Season 2, Episode 9: Encountering My Moral Conscience
In this episode, the hosts discuss attuning to our own moral conscience understood as a personal capacity of sensing what is right in a given situation. In contrast with moralistic attitudes or a priori prescribed percepts about right or wrong, encountering our moral conscience means encountering ourselves as persons, and trusting our own capacity to sense what is right. Listening to and following our moral conscience requires courage and vulnerability to trust our inner moral compass and our capacity to sense what is right and to do justice to what is right.
In Existential Analysis, moral conscience is defined as the sense for the hierarchy of values in a situation with regard to what this person perceives as overall good and therefore finds to be „right“. In other words, encountering our moral conscience means finding the personal resonance between one’s own person or essence and the values involved in a certain situation. It means asking oneself: what do I sense to be right or the right thing to do in this particular situation? If I am listening closely to myself, what is right in this situation?
This understanding of the moral conscience is different than following the moral norms prescribed by others or the moralistic injunctions internalized from parents or other authority figures. While the voice of our moral conscience is a gentle, firm, quiet, persistent voice that speaks within us and is always on our side by pointing to what is the right thing to do, the voice of our internalized models of moral behaviour- also called the superego- typically talks to us and is loud, critical, insistent and often blaming or shaming. Distinguishing between moral conscience and superego is important for engaging in authentic, personal ethical action.
Some people tend to be afraid of following their moral conscience because of the perceived risk of being selfish, “too subjective”, or because of the fear of making mistakes. This attitude reveals both a mistrust in one’s own experience and intuitive capacity to know what is right, and a misunderstanding of what moral conscience is. Moral conscience is not an individualistic capacity that looks exclusively after individual’s rights at the expense of others. On the contrary, encountering our moral conscience represents as deep responsibility for the other and emerges from a relational space. In encountering our moral conscience, we face the question: as I attune to myself as a person, what do I sense to be right in this particular situation and that would be right at the personal level of shared humanity for anyone who would find oneself in that exact situation? This way, our moral conscience connects us with humanity and does justice to our inherent relationality as human beings.
In psychotherapy, the theme of moral conscience shows up often particularly with clients who suffered or perpetrated injustices, or relational harm or violations. The questions of what is right and what is justice in a given situation become acute existential dilemmas that are usually accompanied by intense distress- the concepts of moral distress and moral injury have been coined to describe this sometimes agonizing anguish. Shame and guilt are emotions that are also present in these circumstances. The existential therapist can accompany and support these clients in their search for what is right and taking an ethical position by encouraging them to attune to themselves, to experience the resonance at the bottom of their heart or at their core and to ask themselves from that place what is right in that specific situation.
References:
Costas Douzinas - The End of Human Rights
Sigmund Freud (Freud Museum London) - What is Psychoanalysis? – The Ego, the Id and the Superego
Sara Kubric - The Lived Experience of Moral Injury in the Context of Intimate Partner Relationships: A Phenomenological Exploration
