Truth, Conscience, and the (New) American Way

Steven D. Smith’s The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity traces the successive transformations of how we understand conscience by highlighting three key figures in its redefinition in the Anglo-American world: Thomas More, James Madison, and William Brennan. Smith argues that a “commitment to something called ‘conscience’ … has been a central and in some ways defining feature of modern Western civilization.” Conscience in the sense of an innate, internal compass is fundamental in the sense that other matters of belief and faith that we hold dear depend on some version of it holding sway in our moral lives. Nonetheless, we seem to be in acute danger of losing sight of what made it so powerful in shaping a society of ordered liberty. ...Within even the communal conception of conscience More held dear, unless conscience is to be entirely coextensive with the public doctrine of the Church, each of us must still work through the contours of our own belief: “You should do what you believe to be right even though you may be mistaken, and even though you may incur excommunication for doing so. … In this way, conscience contains a sort of capacity to cover for—even to consecrate—error. … Conscience thus appears to offer us a win-win situation: if I do what is right, I do right; and if I do what is wrong, I still do right—provided I do what I believe to be right.”