Conscience: A Brief History

The lived experience of human moral agency suggests that some actions favour human flourishing while others lead to division and conflict: the universal human desire for happiness is bound up with the effort to discern and do 'good' and to avoid 'evil'. Words exist to convey an experience, and the word 'conscience' has emerged as an attempt to describe the experience of moral discernment. We offer an account of the development of the word 'conscience'. Our treatment is divided into three sections: the first beginning around 600 BCE until the arrival of Christianity; the second will cover the Christian era through to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century; and the third section will cover post-Reformation and post-Christian developments to the present day. We argue that the Christian understanding of the conscience constitutes a major human achievement with durable and beneficial effects on human history, and that the progressive undermining of the Christian notion of conscience is an important contributor to the fragmentation of society today and increasing hostility to conscientious objection in medicine.