Moral Conscience and Its Role in Behavior Choices

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In Unemotionality Inherently Selfish, we were discussing the importance of moral sentiments, or the social emotions, (i.e., love, compassion, pity, shame, empathy, sympathy, guilt, embarrassment, pride) and perhaps the overall lack of emotional intensity being the cause of selfish behavior and perhaps even the amorality that defines psychopathy. Larval even cited Dr. Robert Hare's book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us in reference to their lack of moral conscience, their ability to consider right and wrong.

This leads me to some questions. First, what precisely is conscience? How does it inhibit or compel our behavior? Can a person without a conscience be, to the objective observer, a morally good person? Do psychopaths truly have no conscience at all? How is conscience and moral reasoning in general different in people with Asperger's syndrome and other autistic spectrum conditions?

To the first question, I would consider one's conscience to be the intuition that a considered course of action is somehow right or wrong. Most people have an inherent emotional connection—even if it is weak—with other people and will intuitively feel a sense of impending wrongness if they consider choosing a course of action that may harm others needlessly to pursue their own interests. Likewise, they may see suffering and feel the desire to help alleviate it, even if they do not know the person. Some people's conscience extends further with heavy religious prohibitions creating a neurotic sense of guilt; they take the concept of not being selfish further by believing that anything that feels good must be bad and thus feel much anxiety over everything. Fortunately, I can say I am free of this neurotic guilt.

Conscience usually affects our behavior simply from these feelings it stirs up for the sake of others. We have a certain desire for harmony rooted fundamentally in ourselves in addition to the desire to sate our own appetites. To ignore the dictates of our consciences requires reasoning that levels moral principles justifying our actions above other courses of action; sometimes, of course, this reasoning can be tenuous and very egocentric, but this is how people can ignore their conscience.

The questions of whether a person without a conscience can be good and whether psychopaths truly have no conscience are questions I'll leave open to discussion.

As for Asperger's syndrome and moral reasoning, I think we will tend to choose a more logical reasoning than emotional one in general.

Darn, I've got to go to class.

I think the conscience is 1 a library of learned proper acts, and 2 the brains problem solving ability applied to achieving its needs and wants with those learned acts in consideration. I think that in one sense a person can just coincidentally appear to be a morally good person if they have not commited any acts people think arent morally good. In another sense your definition of a morally good person may be someone who has a conscience of a certain type and inclination.

I think sociopaths have a conscience as i have described it, but the brain of a sociopath has different neurochemical needs than a normal brain and i think they dont learn the library of proper acts like a normal person would.

I think that autistic people and aspergers also have different needs to be fulfilled so we learn different proper acts. It has much similarity to a normal person, but there are differences. Also on average we think a whole lot more, and put a lot more conscious thought into our emotions than a normal person which is mostly a subconscious thing. And we are very logical in our emotions because of all the thinking and the fact that we have slightly different needs from a normal person. So in some cases it looks like we are emotionless. We are just less subconscious-emotion dominant.

You ever notice how if you present a reasonable piece of evidence to some normal person who is offended by that evidence, they will emotionally defend themselves, instead of trying to reach with their minds and incorporate the new information into their understanding of the world? I think this is because for normal people their emotions are mostly subconscious and they never think about them, and thus do not know how to manage them when thinking about something that provokes them.

Psychopaths can definitely be good people. Responsible people, even.

They are responsible for their own actions just like everyone else.

They are not impaired in any way except for lacking a moral conscience and having impulses that they don't bother to control. (They can, they just have no desire to try.)

Some may lack higher emotions, but thats a different story altogether, and doesn't affect their responsibility.