What an interesting and extremely complicated question!!!
I was secretly hoping you'd reply to this
🙂 😉
The issue of defining the conscience poses questions of one's identity.
When someone says something like "I would never do that" they are defining who they are based upon their perceived future behaviour.
The question becomes, how do we define the conscience and how would affect our behaviour if that element of our being were absent.
As I stated earlier in the thread, I believe we
are souls and
have bodies. However, I am very much open to the concept of us "constructing" our own souls/conscience based on what is deemed acceptable in society.
In the verse the soul has been used as the defining point between good and evil. In the real world I don't really believe in good and evil, but in good and bad choices. So with that in mind, the decisions we make every day are essentially constructing our "souls" or "conscience".
Also how does this affect our relationships and how we treat others.
I've been wondering to what extent does society factor in the construction of conscience. If our society did not view murder as a heinous crime, would people feel bad about it if they killed someone?
In any number of choices a person makes during their day, how many of them are sourced from the fear/awareness of how society would judge them, than out of a desire to do what one believes/feels is "right". The internet is a good barometer on this, every day you see people be aggressive, rude and abusive, in an environment that cannot be policed and so lacks any real consequences. How right or wrong it is to be abusive to another person, even one you cannot see, does not appear to factor.
That leads to a question of whether conscience actually exists, or is it merely the environment you are placed in is the "conscience" and you acting in a way that best allows you to survive there.
As for how I would be without a conscience? I have no idea. How I treat others is based on a feeling of empathy, which may be both biological or societal in its nature with perhaps one informing the other. A change in such behaviour might be due to drastic social changes or physiological differences.
I very much agree.
So the question remains: If we rid ourselves of our conscience, then how much of 'us' is really left?
I find myself wondering, are we "us" at all whilst utilising either our own personal conscience, or our collective societal conscience.
