One of the main points of crisis in modem civilization concerns, in my view, the relation of conscience and authority. Where these two are not simply taken to be polar opposites, neither tolerating the claims of the other, the one is often subordinated to the other. This may be right. Unfortunately what should then dominate is often made subordinate and vice versa. Thus Fr Eric D’Arcy writes:
Of course, one of the elements of the decision which one’s reason ultimately makes will be the guidance of authoritative and skilled moralists whose standing we accept; but it has to be the individual’s judgment of conscience that this is an authority which we may safely accept. As Mr Hare says, other people cannot make decisions of principle for us unless we have first decided to take their advice or obey their orders (Conscience and its Right to Freedom, Stag edition p 216).
D’Arcy goes on to quote Newman in support:
Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink — to the Pope, if you please — still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards (Difficulties of Anglicans, 1910, vol 2 p 261).
Now we may I think take these authors as referring here to a common, non-technical notion of conscience which, we might want to say, is our knowledge, either of what we ought to do or of the rightness or wrongness of what we have done, or merely the memory of an unambiguously evil deed. But here at once the difficulty would meet us of the erroneous conscience. If this is as much a conscience as a correct one is then it seems we cannot characterize conscience as knowledge, not even as our knowledge. It will only be a seeming knowledge of right and wrong, and a seeming only to ourselves moreover.