Sexual Ethics And Conscience Essay

Whether or not conscience is the best guide to making moral decisions on sexual ethics depends on one key thing, what conscience is. There are many different views of this, with many different philosophers taking a point of view on the definition. Freud, an 19th Century Austrian Neurologist said that conscience is the conflict between our ‘ego' and our ‘super-ego', which depends on our upbringing and societies rules as to how it imposes of what we do, known to us, as guilt, where obeying our super-ego rather than our ego resulted in guilt.

Freud was not the only scholar to have a view on what conscience was, with St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th Century American Scholar also trying to define what it was. Aquinas portrayed that conscience was
If you take Aquinas' view that it is a faculty for reasoning of which we have a right to educate it, then going against your conscience would be going against God's teachings, which is wrong. However, he also says that ignorance is no excuse, saying that if a person has not educated their conscience enough to make right decisions, then they are also wrong.

Aquinas' view is very contrasting to that of Butler, who also believes that it is religion based, but instead of our own faculty to make our decisions, it is the voice of God, which should always be obeyed. He believed that to "disobey ones conscience is to deny one's very self". Butler does however leave a slight flaw in the theory of logic, in that he states you can mishear or misunderstand your conscience, which leaves the problem when you should obey your conscience, and when you think you have misheard, as disobeying your conscience is not an option in his mind. If this is put in the context of sexual ethics, when many thousands of Catholics disagreed with Pope Paul XVI's view of contraception, Butler would have said that these people will have been right to make the decision to go against the church's