Conscience, Love and the Difficulty of Morality

Abstract

Moral philosophers often feel a need to underpin ethics with a metaphysical or supernatural law or principle, the idea being that would it be only for human beings, there could be no goodness. In this paper, I show the implausibility of this idea, by criticizing the fundamental role I assigned to supernaturality in my PhD thesis The “I”, the “You” and the Soul: an Ethics of Conscience.

In this paper, I show how the view laid out in the thesis gives a distorted picture of the meaning of both conscience and love. In the thesis, I claimed that the love in the light of which conscience presents my neighbour “cannot” be my love, as I thought that conscience announces itself even against my will. Instead, I argued that the love that “presents” my neighbour as someone to love is a supernatural love and that our moral task is to respond to that love. In this paper, I show how this account makes nonsense of both conscience and love, by making them impersonal.