority more generally. Wycliffite writers repeatedly emphasise the opacity of the inner life and its consequent authority, a rhetorical tendency inherited and adapted from Wyclif’s own writings and other Latinate discourses. This not only provides Lollards with a helpful strategy in their attempts to avoid prosecution for heresy, but also provides the somewhat shaky ground upon which a number of their doctrinal convictions rest—especially those pertaining to oral confession and membership of the Church. Conscience also provides an obvious connection between religious dissent and political rebellion, which is why it must be central to any future account of Lollardy’s relationship to class struggle or sedition more generally conceived. When writers like Thorpe refer to the soul as invisible, or to God as their only judge, they invoke a fundamental, if unstable, aspect of Wycliffite belief: an incipient but dynamic account of the relationship between individual conscience, interiority, and authority that was to find even greater expression in figures such as Martin Luther, Jan Huss, and Henry VIII.

Renowned Sect, Sunnism and Socio-sectarian bickering in Traditional Western Urban Sierra Leone

The renowned sect, Sunnism and sectarian bickering, are part of the same triangle, unavoidable in any analysis of the sectarian life of Traditional Western Urban Sierra Leone. A conceptual social frame has not yet been established, however, to explain, from the point of view of the nation’s own sectarian experience, the specific forms taken by this sectarian life and how they relate to other similar expressions worldwide, as well as to holistic processes such as secularisation. The paradigm of novelty; The paradigm of novelty seems to resist as long as it follows the guidelines of the gestation of a secularisation process which translates into the strengthening of individual social conscience, the debilitation of Dawah (Islamic preaching) control and the formation of freedom spaces for those who do not think like a group of Islamic believers. However, the social paradigm does not find its parallel in the Arabian Model of Shiism in the consolidation of a class or social group that feeds and explains this bickering sectarian social thought. Consequently, it is imperative; from a sociological standpoint, to question the centrality or pertinence of the modern social paradigm. Most of all, because the modernity social paradigm results in an Irancentric social paradigm, too oriented towards a set concept of socio-economic development and, therefore, of sectarian ‘evolution’.

A Study of the Individualism Accounts on American Literature through Reader Response Criticism

This study is by no means a comprehensive account of individualism or more accurately, individualism, in America. It is intended to be more suggestive than comprehensive though it is characterized by more summery than controversy. Many ideas as well as some of the highlights of American manifestations of individualism and modes of individualistic thought and philosophy have been added. What follows, then, is merely a look at some of the high-water marks of literary American individualism and an attempt to offer some cursory explanations for this American phenomenon in theory and practice. This study was under an exploratory qualitative method supported by an interdisciplinary approach of American Studies. Reader-Response criticism is used to make perspective and interpretation without a doubt. The sample was 28 students taking the American Society and literature course at the Universitas Islam Sultan Agung Semarang. The completion of this research shows the students have creativity and freedom to express their innovation in learning American literature. The cornerstone of individual conscience has to be their credos for changing into a better life through the social, political, economic, and moral autonomy of each individual.

Clinical nurse adherence to professional ethics: A grounded theory.

Professional ethics is the regulation and discipline of nurses' daily nursing work. Nurses often encounter various ethical challenges and problems in their clinical work, but there are few studies on nurses' adherence to professional ethics. An analysis of nursing adherence to nursing ethics from the perspective of clinical nurses in the Chinese public health system. This study adopts the grounded theory approach proposed by Strauss and Corbin. Between July 2021 and January 2022, Clinical nurses were recruited for online video interviews using purposive and theoretical sampling methods in seven hospitals in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanxi, Henan, Guangdong, and Fujian, China. Data analysis was conducted using Strauss and Corbin's coding approach. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Sanming First Hospital (MingYiLun 71/2021). A total of 27 participants were included. A theoretical model of nursing staff adherence to professional ethics was constructed. The main core was adherence to professional ethics and the other cores were (1) causal conditions: professional ethics code, individual conscience; (2) intervening conditions: personal growth, social support system, matching career compensation, prediction of adverse consequences; (3) action strategies: sticking to professional values, self-regulation, flexible response, post-event improvement; and (4) outcomes: self-harmony, reduced medical disputes. This study provides an interpretive understanding of why clinical nurses adhere to professional ethics in China and describes the challenges and issues posed by nurses' use of strategies to cope with ethical adversity. The findings can be used to develop future complex studies.

The New Education Policy (NEP-2020) - Introduction of Universal Human Values (UHV) In Technical Institutions of India: Reflections from Visvesvaraya Technological University

Education is the fundamental parameter for the human capital. The adoption of the New Education Policy-2020 (NEP, 2020) for both primary and higher education will be the new paradigm shift in education system after 34 years to bring unity and quality education. Universal Human Values (UHV) is included as a part of curriculum in the various universities and institutions. It is important to imbibe human values within engineers so that they can contribute to the society and address the social issues and live happily in the family. Universal Human Values (UHV) will bring the concept of individual conscience and ethics in technical education.

England's Life of Paradox

England's Life of Paradox

How Should Military Health Care Workers Respond When Conflict Reaches the Hospital?

Military clinicians face unique ethical challenges in conflict zones, particularly if conflict reaches a health care setting. Although the ethical challenges of rationing and triaging while fulfilling obligations to individual patients are not dissimilar to those civilian clinicians encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic, military clinicians must also meet national security and mission requirements. Conflicting clinical care, mission, and individual conscience obligations can cause moral distress, a deeply troubling internal conflict also experienced by civilian clinicians. Crisis settings imposed in conflict or during pandemic surges demonstrate the need for all clinicians to be prepared to modify practice priorities during extreme circumstances.

Pope Francis, the Ethicist: Ignatian Roots, Jesuit Priorities, Contemporary Challenges

The teachings of Pope Francis on such ethical issues as economic justice, family life, ecology, refugee rights and peacemaking reflect core elements of Ignatian spirituality. These include careful discernment, respect for individual consciences, Christian humanism, personalism, attention to the affect and a commitment to practical pastoral flexibility. The pope's engagement with global challenges also reflects the influence of recent institutional priorities of the Society of Jesus, particularly its 2019 Universal Apostolic Preferences and Jesuit responses to globalization and structural injustice.

Are Christians morally obligated to be vaccinated for COVID-19?

As the COVID-19 pandemic persists and new vaccine boosters targeting the latest subvariants have been approved, public debate concerning vaccines and vaccination mandates has not subsided. Such debate has been particularly acute among Roman Catholics and other Christians, with arguments having been put forth from scriptural and natural law bases in favor of vaccination against COVID-19, and counterarguments based on respecting individual conscience and concerns about moral complicity with abortion. In this article, I argue that principles of both secular public health and Christian social ethics justify vaccination mandates for COVID-19. I further show why certain objections Christians may have are ill-founded and conclude that no moral reason exists for a Christian to refuse to be vaccinated for COVID-19; rather, vaccination for COVID-19 is a moral obligation.