A Forum for Conscience

Extract

In the Apology Socrates moves immediately to focus the issue: ‘Let the witness speak the truth and the judge decide with equity.’ Truthfulness is an implied claim in every kind of judgment we make, even as justice raises a norm for living at its best. These inseparables shadow our every decision within the knowing process. A scrupulous honesty in thinking is as necessary for the natural scientist as for the ethicist. That common necessity is too often slighted, but the cost is never reduced. In one way or another this kind of conscience identifies us all. Every caricature of it proportionately restricts the prime conditions for human advance. One of the commonest ways of distorting the situation is to confuse morals with morality, transient ideas about the right and the good with valid ethical principles. Both suneidēsis and conscio put descriptive conditions within a moral value-context as the pivotal point of experience. Here truthfulness sets conditions for weaving judgments together and a moral climate guarantees integrity in the product. If this idea has validity, the perennial problem concerns keeping the way open for a genuine forum on conscience in its efforts to epitomise the thinking process at its highest reach. At this point our intellectual climate contributes special difficulties.