Thomas More on Conscience, Courage, & the Comedy of Politics (original) (raw)
Thomas More on Tyranny: What Is Distinctive in His Early Thematic and Literary Treatment?
Moreana, 2012
This paper analyzes More’s earliest writings on tyranny completed before More joined Henry VIII’s court in 1518. It argues that More’s treatment is distinctive in several ways: in contrasting the tyrant to Cicero’s princeps rather than to Plato’s just man or to Aristotle’s king; in the use of an unsettling comic tone; in the deeply perplexing and clever ways of engaging inquiry; and in thematic preoccupation with the need for effective citizenship education ordered to peace, prosperity, liberty in law, and civic friendship.
The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy of Western Ethical Experience
" In Western thought, it has been persistently assumed that in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience rather than on external authorities, laws, and regulations. This volume investigates this concept, examining the development of the Western politics of conscience, from Socrates to the present, and the formation of the Western ethico-political subject. The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics. This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization. Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. National Socialism and the Inner Truth The Call of Heidegger’s Conscience Nihilism of Judgment: Arendt 3. Conscience in Moral and Political Theology Church Fathers between the Law and the Spirit Synderesis and Conscientia: Scholasticism Divine Instinct The Spark of the Soul: Eckhart and Tauler A Voluntarist Bias of William Ockham? The Lutheran Revocation The Return of the Repressed: Spiritualists and Pietists Calvin’s Compromise The Puritan God within On the Modern Protestant Conscience 4. Conscience in Early Modern Moral and Political Philosophy The Witness of Natural Law from Suárez to Pufendorf The Candle of the Lord: Cambridge Platonists A Crisis of Conscience: Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke 5. The Conscience of the Enlightenment The Moral Sense from Shaftesbury to Smith The Judgement of Intuitive Reason: Clarke, Butler, Price, Reid and Beyond The French Experience: from Bayle to Rousseau The German Model: Wolff versus Crusius Immanuel Kant and the Infinite Guilt German Idealism: Conscience as Conviction 6. From Political Theology to Theologized Politics 7. Remarks on Late Modern Conscience Internalized Coercion: Nietzsche and Freud The Voice of the Other: Levinas and Derrida Ethics of the Real: Lacan 8. The Western Politics of Conscience On the Socratic Origins of the Politics of Conscience Conclusion "
Thomas More, England and the Martyrs: Martyrs of conscience.
Conference talk presented at the 2018 Europa Christi Congress 14-22 October, Częstochowa, Warszaw, Rzeszów, Lublin Lodź, Kraków. This Paper will both ambitiously cover a few notable English martyrs as well as some of their institutions, and meekly confine itself to a panoramic view of the topic. It will present the English Martyrs, as Martyrs both of the Libertas Ecclesiae and Conscience.
Pax Americana: A comment on Martha Nussbaum's Liberty of Conscience
My dear wife: Mr. Davies will tell you what's happening here. He's a good man and has done everything he can for me. There are some other good men too, only they don't realize what they're doing. They're the ones I feel sorry for, because it'll be over for me but they'll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world because then he's not just breaking one law, but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody's conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived? I guess that's all I've got to say, except kiss the babies for me, and God bless you. Your husband, Donald."-The Ox-Bow Incident These are the words penned by an innocent man in the few moments granted to him to before he is lynched by men convinced of his guilt. They are heard for the first time in the film, The Ox-Bow Incident, in this final scene when the letter is read aloud to those who now know they are guilty of murdering the writer. As Henry Fonda speaks the dead man's words his eyes are obscured by the brim of another man's hat, as if to emphasise that these words spring from the lips of Justice, whose blindness symbolizes her impartiality and, so, her unwavering commitment to what is right. Law, justice, right, civilization, humanity, conscience, God. Not only are these notions intertwined but they also described how we are all linked: by law, by the justice it serves, and by the faculty called conscience, which contains within it the possibility of civilization. Reading Martha Nussbaum's spirited defence of Liberty of Conscience, I could not help recalling this particular scene from one of America's most famous westerns.
"A Moral Surprise: Common Foundation of Christianity and Modern Politics"
Keynote Address, Acton University, The Acton Institute, June 16, 2016, 2016
This talk explores the fundamental meaning of the freedom of conscience and demonstrates that it is actually a foundation both of Christianity and political liberty. It operationalizes without mentioning the “passions, opinions, and interests” that James Madison invoked in Federalist Paper number ten as the motive forces operating in human life, with the understanding that opinion is the mediating term which is required to actuate either passions or interests. That argument means that opinion bears forcefully on the sensory world through reason, while recognizing that it operates as well from the supersensory or transcendent realm. That reality means that humans have the capacity to produce motion or movement in the sensory world without first being moved in a sensory manner. To that limited extent the human is akin to Aristotle’s unmoved mover – the human acts a little bit like God in the world. But the most important question is whether that action is constrained or arbitrary. If it is strictly guided by reason, then it is not transcendent. Historically, accordingly, humans have resorted to a separate faculty, called conscience (a moral cause), to account for their ability to move independently of material cause. We inquire, therefore, whether conscience is a sure guide. We do this particularly in light of the pride of place conscience holds in governing human conduct, since the freedom of conscience is the over-riding foundation of political liberty. For if conscience proved to be a mere chimera, then it would follow that humans can and may act without accountability in the sensory world. To occupy this authoritative ground conscience would have to govern man above all other potential causes of human conduct. That this is the claim for conscience is underscored by the role it plays in defining political freedom. For the enforcement of freedom of conscience means explicitly interfering with the operation of all other sources of rule (that is, human sources of rule) in determining human conduct. That position does not inhere in individualism, equality, or consent, since each of those can yield a “free-for-all” with respect to competing human claims of authority. To express it differently, there exists no moral or ethical foundation for yielding to collective authority, apart from the subordination of collective authority – and hence any human authority – to the transcendent authority that informs conscience. While political freedom, for example, may have good consequences (such as in producing a more equitable distribution of resources), it can do so only if it stands upon the foundation of freedom of conscience. That is, political freedom requires a freedom of conscience that is not itself the product of political freedom; It is rather a construct of divine revelation.
2009
I. THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 1 IN her remarkable book Liberty of Conscience, Martha Nussbaum chooses Roger Williams as her chief reference point for the historical and programmatic unfolding of America's Tradition of Religious Equalily. Like Williams's work on The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 2 this newer study might
The law has yet to articulate a separate test for conscience in the law. The fact that it has not done so raises a number of questions: Why? Is it possible that the concept of conscience and religion is, in their essence, the same? If they are different, which the jurisprudence suggests they are, how are they different? What are their parameters? How are we able to distinguish between the two? Until these questions are answered – and there are no doubt many others – we are left with a definition of religion that may well be the basis upon which we can use to define “conscience.”
New Blackfriars, 1959
MODERATOR: The subject of this disputation is a fundamental one and touches the centre of every moral dilemma-for the individual as well as for the community at large. Conscience and law. Are they enemies, and is the most we can hope to achieve an armed neutrality, so that the conflict between them can at lcast be kept within bounds? Or are thcy brothers, twins-and Siamese twins at that, so that one must necessarily imply the other? Of course we must first want to see what the words mean, for here, as always, we are a t the mercy of the labels we use to avoid the painful work of thinking. Conscience-too easily it can be the name for the spontaneous response of anarchy or anguish: law-as easily it can be the title for no nonsense, the totalitarian's eternal alibi. To decide what is their relationship, then, must demand a careful scrutiny of what their function is: a function that is proper to the human person, with a mind to know and a will to implement his knowledge. That is why the form of this disputation may be specially useful, demanding as it does a patient definition of terms, and a guarded inspection of their use in argument. I The slightly abbreviated text of a Disputation held at the Aquinas Centre, St Dominic's Priory, N.W.5, on May I, 1958, and broadcast on the Third Programme of the B.B.C.
Conscience: A Philosophical History (in progress)
There is no doubting conscience is central to the human condition and our understanding of it. Still, questions arise. What is its origin and purpose? What does it disclose? And how? Although any historical schema will be imperfect to the extent that it must be incomplete, broadly speaking, the history of the concept of conscience can be usefully divided into four familiar periods: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern. Historically, it has been conceived in numerous ways, whether as an innate capacity responsible for the ability to discern right from wrong (the Hebrew Prophets), as a voice of divine guidance (Socrates), as an internal tribunal whereby we pass judgment on ourselves by way of reason (Kant and German Idealism), as the ontological hallmark of our capacity for authentic individuality (Heidegger), or as an internalization of society’s repressive norms and mores (Freud). This rich and variegated conceptual reception only serves to underscore the phenomenon’s remarkable pertinence to multiple dimensions of philosophical interest. It is, perhaps first above all, a matter of our individual responsibility and morality. What, for example, does the capacity to draw moral judgments on its basis reveal about what it is to be the selves each of us is? It also, second, is an item of social, communal, and political significance. What, for example, does it mean to have our actions laid bare before others for moral and rational appraisal as social and political beings? And, of course, it is a spiritual matter too, as it discloses us before God. How, then, does conscience lay us bare before ourselves, others, and God? From Plato to Kant and Fichte, from Rousseau and Mill to Nietzsche and Freud, from the Prophets and Apostles to Heidegger, this work traces the evolution of the concept of conscience’s formation, in turn highlighting how the capacity to hear, and so heed, its voice forms the heart of man.