The seat of moral conscience

[Richard Norman]

Hello.

I am trying to discover where lies the seat of moral conscience.

I have issues from the relationship with my mother and my Soul image is less than perfect, I am also not the most moral person you could meet, but I'me working on that.

I am reminded of the words of William Blake; "I have genius and honour I need nothing more" he was referring to the masculine and feminine aspects of his psyche. His genius being the masculine and his honour (or moral conscience) being the feminine.

This suggests to me that a sense of honour or a moral conscience derives from the Soul image?

Any thoughts of this please?

Thank you.

Richard.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

Moral conscience comes from our concern for our fellow human, though also concern for ourselves as a continual being. The concern for each other is likely mammalian in nature. In MBTI, it is most linked to the Feeling function, in particular Fi.

It is tied to our ability to imagine ourselves as another person, and as ourselves in the future. So it is linked to empathy and the imagination. It is linked to the ability to learn, as a guilty conscience is a means of self-punishment to not repeat a behaviour which has had negative effects.

 

[Thurlor]

More often than not moral decisions seem to be shaped by disgust.

 

[Cognisant]

Your emotions are your instincts, if your morality is simply based upon how you feel then you're just letting your impulses direct you, I don't consider that moral.

A codified rational morality (i.e. thou shalt not do something) isn't inherently better, instead it's better to understand why you should or should not do something, to have a moral philosophy.

What is your moral philosophy?

 

[Invisible Gorilla]

One way of looking at this is through the big 5 personality traits' framework. Some of these traits include agreeableness (seeking to create harmony via empathy) and orderliness (which focuses on maintaining the order of things). Atsu's description has close resemblance to the description agreeableness. Interestingly, there's some evidence that orderliness is related to disgust (something Thurlor pointed out). These traits, however, have negative aspects as well. We can say that agreeableness, since it mainly seeks harmony through empathy, can miss or blind itself from important information that can cause it to act impulsively. On the other hand, orderly individuals can attempts to classically and operantly condition the individual into submitting to a certain order, by projecting disgust onto them if they do not obey. This is similar to what Cognisant pointed out.
I don't know about the seat of moral conscience, but perhaps it's from the proper interaction of agreeableness and orderliness that the seat of moral conscience could emerge at the individual and the societal level. Perhaps, each trait must attempt to keep the negative aspects of the other trait in check or something along those lines .....