Conscience, where is it from?

Last evening we discussed the source of conscience at the Ideas Cafe.

There was consensus that empathy and seeing the victim's perspective have a lot to do with triggering our conscience, making us feel guilty if we do not follow our conscience.

Very often, our conscience come into play when we find ourselves at odds between choosing something that is more convenient or advantageous to ourselves but may disadvantage or harm the other party in some way.  We can look at it as our self interest versus interests for the social group that we are in.

It seems better for our social group if we help other members of the group even at a cost or risk to our own well being.

Conscience also seems to be more prominent when the other party being disadvantaged is a person rather than a non human such as a store. Stores have greeters to put a face to the store to discourage shop lifters and it is less likely for shoplifters to steal if they know the store owner as a good person.

We want acceptance from people we like and respect.

Conscience is an emotion related response and as such is similar to anger and fear.  These emotions come on fast, trigger us to take immediate action without really knowing the exact details of why or what else should be done.  This leads to speculation that it is based in the amygdala, maybe we should consider handling our conscience the same way we handle other emotions. 

People going through anger management training are told that whenever they feel anger, they should slow down, count to ten, just to give enough time for their analytical prefrontal cortex part of the brain come in to analyze the situation before taking action.

Perhaps a similar response to seeing an abandoned baby seal is in order? Even though we may feel that we should be doing something, apparently the baby seal may not be "abandoned" but that the mother seal is watching and will indeed abandon the baby if we intercept to "help"?

The difficulty is the balance of acting out of conscience versus analysis. 

Should we always jump into the water to help a drowning person when our conscience urge us to? Will we unwittingly become the reason for other people to try to help us and ended up with a lot more people involved in the tragedy?

But our conscience is for many people their moral compass.  If it feels right, it is.

The discussion also wondered why people behave differently in riots and mobs and seems to loose their conscience in those situations.  The speculation is that the new social group of the riot excludes others and no one is empathising with the store owners or other property owners who are being hurt. After all, they are not there or have no face at that time.  But there may also be the element that our conscience is shaped by what others may think of us when they find out what we have done.  In this case, the "others" for that moment are the other rioters and they all seem to be condoning and encouraging the riotous acts.

Someone once told me that if we are wrestling with our conscience, imagine that our actions is going to go on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper.  Would we still do it?

Let our social group be our judge.

Of course, conscience must also be rooted in our upbringing and the social order that we are in.  We pick up what is "normal" and "good" social behavior from our parents and role models around us when we grow up.

So our conscience is likely a constant moving value system formed by our experience of how the social group we belong to will judge the situation. This is a fast and unconscious judgement that will likely meet the approval of the social group we value.

But we generally belong to several different social groups at any one time and these groups exert their influence on us, shaping our judgment and responses to events.

The fast acting aspect has the advantage of quick response but also restricts the consideration to the immediate rather than the longer term or secondary effects of the action.

So, next time conscience calls, maybe we should think about which social group that we belong to may judge us harshly, and also what secondary or longer term effect of our intended action may be?