Section 17

Section 17 10 Conscience

Gerard J. Hughes

Newman gives his views on conscience mainly in two contexts. As one would expect, he considers the role of conscience in moral decision-making. How does a person arrive at conscientious moral judgements? What is the content of such judgements? How should one resolve conflicts between one’s own conscientious moral judgement and the views of others whom one accepts as authorities to whom one owes due respect? More surprisingly, Newman discusses the role which conscience might play in grounding a person’s belief in God. How is one to account for the particular force which the claims of conscience make upon us, and the very personal nature of those claims? Is there any sense in which conscience must be thought of as the voice of God? The two main sections of this chapter will therefore consider Newman’s views on the role of conscience in morality and in theology.

Conscience and moral judgement

Newman prefaces his discussions of conscience with two important sets of qualifications which he insists must be borne in mind throughout his entire treatment. One is concerned with academic discussions about the extent to which our conscientious judgements are conditioned; and the other is the less rigorous but perhaps more widespread assumption that nobody else is ever entitled to criticize one’s own conscientious judgements.

Conscience and free will

One of the mistakes which Newman thinks is frequently made in academic circles is the denial of freedom and consequently of moral responsibility. Here are the final few sentences from his attack on such views, common in universities and repeated by subversive ‘public writers’:

We are told that conscience is but a twist in primitive and untutored man; that its dictate is an imagination; that the very notion of guiltiness, which that dictate enforces, is simply irrational, for how can there possibly be freedom of will, how can there be consequent responsibility, in that infinite eternal network of cause and effect, in which we helplessly lie? And what retribution have we to fear, when we have had no real choice to do good or evil?¹

As he here presents matters, neither Newman nor the people he is attacking even consider the more modern view that responsibility might be compatible with determinism. Newman is a libertarian, who believes that determinism is false and that anyone who performs an action for which they can be held morally responsible must at the moment of acting have been able to act otherwise than they in fact did. His opponents are those who would now be described as ‘hard-determinists’ or ‘incompatibilists’. Newman claims that when someone acts freely, neither the external circumstances in which they are placed nor their own desires and beliefs at that time made that piece of behaviour inevitable. Though he does not say so here, he would probably have accepted the traditional doctrine that to the extent that one has in the past been responsible for the formation of long-established habits of thought or of desire one can be held responsible for the actions which are caused by those habits, even if at the time it would have been impossible for the person to act otherwise than they did.

Conscience ‘truly so called’

In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk Newman dismisses two ways of explaining the nature of conscience. The first, he says, is prevalent in academic circles. He rejects it in the following terms:

The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself, but a messenger from Him who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil . . .

Words like these are idle empty verbiage to the great world of philosophy now. All through my day there has been a resolute warfare, I had almost said conspiracy, against the rights of conscience, as I have described it. Literature and science have been embodied in great institutions in order to put it down. Noble buildings have been reared as fortresses against that spiritual, invisible influence which is too subtle for science and too profound for literature. Chairs in universities have been made the seats of an antagonist tradition.²

This scathing passage obviously expresses a total disdain for a great deal of what he took to be the academic fashions of the time. In these passages, Newman simply rejects without elaboration the whole gamut of ethical theories current in his day: Hobbesian egoism, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, Darwinian selection and the rest. But the rhetoric does not make it easy to disentangle exactly what it is that he most dislikes, let alone to see the reasons he might have given for his rejection.

Perhaps one clue lies in the way in which he contrasts conscience truly so called with the role he takes to be ascribed to it in all the academic discussions of ethical theory. The true notion of conscience is, he says, too subtle for science and too profound for literature. In a broad sense, most of the ethical theories he rejects probably did have some pretensions to scientific exactitude. Bentham, Mill, and the later utilitarians were reacting against various earlier accounts of moral perceptiveness. By offering what they termed a calculus, in contrast to what they regarded as the undefended and often indefensible claim made by earlier philosophers to possess a clarity of moral perceptiveness, they saw themselves as putting ethics firmly on a rational, almost a scientific, basis. Utilitarianism, as Bentham puts it, had as its object ‘to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light. But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved.’³ The target of Bentham’s criticism here, with his stress on calculus, reason, law and science, is just the kind of view which Newman wants to reinstate in the teeth of academic fashion. Newman would have had much the same to say about the aim of many Darwinians to fit ethics into the evolutionary scheme of things, and thus again make it ‘scientific’. Hobbesian egoists stressed the critical use of moral reason. As Hobbes himself had said, ‘The science of virtue and vice is moral philosophy; and therefore the true doctrine of the laws of nature is the true moral philosophy. But the writers of moral philosophy, though they acknowledge the same virtues and vices; yet, not seeing wherein consisted their goodness . . . place them in a mediocrity of passions as if not the cause but the degree of daring made fortitude; or not the cause but the quantity of a gift made liberality.’⁴

As the phrase ‘a mediocrity of passions’ makes clear, the view Hobbes is attacking is just that version of Aristotelianism which Newman wished to promote.⁵ Of course, the judgements of conscience which Newman defends as ‘too subtle for science’ could easily be represented as being too subject to the whims of an individual to be in any important sense rational at all. Newman wishes to argue that moral judgements are indeed not numerically calculable nor are they logically derivable. The ‘subtlety’ which he wishes to defend depends upon a nicety of judgement which cannot be reduced to any scientific terms or process. His critics would regard this kind of claim as little better than enshrining old-fashioned sentiments and prejudice. It remains to be seen whether Newman can defend himself with more than the rhetoric he uses in the passages just cited.

So conscience ‘truly so called’ is not, in Newman’s view, widely fostered by academics. But he does not believe the correct view is widespread among the common people either:

Now let us see what the notion of conscience is in this day in the popular mind. There, no more than in the intellectual world, does ‘conscience’ retain the old, true, Catholic meaning of the word. There too, the idea of a moral governor is far away from the use of it, frequent and emphatic as that use of it is. When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing and acting, according to their judgement and their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dare say a word against his going to perdition, if he likes it, in his own way.⁶

If Newman’s problem with the academics was their insistence on some kind of scientific accuracy, insufficiently subtle for the nuances of the moral life, it appears from this passage that neither is he about to allow just any kind of appeal against the rigour of would-be scientific rules. Yet it is not obvious that the attack in this passage is precisely directed against loose living; the real focus of his criticism is the claim to an autonomy and independence which feels no reverence at all for the Creator. Even if the ‘popular mind’ pays little attention to the Creator, Newman believes that his ‘high’ view of conscience is shared at any rate by the main body of Christians, who are agreed that it

is founded on the doctrine that conscience is the voice of God, whereas it is fashionable on all hands now to consider it in one way or another the creation of man. Of course, there are great and broad exceptions to this statement. It is not true of many or most religious bodies of men; especially not of their teachers or ministers. When Anglicans, Wesleyans, the various Presbyterian sects in Scotland, and other denominations among us speak of conscience, they mean what we mean, the voice of God in the nature and heart of man, as distinct from the voice of Revelation. They speak of a principle planted within us before we have had any training, although training and experience are necessary for its strength, growth, and due formation. They consider it a constituent element of the mind, as our perception of other ideas may be, as our powers of reasoning, as our sense of order and the beautiful, and our other intellectual endowments. They consider it, as Catholics consider it, to be the internal witness of both the existence and the law of God.⁷

In short, he takes his view to be one which is solidly established in mainstream Christian tradition, in contrast to the secularism of Hobbes, Bentham, and the Darwinians. Scientific ethics fails on two counts, then. First it pretends to a rigour which is insufficiently nuanced (if that is the point of his use of ‘subtle’) to be useful in practice. Secondly, it fails to see that the strength of moral demands derives not from scientific rationalism but from God to whom all human beings owe total obedience. His concluding remarks are in exact accord with the Thomist view which he cites,⁸ and with the wholly Aristotelian background which he presupposes. For it is crucial to both Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle that although the basic ability to make sound moral judgements is innate in humans, it cannot be properly exercised except after careful training and experience.

We can compare Aristotle:

A young man is not a suitable person to take a course on how to run a city, for he is inexperienced in the affairs of life (which are the starting point and subject matter of the course). Besides, since he tends to be led by his feelings, attending the course will be pointless and unprofitable, since the aim of the course is not knowledge but action. It makes no difference whether he is young in years or immature in character. The problem is not a matter of time, but of a life-style which pursues one thing after another as feelings dictate.⁹

It is no trivial matter, then, that we form habits of one kind or another right from childhood; on the contrary it is very important, indeed all-important.¹⁰

And Newman:

But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect this sense is at once the highest of all teachers and the least luminous.¹¹

Newman’s view of conscience ‘truly so called’¹² is very close to Aristotle’s notion of phronēsis, practical wisdom. Phronēsis, too, is the ability to make sound moral judgements. In Aristotle’s view, it is an intellectual virtue, a quality of rational reflection. The person whose conscientious judgements are sound will through childhood training have gradually achieved the emotional balance without which moral judgements are likely to be distorted; and their intellectual grasp of moral situations will have been informed by a considerable experience of the complexities of life. Only this carefully nurtured combination of sensibility, experience, and intellectual acumen will result in the possession of ‘conscience in the true sense’; the ability to make moral judgements upon which the person is entitled to rely.¹³

Somehow, then, Newman intends to harmonize the following claims:

(1) Conscience is nuanced and subtle rather than rigorous, scientific and governed by the laws of any ‘theory’ of morals.

(2) Conscience requires careful education, emotional balance, and intellectual clarity if it is to function correctly.

(3) Conscience ‘truly so called’ expresses within us the demands of God.

The tensions are not difficult to find. For it will appear that in his view conscientious judgements do not conform to the terms of a precise set of moral laws: yet he appears to urge the claims of the commandments of God as a challenge to the insistence of so many people to ‘profess what they please’ rather than follow any moral rule. So what is his view of the relationship between moral rules and the conscientious judgements of the person of practical wisdom trying to do the will of God?

Conscience and moral judgement

Newman develops his account of conscientious moral judgements in two principal places. One is in the discussion of the relationship between conscience and authority in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk already mentioned. The other, perhaps rather more unexpectedly, comes towards the end of A Grammar of Assent. Newman here, perhaps rather optimistically, takes it that his views on conscience are clear and would be widely accepted; so he can easily use them to illustrate his much more controversial views on what he calls the ‘Illative Sense’. But for our present purposes we shall do better to work the other way round, and consider what light his extended treatment of the Illative Sense throws on the notion of conscience which he takes most sensible people to accept.

A Grammar of Assent sets out to break away from the assumption that epistemology requires all arguments aimed at establishing truth to be modelled on the arguments of formal logic. Newman points out that the arguments of formal logic succeed only to the extent that the terms are given a totally precise sense and the rules of legitimate inference are equally precisely defined. This can be achieved only by making the terms as abstract as possible; the argument ‘All A’s are F, B is an A, therefore B is F’ follows strictly and precisely because ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘F’ are purely abstract notions, shorn of any empirical content. ‘No process of argument’, he says ‘is so perfect as that which is conducted by means of symbols’.¹⁴ When we try to construct similar arguments using words instead of the rigid symbols of mathematics or logic, the inference will succeed only to the extent that we manage to restrict the words artificially: the variations and subtleties of meaning which they have in ordinary discourse are excluded so as to avoid any risk of equivocation. In either case, all we are doing is exploring the relationships between our concepts. Crucially, he claims that it is ‘a fallacy that whatever can be thought can be adequately expressed in words’.¹⁵ I think he must mean not only that all our concepts for things other than mathematical or logical abstractions are inevitably ‘fuzzy’ at the edges, but also that the strength of the evidence for a conclusion is not captured by an abstract rule of inference. There are always and inevitably going to be borderline cases where it is not in advance clear whether the concept is correctly applied or not, and whether the evidence really is cogent. With this in mind, he speaks of premisses involving terms referring to real things as being ‘assumed’ – taken to be true even if we realize they are inaccurate and may not strictly apply at all. ‘Inference comes short of proof in concrete matters because it has not a full command over the objects to which it relates, but merely assumes its premisses.’¹⁶

Newman illustrates his view by drawing a contrast between an argument in formal logic or mathematics and the process by which we might argue about the correct reading of a Shakespearean text of which the extant manuscripts give different versions. He emphasizes the very many types of consideration which contribute to the formation of such judgements, and the artificiality of reducing them to the precision of mathematics or formal logic. When we are thinking about the real world, he says,

We have to do with things, far more than with notions. We are not solitary, left to the contemplation of our own thoughts and their legitimate developments . . . But how is an exercise of mind, which is for the most part occupied with notions, not things, competent to deal with things except partially and indirectly?¹⁷

It is by the strength, variety, or multiplicity of premises, which are only probable, not by invincible syllogisms – by objections overcome, by adverse theories neutralised, by difficulties gradually clearing up, by exceptions proving the rule, by unlooked for correlations found with received truths . . . by all these ways, and many others, it is that the practised and experienced mind is able to make a sure divination that a conclusion is inevitable, of which his lines of reasoning do not actually put him in possession.¹⁸

When someone is trying to understand the real world and explain what happens in it, the evidence which they will consider relevant and whose force they try to assess is normally manifold. Exactly why, for instance, a juror might conclude that a witness was hiding something important, and that it might be of sufficient importance to require a different overall verdict, is something which perhaps the juror herself might find it difficult even to put into words. Her process of thought cannot with any plausibility be represented as a piece of syllogistic reasoning. Newman’s point is that what is important is whether the evidence supports the charge being made. The level of support is not numerically quantifiable, nor expressible in logical terms, but the assessment might still be entirely reasonable. Metaphors such as ‘weighing’ the evidence (which suggests that the various pieces have pre-defined weights), or ‘drawing the logical conclusion’ (which suggests a kind of formal inference) are in Newman’s view quite inappropriate if they are taken in more than a general metaphorical sense. What it is reasonable or unreasonable to say or believe about the real world is discovered by a process of assessment which is quite unique and cannot be reduced to any formula. Rational assessment is not somehow a ‘second best’ to formal logic. On the contrary, it is the proper way in which to think about the real world.

If this is a correct interpretation of Newman’s intentions, however, it is surely unfortunate that the passage given above concludes with the comment that these lines of reasoning do not actually ‘put us in possession’ of the inevitable conclusion. Newman’s contrast between ‘possession’ and ‘sure divination’, and indeed the very use of a term like ‘divination’ with its somewhat misleading overtones, do tend to mislead his reader. What he is trying to do is to contrast a process of reasoning leading to a rational assessment of the force of the evidence for a particular conclusion with the process of deducing that conclusion from premisses. To have the premisses is in a sense already to be in possession of the conclusion which those premisses deliver. Assessing the import of evidence about things in the real world requires the person to ‘reach’ a conclusion. But this process of ‘reaching’ is in no sense a second best.

Newman’s view of the Illative Sense has been severely criticized. Patrick Fitzpatrick takes issue with several points, two of which are specially important.¹⁹ The first is that Newman’s examples of conclusive informal reasoning – that Britain is an island, that the earth is a globe, that there are cities called London and Paris, that the future is affected by the past ²⁰ – are not typical. Fitzpatrick concedes that in such cases we do indeed reason in the way that Newman suggests, by a simple assessment which is not and need not be expressed as a formal argument; but he insists that many other cases do not exactly fit this model, and in some the process is quite different – ‘It is a matter of degree’. Often our conclusions – about the emendation of Shakespearean texts, or the diagnosis of complex mechanical failures – require very careful and complex and cooperative investigation. They require a precision which makes Newman’s model of a simple, immediate personal grasp of the force of the evidence seem very far from how such inquiries are actually conducted.

However, it may be possible to lessen the force of this criticism. Newman does not particularly wish to oversimplify the discussion about the correct version of the Shakespearean text, nor does he suggest that arriving at the correct conclusions is a matter for the almost effortless solitary insight of the individual rather than from the work of a body of scholars. The final act of assessment is simple only in the sense of being irreducible to anything more fundamental.

Fitzpatrick’s other criticism is that Newman presents the Illative Sense as infallible, whereas we do not possess any such faculty.²¹ This criticism, too, can be blunted. The point is similar, as we shall see, to a point that might be made about Aristotle’s phronēsis (practical wisdom). Moral judgements made by the exercise of practical wisdom are indeed correct. But this is not because we possess an infallible faculty: phronēsis is not a faculty, it is an intellectual virtue. By that Aristotle means that it is an acquired disposition of our power to judge which actions ought to be performed. The judgements of the young, or of adults whose upbringing has been faulty, are liable to be mistaken; acquiring the ability to get such things right is a process which any given individual might or might not have completed. So it is, I would suggest, with Newman’s Illative Sense, which he describes as ‘the perfection or virtue of the ratiocinative faculty’.²² It is not a special ‘faculty of infallibility’ but rather the ability to assess evidence which the perfect thinker has gradually developed. Newman does not suggest that Shakespearean editors can function without years of training and experience. One might indeed wonder whether such intellectual perfection is ever attained, as one might equally well wonder whether any individual actually achieves the perfection of the virtue of moral discernment. Newman’s point is not that we always have such a perfected ability at our disposal, but that nevertheless there are many times when a person is justified in their assessment of complex evidence without there being any possibility, or need, to demonstrate that justification in formal logical terms. Progress in soundness of judgement is ‘a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulae and contrivances of language’.²³

Newman expects this rather unfashionable epistemological doctrine to be made more palatable by what he clearly thinks people already believe about moral judgements, where he takes the situation to be precisely similar. He cites what he calls ‘the grand words of Aristotle’:

We are bound to give heed to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of the experienced and aged, not less than to demonstrations; because, from their having the eye of experience, they behold the principles of things.²⁴

And Newman’s comment:

Instead of trusting logical science, we must trust persons, namely, those who by long acquaintance with their subject, have a right to judge.²⁵

The text which Newman uses here is part of a general summing up of Aristotle’s account of moral judgement. The use of ‘undemonstrated’ requires some explanation. An Aristotelian apodeixis, ‘demonstration’, starts from accepted premisses which are true of necessity and proceeds by strictly defined logical steps to reach conclusions which are equally necessary. Suppose it is known that water is H₂O; the idea would be that, with that basic starting-point (no doubt along with other similar ones), one would be able to show that the other properties of water – its ability to dissolve many other substances, its boiling point, and so on – followed logically. This type of explanation of why things are as they are is a ‘demonstration’. Even in the case of physics, Aristotle did not believe that physicists will have employed demonstration as a method for discovering that water is H₂O. To discover that, one needs to have spent time examining water in various circumstances, and eventually to have the insight that all would be explained if water were H₂O. Once that is achieved, then demonstrations can proceed from necessary premisses to necessary conclusions in order to exhibit the value of the insight involved. It is this model that Aristotle says does not fit ethics, for two reasons: particular moral conclusions do not follow from moral principles by necessity; and the principles themselves are not true of necessity. That is why Aristotle says that the undemonstrated opinions of the experienced are to be respected. Reliable moral judgement, in Newman’s view and in Aristotle’s, like any other judgement about the complex realities of life, requires the growth of lifelong experience more than logic, and a reliable grasp of the fundamental values in human life, ‘the principles of things’. The comparison is made quite explicitly in the Grammar. Aristotle calls our ability to make correct assessments in matters of conduct ‘by the name of phronēsis or judgement’ and Newman describes, develops and endorses it in these terms:

What it is to be virtuous, how we are to gain the just and right idea and standard of virtue, how we are to approximate in practice to our own standard, what is right and wrong in a particular case, for the answers in fullness and accuracy to these and similar questions, the philosopher refers us to no code of laws, to no moral treatise, because no science of life, applicable to the case of an individual, has been or can be written. Such is Aristotle’s doctrine, and it is undoubtedly true . . . The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalisations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them.²⁶

The various points made in the first sentence of this paragraph are perhaps not to be taken as merely rhetorical elaborations. How we are to grow in understanding of dispositions such as courage, or generosity, or loyalty is one issue; by what criterion progress in virtue is to be distinguished, what is meant by living by this standard, and ‘What should I do now?’ are related issues, to be sure; but they are not identical. What they have in common, in Newman’s view, is that there is no neat way of answering any of these questions. Appropriate emotional responses to situations, the tests to be applied when making moral decisions, what a fulfilled life is like – these are matters which cannot be adequately put into words or codified in a way that makes further interpretative insight unnecessary. The undemonstrated judgements of the wise are to be heeded because of what the wise can ‘see’, not because of any argument they might have been asked to produce. In this paragraph, then, Newman neatly combines some essential Aristotelian points: (i) what it is to be virtuous and which standards of virtue are the true ones, can be derived only from our many judgements in individual cases; (ii) no code of laws or set of moral principles can possibly guarantee their correct application to particular instances; and (iii) our judgement in individual cases is, at least in those of us who are older and sufficiently experienced, more demanding and searching than any set of jejune generalities could possibly be.

In understanding Aristotle in this way, Newman interprets him as holding some version of the position in contemporary moral philosophy which would be termed ‘particularism’. The basic moral judgement is the assessment by the person of mature conscience, the phronimos, of what is to be done on this particular occasion. Moral principles are summaries of the individual decisions already made – ‘universals come from particulars’ as Aristotle puts it.²⁷ It is therefore not the case that one simply starts with a moral principle and from it deduces what is to be done in the particular case. Of course, it will in general be true that our moral principles employ a set of categories in terms of which individual cases can be interpreted; and in that sense the adult will come to the assessment of particular cases armed with a whole range of moral terms at their disposal. It is Aristotle’s contention, though, that these moral terms – ‘killing’, ‘unjust’, ‘generous’ ‘courageous’ and so on – get their meanings from our past experience and from the individual judgements we have already made in interpreting that experience morally. So when we are faced with a particular situation now, our experience, which is a necessary aid to our judgement, certainly does not make that judgement automatic. We will come to a decision with all these patterns of thought at our disposal: we have concepts like ‘killing’, ‘unjust’, ‘foolhardy’, ‘adultery’. But we might still have to wonder about situations involving a life-support machine, or taxation policy, risking one’s life to save a friend or living in a second marriage. In the assessment of these situations we may or may not come to make further refinements in our understanding of our moral principles and of the terms they contain. Is switching off this life-support now properly to be described as ‘killing’? But Newman’s key claim is this: in making such judgements, we do not make a decision which is in any way in conflict with our principles, for the principles themselves are now interpreted in the light of this decision as well as our earlier ones. ‘Killing’ (or any of our other concepts) may come to have a slightly different application for us than it previously did; and so the moral principles may come to have a different sense precisely because of what we have seen to be required in individual cases:

I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule, and must be decided on its own merits. I should look to see what theologians could do for me, what the Bishops and clergy around me, what my confessor; what friends whom I revered: and if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then I must rule myself by my own judgement and my own conscience.²⁸

The person of practical wisdom will take every means – advice, reading, precedent, experience – to enhance their ability to reach a good decision. Sound judgement does not come automatically. Still, particular cases are ‘beyond all rule’ in the sense that no moral rule can guarantee its correct application to each particular set of circumstances. So, according to the Letter, the manuals of moral theology, even though they are doubtless ‘drawn up by theologians of authority and experience’, are ‘little more than reflexions and memoranda of our moral sense’.²⁹

For just this reason, Newman rejects Gladstone’s claim that the authority of the pope as defined in the First Vatican Council undermines the judgements of conscience made by Catholics:

I observe that conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done. ‘Conscience’, says St Thomas, ‘is the practical judgment or dictate of reason by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or avoided as evil’. Hence conscience cannot come into direct collision with the Church’s or the Pope’s infallibility, which is engaged on general propositions and in the condemnation of particular and given errors.³⁰

Probably the words ‘hic et nunc’ (‘here and now’) are italicized as being in a foreign language; but the italics might equally well serve to emphasize the epistemological primacy of the experienced and wise person’s insight into the present, irreducibly particular, situation. Unless a pope were to condemn precisely this individual action in these particular circumstances, his infallible statements cannot contradict a person’s conscientious judgement, because the understanding of the terms in any such statement depends not merely upon past experience and precedent, but on a person’s insight into the particular cases with which they are confronted. Gladstone’s criticism, that the doctrine of papal infallibility in morals undercuts individual judgement and controls from afar the lives of citizens who owe him allegiance, misses the mark entirely because it fails to understand the process of making a moral judgement. The point is not a theological but a straightforwardly philosophical one.

Some criticisms and replies

It might be argued that there are problems with Newman’s position.

(1) How does he reconcile his statement that the moral judgement is ‘beyond all rule’ with his own criticism of some modern thinkers who ‘do not even pretend to go by any moral rule’?

(2) Exactly what is the relationship between those basic moral values which are in his words ‘the principles of things’ and judgements about what ought to be done in any particular case?

(3) Does Newman believe that there is anything distinctive about a Christian ethic?

I shall consider these one at a time.

The role of ‘moral rules’

Newman’s use of ‘principles’ here links the notion of a moral rule to the Aristotelian notion of an archē; archai in Aristotle’s ethics are ‘starting-points’, and he says that the starting-points of moral reasoning have the form ‘since the end is of such and such a kind’.³¹ These ‘ends’, Aristotle says, are not clear except to the virtuous person; and virtues are habits of appropriate emotional response to situations. ‘Virtue makes the end right, and practical wisdom those things which are for the end.’³² To have appropriate emotional responses to situations is already to find oneself responding to what is morally significant about each situation. Examples of ‘starting-points’ expressing the ends of action might be such statements as ‘Generosity towards others is a virtue’ and ‘Foolhardiness is a vice’. I suggest, then, that when Newman thinks of moral judgement as being ‘beyond all rule’ he is claiming that such ‘principles’ are in themselves no more than starting-points. One still needs to think about how to be generous here, or how not to do something foolhardy at this point. So Newman says that all practical judgements must be in accord with practical wisdom:

In buying or selling, in contracts, in his treatment of others, in giving and receiving, in thinking, speaking, doing, and working, in toil, in danger, in his pleasures, every one of his acts, to be praiseworthy, must be in accord with this practical sense. Thus it is, and not by science, that he perfects the virtues of justice, self-command, magnanimity, generosity, gentleness and all others. Phronēsis is the regulating principle of every one of them.³³

I take it that the criticism that some – perhaps many – of Newman’s contemporaries consider themselves bound by no moral rule amounts to saying that they believe that they are justified in taking decisions which take no account of such virtues. He contrasts his own view with theirs precisely on those grounds. These virtues are the starting-points, the archai, of sound moral judgements, precisely because the emotional dispositions in which virtues consist open our eyes to the morally significant features of the situations in which we find ourselves. A psychopath, who is unable to have emotional responses, simply cannot see situations in moral terms at all, cannot even ‘get started’ morally speaking; and the young, whose emotional responses to situations are often far from appropriate, will find their moral judgements skewed as a result. However, like Aristotle, Newman does not believe that even the possession of wholly appropriate emotional responses to situations is sufficient to guarantee right judgement in particular cases. One needs experience, and often one needs to profit from the wisdom and experience of others. The moral judgement should take all of that into account; but is itself ‘beyond all rule’.

The relationship between ‘rules’ and moral judgements

Newman makes two very significant remarks in this context:

[a] [Practical wisdom] is formed and matured by practice and experience; and it manifests itself not in any breadth of view, or any philosophical comprehension of the mutual relations of duty towards duty, or any consistency in its teachings, but it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now by this given person under these given circumstances.

[b] [Practical wisdom] has an elasticity, which, in its application to individual cases, is, as I have said, not studious to maintain the appearance of consistency.³⁴

Newman is here speaking of judgements expressing moral conclusions about what one should do here and now, as distinct from moral judgements concerning virtues or moral values. But what exactly is meant by his repeated denial of the importance of consistency in reaching one’s moral conclusions? There are several possibilities: that the weight given to any given type of moral consideration – truthfulness, for instance – might vary from one case to another; or that a consideration which is admittedly relevant in one case – that someone will be offended, for instance – might not even be relevant in another; or that a consideration – for instance that nobody else knows what is being done – might be a reason in favour of what is done in one case, and a reason against it in some other case. It seems to me that Newman has little interest in any of these details, despite the emphasis he places upon individual circumstances, and the considerable theoretical importance of distinguishing them.³⁵ I think the most that can be established from his text and the various examples he offers is along the following lines. Someone who is thinking about, or trying to explain to someone else, why they should do A, will select one or more considerations which they take to be relevant to this case, assess their relative importance, and so decide; but though the process of reflection might indeed involve considerable thought and require that quite a large number of facts need to be taken in to consideration, the act of reaching a conclusion on the basis of all those considerations cannot itself be further analysed. Aristotle describes it as a ‘perception’ in a broad sense, and I think this is the view that Newman takes.³⁶ He also wishes to make it clear that in an apparently similar case the assessment of the relevance and importance of the various considerations might be seen to be different, and to lead to a different conclusion, without there being any further explanation for why they are seen to be different.

Newman is far from thinking this process is infallible. He is well aware that one’s best efforts in reflecting and deciding can go wrong for a variety of reasons; the person may be factually ill-informed, emotionally immature, emotionally involved in a way that would cloud their judgement, or simply lacking in experience of life. That is why he counsels taking advice, praying, reading well-established authorities. He admits that one’s most conscientious judgements may indeed be mistaken, but insists that even so one has a duty to act in accordance with them.³⁷

On the other hand, it cannot be said that Newman’s lengthy discussions of whether or not he has a duty to accept some important papal documents are a particularly good or edifying example of how his accounts of conscience might work in practice. The considerations he discusses are indeed complex; and it is clear that he finds himself in a particularly awkward position, as a convert, prominent, and yet in some Catholic quarters nonetheless suspect. All the same, at times he gives the impression of being less than candid in his attempt to defend the indefensible, and of resorting to a narrow legalism in an attempt to dodge the central issues.³⁸ If he were faced with this criticism, what could he say? He would point out that my view, that he was over-cautious and bending over backwards to be loyal, is an opinion which I could no more prove than he could prove that he was right. The matter can of course be discussed, and various relevant, or possibly relevant considerations can be advanced. But at the end of the day, there is nothing more one can appeal to than one’s honest perception of what one should do in the light of all the various considerations. There is no moral algorithm for reaching correct decisions, nor any series of syllogisms which would not simply assume what has to be established. I might well be right in my view: but if he cannot see that fact, there is nothing more he can say.

In general terms, Newman holds the Aristotelian view that morality depends upon features of our human nature as thinking social animals, since it is those facts about us which will determine how we can live fulfilled lives. A morally admirable life consists in living in such a way that our human capacities at every level are exercised harmoniously to their fullest extent. One can give a general characterization of how such a life would be, in terms of physical and mental health, mature emotional balance, the exercise of our minds both in practical matters and in trying to understand the deepest questions about the nature of our world and the meaning of human life.

The distinctive character of a Christian ethic

In presenting Newman’s account of the way in which judgements of conscience are formed, I have made it clear that in my view the framework within which he discusses conscience is heavily indebted to Aristotle. A story is related of another well-known Oxford don, William Spooner, who from 1867 to 1930 was a Fellow and later Warden of New College, that he returned to the pulpit having just finished a sermon, and apologised to the congregation: ‘In the places in which I said “Aristotle” I did of course mean “St Paul”’. Could Newman have been guilty of a similar confusion? What few clues Newman gives to the actual content as distinct from the method of his ethics suggest that his views were rather conventional, conforming to the standards of educated Victorian society, much as Aristotle’s might be thought to correspond to those of a cultivated Greek of his time. Speaking of pride under the training of modesty, Newman writes,

It is no longer such a restless agent, without definite aim; it has a large field of exertion assigned to it, and it subserves those social interests which it would naturally trouble. It is directed into the channel of frugality, honesty and obedience; and it becomes the very staple of the religion and morality held in honour in a day like our own. It becomes the safeguard of chastity, the guarantee of veracity, in high and low; it is the very household god of society, as at present constituted, inspiring neatness and decency in the servant girl, propriety of carriage and refined manners in her mistress, uprightness, manliness, and generosity in the head of the family.³⁹

His sermons, however, as distinct from this lecture to a university audience, are much more biblically based, and their moral tone derives more from the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus than from Aristotle. He accepts that contemporary social decency has indeed been influenced by the great Western tradition in philosophy, which has also influenced Christian ethics. But this influence, in itself a good thing, can easily mislead even Christians into thinking that in all conscience they need look no further. Newman offers two principal criticisms of contemporary morality. The first is that

it has taken the brighter side of the Gospel, – its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten. The is the religion natural to a civilized age, and well has Satan dressed it and completed it into an idol of the Truth. As Reason is cultivated, the taste formed, the affections and sentiments refined, a general decency and grace will of course spread over the face of society, quite independently of the force of Revelation . . . Thus elegance is gradually made the test and standard of virtue, which is no longer thought to possess an intrinsic claim on our hearts, or to exist further than it leads to the quiet and comfort of others. Conscience is no longer recognised as an independent arbiter of actions, its authority is explained away.⁴⁰

Conscience is replaced by some theory of a moral sense, and the conviction of guilt and the stern forewarning of future punishment which it should sound in our ears is muted or forgotten altogether. What he calls ‘elegant accomplishments’ satisfy our minds, as do thoughts of heroism and virtue; but they lack the impact of the truly Christian conscience. Hence, his second criticism of contemporary morality is that it has severed its link with God:

This is what is meant by the peace of a good conscience; it is the habitual consciousness that our hearts are open to God, with a desire that they should be open. It is confidence in God, from a feeling that there is nothing in us which we ought to be ashamed or afraid of.⁴¹

To sum up. Newman does not have a theory of ethics, nor is he particularly intent on correcting the mistaken moral conclusions of many of his contemporaries (though he is scathingly critical of the positions advocated by many academic moralists). The judgements of Newman’s conscience are neither radical nor revolutionary. What he emphasizes is the delicacy and sensitivity of the mature conscience to the particular demands of each situation, a view which he finds in Aristotle. There is also what is almost a Kantian strand in Newman. Kant argues that it is a central feature of our moral experience that we believe it to be somehow morally offensive that virtue and happiness so often fail to coincide in our world; and Kant goes on to suggest that we cannot make any satisfying sense of our moral experience unless we see it as pointing beyond our world to God, the guarantor and vindicator of morality.⁴² As we shall now see, Newman takes a similar position with much less hesitancy than Kant.

Conscience and the existence of God

Newman gives only grudging approval to what might be termed the traditional arguments for the existence of God. His lack of enthusiasm stems not so much from doubts about their validity or force, but from the very limited conclusions about the nature of God to which they can lead. Starting from the kinds of premisses which are available to everyone, they conclude only to an impoverished one-size-fits-all notion of God, far removed from the God of Christian belief. Starting from the phenomenon of change and impermanence in the world of our experience, we might well argue for the existence of an uncaused cause, or a prime mover, a necessary being or an artificer of the ordered cosmos. But where is the religious significance of such conclusions?⁴³

In his discussion of the history of Arianism, Newman discusses a pastoral strategy which he calls ‘The Economy’. It consists in an

accommodation to the feelings and prejudices of the hearer, in leading him to the reception of a novel or unacceptable doctrine. It professes to be founded in the actual necessity of the case; because those who are strangers to the tone of thought and principles of the speaker cannot at once be initiated into his system, and because they must begin with imperfect views; and therefore if he is to teach them at all, he must put before them large propositions, which he has afterwards to modify, or make assertions which are but parallel or analogous to the truth rather than coincident with it.⁴⁴

One instance of what Newman takes to be an acceptable use of this approach is Paul’s speech to the Athenians in the Areopagus, where Paul uses as his starting-point the Athenian altar dedicated to the ‘The Unknown God’; Newman goes on to give several more examples, taken from the early Church Fathers. He concedes that this kind of gradual and conciliatory approach can be useful; but he is equally clear that it can be abused if the hearer is led to believe something which is in fact false (as distinct from not being from the start shown where his beliefs are in error). But plainly Newman has no doubt that this approach is of only limited utility, and at most might provide a helpful first step in preaching the gospel. It will necessarily fail to deliver the full riches of the Christian experience of God.⁴⁵ He outhnes and comments less than enthusiastically on some ‘economic’ proofs for the existence of God:

What are the phenomena of the external world, but a divine mode of conveying to the mind the realities of existence, individuality, and the influence of being on being, the best possible, though beguiling the imagination of most men with a harmless but unfounded belief in matter as distinct from impressions on their senses. This is at least the opinion of some philosophers, and whether the particular theory be right or wrong it serves as an illustration here of the great truth which we are considering. Or what, again, as others hold, is the popular argument from final causes but an Economia suited to the practical wants of the multitude, as teaching them in the simplest way the active presence of Him, who after all dwells intelligibly, prior to argument, in their heart and conscience? And though, on the mind’s first mastering this general principle, it seems to itself at the moment to have cut all the ties that bind it to the universe, and to be floated off upon the ocean of interminable scepticism; yet a true sense of its own weakness brings it back, the instinctive persuasion that it must be intended to rely on something, and that therefore the information given, though philosophically inaccurate, must be practically certain.⁴⁶

This is far from an easy passage to follow. The first argument he mentions seems intended to be that of Bishop Berkeley – though if it is, it seriously misrepresents him – which Newman interprets as trying to show that there are no good grounds for believing in the independent existence of matter or of the material world, because the ultimate reality of everything consists in the fact that it exists in the mind of God. Berkeley’s argument is indeed comparatively simple: a material substance just is the total of all possible sensations of that thing; but sensations are properties of conscious minds; hence a material substance exists primarily in consciousness rather than ‘out there’, independently of any mind. Since we are not constantly perceiving every object in the universe, such things must exist in the mind of God who is aware of them all the time. Berkeley insists that this is more direct than arguments that start from the independent existence of matter, which, he claims, lead to scepticism, or to a kind of misleading scientism and ultimately to atheism. But Newman himself is not ‘beguiled’ by this argument, nor does he take our belief in the existence of matter to be ‘unfounded’. I suppose he thinks that these misleading features of the argument are distracting rather than helpful; the simplicity of arguing that all things depend immediately upon the consciousness of God is outweighed by the disadvantages of such an approach.⁴⁷

Again, the traditional argument from design might indeed instil wonder at the orderliness of the universe, but fail to establish the existence of the true origin of that order. Newman echoes Berkeley’s fear of the scepticism which can be induced by placing too much emphasis on these ‘economic’ arguments which claim to start with what everyone already is disposed to believe; but, if my interpretation of the present passage is correct, he thinks that Berkeley himself falls into the very trap he warns us against; Newman takes the same view of William Paley’s famous version of the argument from design. Here is Newman criticizing Paley, while claiming that the same criticism does not touch his own view about the immediate experience of God through conscience:

It is to be considered whether this feeling of conscience as involving a Personal Governor is peculiar e.g. to the Anglo-Saxons. Have the Germans it? Have the Chinese? It may be objected that in arguing from the analogy of an earthly friend, I am committing the same mistake as Paley who argues Design in the universe from the case of a watch. But the cases are not parallel. It is first the very intricacy, vastness, perfection of nature which takes it out of parallelism with human work – and secondly, if there is a God, design is a finite idea to include in the notion of him. On the other hand in the argument which I am urging I am not speaking of any attribute or work internal or proper to him, but what I feel towards him. It is hardly any assumption to say that an Infinite Being cannot have a design – It is no assumption to say that he may excite certain feelings in us.⁴⁸

The lack of parallelism with human work is just the kind of shortcoming which might in the end lead to scepticism; we know perfectly well that watches or cars have been designed: but, the objection goes, it is not at all so clear that the universe has been designed. Reliance on that parallel is as likely to induce doubt rather than belief. By contrast, Newman thinks that it is quite obvious that if there is a God, we can at once assume that that God can act on us. The mind has a ‘true sense of its own weakness’ which leads it to abandon arguments like those of Berkeley and Paley and to turn instead to one whose force is more immediately and directly felt. In the experience of conscience, we directly experience the action of God.

Two of the phrases Newman uses in these passages are especially important. One occurs in his claim that God dwells in the human heart and conscience intelligibly, ‘prior to argument’; and the other in his criticism of what he takes to be Berkeley’s contrast between the ‘unfounded belief’ in matter and the ‘impressions on the senses’. A helpful way to understand what Newman is getting at here is to compare him with the recent development of ‘Reformed Epistemology’ in the hands of such philosophers as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.⁴⁹ Newman argues that we do not infer the existence of an external world from the experience of our own senses. The experience of our senses just is the experience of an external world. Similarly, Plantinga and Wolterstorff both deny that belief in the existence of God is inferred from religious experience; they insist that some experiences just are, and are known to be, experiences of God. Wolterstorff writes,

Deeply embedded in the Reformed tradition is the conviction that a person’s belief that God exists may be a justified belief even though that person has not inferred that belief from others of his beliefs which provide good evidence for it. After all, not all the things we are justified in believing are inferred from other beliefs.

Plantinga, in the same vein, says,

It is not exactly right to say that belief in God is properly basic: more exactly what are properly basic are such propositions as ‘God disapproves of what I have done’ which self-evidently entail that God exists . . . Perhaps such items as ‘There are trees’ are not properly basic, but instead such propositions as ‘I see a tree’.⁵⁰

It is the immediacy of being spoken to by God which is basic. What is striking about these two contemporary authors is the way in which their views mirror those of Newman. Newman does not wish to infer that there is a God from the experience of conscience; that is why he explicitly denies that he ‘has faith in’ his conscience, or in his sense experience:

Sentio ergo sum.⁵¹ To call this an act of argumentation or deduction, and to say that it implies faith in the reasoning process which is denoted by the symbol of the ‘ergo’ seems to me a fallacy. I do not advance from one proposition to another when I know my existence from being conscious of my feeling, but one and the same act of consciousness brings home to me that which afterwards at leisure I draw out into two propositions, denoting two out of many aspects of the one thing.⁵²

Newman takes exactly this line when speaking of conscience:

By conscience I mean the discrimination of acts as worthy of praise or blame. Now, such praise or blame is a phenomenon of my existence, one of those phenomena through which, as I have said, my existence is brought home to me. But the accuracy of praise or blame in the particular case is a matter not of faith, but of judgment. Here then are two senses of the word conscience. It either stands for the act of moral judgment, or for the particular judgment formed. In the former case it is the foundation of religion, in the latter of ethics.⁵³

The last sentence is of central importance. The foundation of religion is the experience of being under moral obligation – the lived experience of subjection, not the content of the obligations to which I take myself to be subject. These latter are the starting-points of ethics, and Newman sees very well that they will differ widely from one culture and indeed from one individual to another, and that they are not infrequently false. But the experience of being obliged to a Being far greater than oneself is, he argues, common to us all.

He makes his character Callista express the point as follows:

You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it the proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness – just like that I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend. The echo implies a voice, the voice a speaker. That speaker I love and fear.⁵⁴

In Newman’s view, then, the experience of conscience is simply one aspect of a complex experience of God:

I have said – assumed if you will – that this feeling of a law, whatever its dictates, and which I call conscience is, not a law of my mind, but one of those phenomena which like thought or consciousness are bound up with or convey to me the idea and the fact of my being or existence. Now I say that, as consciousness of thoughts is a reflex act implying existence (I think therefore I am), so this sensation of conscience is the recognition of an obligation involving the notion of an external being obliging. I say this not from any abstract argument from the force of the terms (e.g. ‘A Law implies a Lawgiver’) but from the peculiarity of that feeling to which I give the name conscience.⁵⁵

This passage is Newman’s attempt to express in more formal philosophical terms ideas which, as he puts it, he has already put in hortatory or popular form.⁵⁶ Its key features are as follows:

(1) There is no inference from the experience of moral obligation to the existence of the Supreme Lawgiver, any more than Descartes’s cogito should be interpreted as an inference. In both cases what is being spelt out is an aspect of a complex experience.

(2) In what is almost a Wittgensteinian manner, Newman insists that ‘as there is no faith properly in these exercises of my being, so there is no scepticism about them properly – and it is as absurd to speak of being sceptical of consciousness, reasoning, memory, sensation as to say that I am sceptical whether I am’. Wittgenstein similarly maintains that certain propositions ‘hold fast’ for us, in that one simply cannot make sense of what it might be to doubt them. There is nothing more basic to which appeal might be made.⁵⁷

Newman claims that these considerations have been his ‘chosen proof of that fundamental doctrine for thirty years past’. ‘Proof’ here, I take it, cannot be used in the sense of a logically conclusive argument nor indeed of an argument at all. His intention is to claim that the experience itself provides the sufficient rational basis for other religious beliefs; and some of the most fundamental religious beliefs are simply ways of spelling out aspects of the basic experience itself. Newman points out that ‘all men know what the feeling of a bad or good conscience is, though they may differ most widely from each other as to what conscience enjoins’ and goes on to say that it is the force of conscience rather than the content of any given moral judgement which is important for his position.⁵⁸ Judgements of conscience are precisely not like judgements of taste, since judgements of taste do not involve the experience of giving personal offence and of being open to judgement, sanction or punishment. To experience conscience is to experience God as father, lawgiver, and judge.

It is not difficult to find objections to this position, just as there have been many objections to the similar views of Plantinga and Wolterstorff. The fundamental problem is that the argument would seem to make it possible to claim almost anything as a properly basic belief and thereby put it beyond challenge. Hence Plantinga is at pains to defend himself from the criticism that his claim that belief that God has spoken to him is properly basic is no more secure than someone else’s belief in voodoo, or that the Great Pumpkin returns every Hallowe’en.

The criticisms of Newman’s and Plantinga’s position may not be unanswerable. Consider the claim that it makes no sense to doubt that as I write this I am seeing a computer screen in front of me, or the claim that the world has existed for many centuries before I was born. Of course, one could indeed construct unusual situations in which I am not in fact seeing a computer screen but am subject to some carefully planned illusion, or suffering from some severe mental disturbance. So my claim is not totally beyond questioning; but neither is it one which in normal circumstances can be rationally questioned. If it were always rationally legitimate to doubt someone’s claim to see an object in front of them, then anything one might use to settle the matter would be similarly open to doubt. Moreover, as the second example also makes clear, we do not hold our beliefs as separate items unconnected with one another. They form a network of interconnected beliefs which to a large extent would stand or fall together. One good reason for querying a particular belief would be its incompatibility with a much wider network of beliefs which one does not believe can be open to reasonable challenge. Our beliefs about the existence of the external world, or the age of the earth, or that there are other persons, belong to just such a network. In the light of considerations of this kind, then, it might be argued, as Plantinga does, that the kinds of religious claims which he (and Newman) have in mind should be believed unless there are good reasons for disbelieving them. The burden of proof is on the challenger. Newman and Plantinga need to insist on immediacy, but not upon infallibility.

The key issue, therefore, is whether there are good grounds for questioning Newman’s account of his experience of conscience. It would be difficult to suggest that he himself was subject to mental disturbance or delusion. More reasonably, one might want to suggest that the feelings of obligation and sanction of which Newman makes so much are in fact the result of childhood conditioning rather than aspects of a direct experience of God. Where Newman is mistaken, the criticism would go, is not in his claim that he does immediately have such feelings, but that alternative explanations for them might be readily available which would be less contentious than the claim that they were directly experiences of God. He might in turn have replied to this suggestion by saying that such explanations in terms of childhood upbringing would ultimately reduce conscience to no more than a matter of taste or social pressure, for these too have doubtless been inculcated from childhood; whereas it is simply immediately given in the experience of conscience itself that more is at stake than that. It is here that the crucial element in his account lies. He maintains that he is not arguing for a particular interpretation of his moral experience over against other possible interpretations, he is claiming that any reflective human will immediately recognize the uniquely personal and over-riding importance of moral obligation even while fully accepting that the content of various moral codes may differ widely.

The great advantage of his view, as he sees it, is that it appeals to the whole person and requires no abstruse philosophical skills to understand. The traditional arguments are unhelpfully abstract, disconnected with our immediate experience:

Why am I to begin with taking up a position not my own, and unclothing my mind of that large outfit of existing thoughts, principles, likings, desires and hopes which make me what I am? If I am asked to use Paley’s argument for my own conversion, I say plainly that I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism; if I am asked to convert others by it, I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts.⁵⁹

Newman goes on immediately to describe Paley’s argument as ‘clear, clever, and powerful’, but insists that such purely intellectual considerations about whose cogency someone is asked to give a speculative judgement will never lead to a true conversion, in which someone is committed to acting on the conclusions he has reached, and not just to believing them. Conversion, as he puts it, involves a real, and not just a notional assent. His own preferred route, then, has two related advantages, he believes: the experience of God as Lawgiver on which it is based is universal and cannot seriously be questioned; and appropriating that experience is a true conversion, a transformation of one’s life rather than a move in a purely speculative game.

Nonetheless, even philosophers who would perhaps not be convinced by the assertion that the experience of being morally obliged is no more than the product of early education, to be explained in terms of the development of one’s superego, might still not wish to concede Newman’s case. Once again, the obvious example would be Kant. He writes, along lines quite similar to Newman’s:

Every man has a conscience, and finds himself watched, threatened and, in general, kept in an attitude of respect (of esteem coupled with fear) by an inner judge. And this power watching over the law in him is not something that he himself (arbitrarily) makes, but something incorporated in his being. It follows him like his shadow when he plans to escape. He can indeed numb himself or put himself to sleep by pleasures and distractions, but he cannot avoid coming to himself or waking up from time to time, and when he does he hears at once its awful voice. He can at most, in the extremity of corruption, induce himself to pay no more attention to it, but he still cannot help hearing it.

Now this inherent intellectual and (since it is a thought of duty) moral disposition called conscience has this peculiarity to it: although its business is an affair of a man with himself, man yet sees himself necessitated by his reason to carry it on as if at the command of another person . . . Now since such a moral being must also have all power (in heaven and on earth) in order to give his law its due effect (a function essential to the office of judge) and since such an omnipotent moral being is called God, conscience must be conceived as a subjective principle of responsibility before God for our deeds. In fact the latter concept will always be contained (even if only in an obscure way) in the moral self-awareness of conscience.⁶⁰

Kant here agrees with Newman about the character of the experience of being under moral obligation. Much more explicitly than many other philosophers, he accepts that the experience of being morally obliged does indeed have the character of coming from outside oneself, of being absolutely authoritative and inescapable, and as deriving from God himself. But there is one crucial difference between Newman’s claim and what Kant here is willing to accept. In saying that this experience must be interpreted in terms of God, Kant is not willing to concede either that it is an immediate experience of God, or that a valid argument can be constructed to show that it is an experience of God. He denies that this experience ‘entitles a man to posit such a Supreme Being as really existing outside himself’.

This highlights the double difficulty in Newman’s position. Many modern philosophers would be much less willing than was Kant to concede that the experience of conscience involves the feeling of being subject to a Supreme Lawgiver; and even if they were, would certainly not concede Newman’s claim that the experience of conscience is directly an experience of God, and that this can be known without any argument at all. Newman might reply that Kant is perhaps wrong to downplay the experience of conscience for the reasons he does. Kant’s reasons go back to his general epistemology and the kind of defence he tried to offer against a Humean empiricism which, in Kant’s view, would have totally undermined the achievements of Enlightenment science. Kant believed that he had vindicated the appeal to causation in explaining the patterns of events in the world, but that his vindication did not extend beyond the realm of our possible sense experiences; in particular, then, since what someone takes to be an experience of God would not be a sense experience, it could not legitimately be used to vindicate causal arguments to establish the existence of God, nor could it make sense of the notion of God’s causal activity. In reply, of course, Newman’s defenders would try to point out that Kant might have difficulty in showing that he can consistently claim both that there is such an immediate experience of the authoritative voice of conscience while denying that there can be an immediate experience of God, which is no less immediate for not being a sense experience.

Conclusion

The salient feature of both Newman’s discussions of conscience is the degree of reliance which he is willing to place on it. Both in ethics and in religion he does not, I believe, deny that such reliance is often called into question. On the narrowly religious point he believes that the questioning would have no rational basis and that the reflective person already knows that it does not; on the ethical point, although the individual’s judgements of what ought to be done in particular circumstances are indeed often mistaken, there is no higher court of appeal than to the insight into the individual case on the part of someone who is well informed, well trained, and emotionally balanced. Consistently with this, Newman exhibits something of a distrust of philosophical systems. His dismissal of the various academic systems of ethics is a corollary of his insistence that he wishes to deal with things, not notions, with the concrete particular and not just the relationships between ideas. His description of even valid arguments in philosophy as ‘smart syllogisms’ and his preference for experience recognized as religious is another aspect of the same approach.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Newman is in some deep sense anti-intellectual. The whole project of the Grammar is to argue that a proper understanding of how we think cannot normally be reduced to the formal structures of logic or mathematics, and that the attempt to do so is highly misleading. It is in this sense that I suggest that there is a parallel between Newman and the later Wittgenstein. The starting-point for philosophy is to be found in how we as a matter of fact talk and think and reflect. Our actual practice has to be taken seriously, both in ethics and in religion, and not forced into some epistemological straitjacket, as if deductive logic were the only method of reasoned thinking. This is of course not to say that Newman’s own conclusions, whether in ethics or in religion, are somehow beyond rational assessment; nor would he for a moment claim that they are. But he is right to insist that the notion of evidence, and the relationship between evidence and interpretation, is often richer and more complex than in our analytical moments we are tempted to allow.

Notes

1. Diff., ii:249.

2. Diff., ii:248–9.

3. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11.

4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 118 (I, §15).

5. ‘Moral virtue is concerned with passions and actions, and in these whereas one can go wrong either by excess or by deficiency, it is what is in the middle that is praised and is right.’ See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6, 1106b24–6. Hereafter referred to as NE. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the texts of the Ethics are the author’s own. For an extensive discussion of the Ethics, including the texts under consideration here, see Gerard J. Hughes, Aristotle on Ethics (London: Routledge, 2002). What Aristotle intends by ‘in the middle’ is considerably more complex than this text might suggest; but it is nonetheless clear that it is some version of this view that Hobbes is attacking, and some version of it which Newman wishes to defend.

6. Diff., ii:249–50.

7. Diff., ii:247–8.

8. ‘Conscience is the practical judgement or dictate of reason by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as good, or avoided as evil’ (Diff., ii:256) paraphrases St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 79, 13.

9. NE, I, 3, 1095a2–11.

10. NE, II, 1, 1103b24–5.

11. Diff., ii:253–4.

12. Diff., ii:257.

13. Aristotle’s account of phronēsis is to be found in his Nicomachean Ethics, VI. I offer what I hope is an accessible commentary in Hughes, Aristotle on Ethics, ch. 5. For the importance of moral education, see NE, II, 1, 1103b21–5.

14. G.A., 265.

15. G.A., 264.

16. G.A., 269.

17. G.A., 277–8.

18. G.A., 321.

19. P. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘Newman’s Grammar and the Church Today’, in David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, OP (eds.), John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism (Bristol: The Bristol Press, 1991), 109–34.

20. G.A., 277.

21. ‘Unfortunately, to think about a special faculty is particularly tempting if we have defined the faculty in terms of its successful exercise – obviously so, because we then seem to be awarding ourselves an infallible means of drawing conclusions, do we but employ it.’ Fitzpatrick, ‘Newman’s Grammar and the Church Today’, 115.

22. G.A., 345, 353.

23. G.A., 350.

24. NE, VI, 1143b11–14. This is the translation of Aristotle provided by Newman in G.A., 341–2.

25. G.A., 341–2.

26. G.A., 354.

27. NE, VI, 11 (1143a22–b5). This passage is central to an understanding of Aristotle’s account of phronēsis. The interpretation of it is, however, still controversial. A convenient summary of the discussion is to be found in D. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88–98.

28. Diff., ii:243–4 (my italics).

29. Diff., ii:242, 243.

30. Diff., ii:256.

31. NE, VI, 12, 1144a26–b1.

32. NE, VI, 12, 1144a6–9.

33. G.A., 356.

34. G.A., 354–5.

35. For a very careful and much more nuanced discussion of all such issues, see Jonathan Dancy, Morality Without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

36. NE, VI, 8, 1142a30.

37. See D.A., 257–61.

38. See the discussion of the authoritativeness of specific documents in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, chs 6–10; see Diff., 262–347.

39. Idea, 207 (Discourse 8).

40. P.S., i:311–12. The sermon is entitled ‘The Religion of the Day’.

41. P.S., v:319. The sermon is entitled ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’.

42. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, nos. 265–9.

43. See the passages mentioned by Edward Sillem in P.N., ii:32 note 6.

44. Ari., 71–2.

45. Edward Sillem points out that this was not Newman’s original position. Newman originally held that consideration of the experience of conscience pointed only to an impersonal deity. See U.S., 18–19, 22–3. The point is already somewhat weaker in P.S., i:193; and P.S., xi:11, 18, 64–7, 217.

46. Ari., 75–6.

47. Bishop George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley (London: Thomas Nelson, 1949), vol. ii, Part I, §133–4.

48. P.N., ii:60 (Proof of Theism).

49. See, for instance, Alvin Plantinga. ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’ in Nous 15 (1981), and Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Is Reason Enough?’ The Reformed Journal 31 (1981). These are conveniently reprinted, with comments from Robert Pargetter and a dissenting article by Stewart Goetz, in R. Douglas Geivert and Brendan Sweetman (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in Religious Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The quotation from Plantinga occurs on p. 138, that from Wolterstorff on p. 149 of Geivert and Sweetman.

50. Plantinga in fact refers to a list of ten propositions of which the one I have mentioned about offending God is only one. I have abbreviated his remarks while leaving the overall sense and syntax unchanged.

51. Literally, ‘I feel, therefore I am’.

52. P.N., ii:35. The passage forms part of a series of reflections entitled Proof of Theism.

53. P.N., ii:47 (Proof of Theism).

54. Call., 244.

55. P.N., ii:59 (Proof of Theism).

56. See P.N., ii:51 where Newman refers to U.S., 17–19; P.N., ii:53 where he refers to O.S., 64–5; and P.N., ii:59 where he cites the passage from Callista quoted above (Call., 314–15).

57. P.N., ii:37 (Proof of Theism). Compare Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 191–234 with G.A., 318: ‘Yet, though our certitude of the fact is quite as clear, we should not think it unnatural to say that the insularity of Great Britain is as good as demonstrated or that none but a fool expects never to die. Phrases indeed such as these are sometimes used to express a shade of doubt, but it is enough for my purpose if they are also used when doubt is altogether absent’ (my italics). See also Cyril Barrett, ‘Newman and Wittgenstein on the Rationality of Religious Belief’, in Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 89–99.

58. P.N., ii:49 (Proof of Theism).

59. G.A., 424–5. The reference to Paley’s argument is, of course, to the example he gives of finding a watch, whose complexity and purposiveness leads one to infer the existence of a designer.

60. Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 104–5.

Section 17

10 Conscience

Conscience and moral judgement

Conscience and free will

Conscience ‘truly so called’

Conscience and moral judgement

Some criticisms and replies

The role of ‘moral rules’

The relationship between ‘rules’ and moral judgements

The distinctive character of a Christian ethic

Conscience and the existence of God

Conclusion

Further reading