Conscience is usually conceived of as an inner voice, which says “do this” or “don’t do that”. This may be a perfectly usable conception. But it may be more accurate to think of conscience as a voice that says “look at this”. If one wants to put this grammatically, one could say that moral judgments are made in an indicative rather than imperative mode.
I think this is already implied in the first Biblical story of the crime of murder, that of Abel by Cain (Genesis 4). God asks Cain where Abel is, and after Cain asks impertinently whether he is his brother’s keeper, God imposes a terrible judgment against him. But before pronouncing this judgment, God does not list the commandments that Cain violated—not being his brother’s keeper, harboring vicious envy, murdering an innocent person. (In the chronology of the Biblical narrative, God could not have done this: There were no commandments at the time. Moses brought down the tablets of the law from Mount Sinai; apparently Adam did not from some hillock in the Garden of Eden). What God did say to Cain: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” In other words God tells Cain to visualize the scene of the crime: “Look at this!” Such a look can prevent a crime as well as revealing one.
Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) was a Japanese diplomat who served as a consul in Lithuania during World War II. Contrary to his instructions, he issued Japanese visas to thousands of Jewish refugees, thereby allowing them to escape from the Nazis. After his return to Japan (where he was penalized for disobeying instructions), he was asked in an interview why he had done what he did. (He had no previous Jewish associations or indeed interest of any kind in Jews.) In reply Sugihara could only say: “These people were very desperate”. In other words, he had looked.
The Chinese philosopher Mengzi (372-289 BCE), known as Mencius in Western languages, proposed that certain moral values are universally embedded in human minds. To illustrate this proposition, he mentioned the case of a man coming upon a child tottering dangerously on the edge of a pool: Even if this man is a violent criminal, he will feel a strong urge to pull the child back to safety. The little story is immediately persuasive. But, with all due respect to Mencius (the second-most famous Chinese thinker after Confucius), he seems to have overlooked three alternative scenarios: The traveler may have a sick soul and enjoys watching children drown (what today would be called a psychopath). Or the child may belong to a group with which the man’s own tribe is engaged in mortal conflict. Or the traveler may have joined what Confucians would call an “evil cult”. In these scenarios the visual scene fails to provoke a sense of compassion. We shall return below to the problem this possibility poses for Mencius’ optimism about the Confucian notion of “human-heartedness”: How come that some people lack that quality?
On April 1, 2015, The Christian Century published an article by Charles Camosy about a change in American public opinion about abortion. According to recent polls 62% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal rarely or not at all; 42% that it should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is under threat. There are demographic shifts relevant for the future: Latinos (both Catholic and Protestant) tend strongly against abortion—and their proportion of the American population has grown as I write this. Another significant demographic fact: Young people are increasingly opposed to abortion. Although many of them are quite oblivious of this, they also get older. What is more, older people survive longer than insurance statisticians hope. The result of all of this is that the U.S. is the only advanced industrial society whose population is not rapidly aging (I don’t know about Canada and Australia, who also have lots of fertility-friendly immigrants—a competitive advantage, at any rate economically, compared to pension-collecting Europeans and Japanese, soon to be joined by the victims of China’s one-child family policy). Over 70% of American teenagers in 2003 thought that abortion was morally wrong; in 2012 only 37% of so-called millennials considered abortion to be morally acceptable.
Of course it is possible that Latinos will become more pro-choice with social mobility, as will young people when they get older. As of now, it is reasonable to think that the society will become more pro-life. It is interesting to consider the difference in how public opinion has shifted on same-sex marriage and on abortion. Both practices are embraced by progressive lobbies, both well-organized and well-funded. But the pro-choice campaign has not managed to reach as far into the conservative community. My own hunch is that the crucial factor of visualization works favorably in the pro-life cause, but not in that of same-sex marriage. I don’t think that many heterosexuals, progressive or conservative, are interested in visualizing same-sex marriage; if they are in favor of it, they are motivated by general values of fairness and by empathy with particular gay individuals they have come to know. In the case of abortion, visualization works both ways: Ultrasound technology makes the more developed fetus visible and looking more recognizably human; the details of late-term abortion, propagated relentlessly by many pro-choice activists, create repugnance if visualized. If nothing else, previously uninvolved people are motivated to ask both pro-choice and pro-life advocates: Just which stage in the pregnancy cycle are you talking about?
One can assert plausibly than the tendency in two fronts of the so-called culture war in the U.S. has been in contrary directions: more conservative in the matter of abortion, more progressive in the matter of capital punishment. There has also been a shift in public opinion concerning the latter—not dramatic but steady. Survey data indicate that unqualified support of the death penalty has been declining. So has the practice. If an alternative of life without parole is legally possible, prosecutors as well as juries tend to favor it. The number of executions has markedly declined (Texas and Florida can share the dubious honor of running the machinery of death with most verve). There have been a sizable number of cases in which (often due to DNA analysis) engaged lawyers were able to show that individuals were convicted and sentenced to death unjustly. There is a factor of international embarrassment: the U.S. is the only Western democracy retaining the death penalty, it vies with China and Iran for the number of incarcerated people, and the conditions in many of its prisons are scandalous (I would imagine that many foreign service officers, mandated by law to advocate human rights abroad, must hope for reform of the U.S. penal system). Recently there have been several shocking cases of individuals being killed by lethal injection and suffering painful and prolonged deaths (motivating the Utah legislature to permit the previously discarded method of execution by firing squad). There very probably was the factor of new opposition to the death penalty by the Roman Catholic Church (beginning in the papacy of John Paul II and reaffirmed in strong language by Francis I). It was expressed most recently in March 2015 by a unique common editorial in four prominent Catholic periodicals, two broadly liberal (National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal) and two broadly conservative (National Catholic Register and America).
I would argue that, as in the matter of abortion, visualization has been a factor in the turn against capital punishment. Unless you have the privilege of living in Iran or Saudi Arabia, you rarely see a public execution. But Americans have recently been able to read detailed descriptions of botched executions; on television they often see pictures of execution chambers ready for the administration of lethal injection, made up to look like operating rooms in a hospital. Not much imagination is needed to visualize the actual events, and thus to be disabused of the illusion that this country has finally invented a humane method of killing. Yet ISIS actually uses the visualizations of its horribly cruel killings to gain recruits. Young men and even women, both in the Middle East and in Europe, watch the videos of these executions and are motivated to travel to Syria in order to join the warriors and torturers of the new Caliphate. Some may have been sadistic psychopaths before, but many are going through a religious conversion process which destroys any previously internalized sense of compassion.
Was Mencius wrong in his view of human nature? Yes and no: Fellow feeling and pity for strangers are certainly not universally compelling. Probably the capacity for them is innate, perhaps genetically transmitted. But for them to be actualized to motivate behavior requires institutions which instill them in children and sustain them in adults. An individual has the physiological equipment to see, but he must learn where to look. I don’t know where Sugihara learned to feel pity for complete strangers; certainly many servants of Imperial Japan had succeeded in suppressing it. However, once a certain way of looking has been internalized—as what we call “conscience”—it asserts universal validity in the mind. Even if I know that my abhorrence of, say, raping captives is the result of my particular cultural upbringing and is not shared by people from other backgrounds, this will not prevent me from making a confident moral judgment against the practice. (What I then propose to do about it is another matter, strongly dependent on my capacity to do anything.) For me to forget such deeply instilled perceptions requires a considerable effort. It can be coercively induced, which is why Nazi killers were specially trained. And why the Nazi regime committed its worst horrors far in the conquered territories in the east, in order to hide them from ordinary Germans. One does not have to delve into the psychology of terror to understand that one must learn to look in a certain way, and that one can manage to look away. If one wants certain moral judgments to be taken for granted in a society, one must have institutions that teach children these judgments and support adults to obey them.
