Conscience always pricks twice

Anthony Kenny, the author of a philosophical biography of Sir Thomas More, has imagined what the 16th-century martyr for conscience would have made of the celebrated 20th-century play about him, A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. “I am sure that the real More would have enjoyed Bolt’s play but I think he would have been mightily puzzled by the conduct of its hero.”

Mr Kenny argues that the play’s understanding of conscience is significantly different from that which motivated More in his refusal to approve Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. I think the debate on parliamentarians’ conscience is displaying a similar rift: a difference not just about whether it is appropriate to invoke conscience after a consultative referendum but also about what conscience means at all.

We disagree about whether following one’s conscience displays moral character – the traits of responsibility, fairness, trustworthiness and citizenship – or, rather, its lack.

The argument arises partly out of differences of interpretation over what calling a referendum entailed. Some say “consultative” is what it said on the tin (my view, as it happens, but that’s another column). But for those who feel cheated by an MP who agrees to call a referendum and then feels free to diverge from the majority view, the invocation of conscience is understandably the acme of irresponsibility, unfairness, untrustworthiness, etc. If conscience is what prompts you to behave well when no one is watching, here it seems to rationalise bad behaviour under the spotlight.

But the argument is also about what conscience is. Revisiting Bolt’s play is illuminating, since there are uncanny echoes of it in our heated exchanges.

One example is the dialogue between More and Henry’s enforcer (today we might say “enabler”), Thomas Cromwell. More has just said that a loyal subject is beholden to be more loyal to conscience than to any other thing. Cromwell retorts: “And so provide a noble motive for his frivolous self-conceit!”

More protests that it is a necessary respect for his own soul. Cromwell again retorts: “Your own self, you mean!” They hate each other, the stage directions underline, and each other’s standpoint.

By now, Cromwell’s way with words may be the envy of Malta’s commentariat. He says so well what many of them have been trying to say less eloquently: that the invocation of conscience is highly selective; that it visits, like the postman, with a special ring at the door, at the opportune time to satisfy inopportune desires.

So it is worth remembering that the play lionises More, not Cromwell. It presents More, as Mr Kenny points out, as a 20th-century existentialist hero: someone who (like the play) understands conscience to be a kind of autonomous lawgiver, the flame of an individual’s personal genius or inner self. It matters – as More tells Norfolk – not because what it proclaims is true or right or even a credo but because it is his own and he is committed to it. Conscience as self-expression.

Such a picture of conscience has been perhaps the most common one in Western culture since the Enlightenment. Its cult of the individual is an essential part of an anticonformist liberal temperament. When Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando criticises the invocation of conscience as dangerous and undemocratic, he overlooks that it is usually unnecessary to invoke conscience when one shares the general consensus.

To criticise the invocation of conscience because it goes against the will of the ruling majority is to criticise, in practice, any invocation of conscience. Perhaps we should be asking if Dr Pullicino Orlando’s view of the dangers of conscience is itself dangerous for an open society.

However, the real More would have needed the modern notion of conscience to be explained to him. And he would have probably rejected it, just as he would have been nonplussed by our reporters asking politicians if they intended to vote “according to conscience” on this vote or that, as though conscience was only relevant on select occasions. More shared the view of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas that one acted according to conscience whenever one acted with good sense – in any decision in which one drew, open-mindedly, on sifted experience, one’s reading of the political game, reason, foresight and shrewdness.

Conscience might be most visible when one was a lonely dissenter but its normal operations were to be found in every action which called for sound judgement and its implementation.

One encountered one’s conscience not in lighting a candle to it in one’s inner sanctum but in acting in and upon the world. In Bolt’s play, conscience can never be wrong because its value is self-expression not truth; for the real More, a mistaken conscience was a real danger. It was always wrong to act against one’s conscience; but sometimes also wrong to follow it.

If More were an anti-divorce MP today, I suspect he would reject the idea that he was obliged simply to vote yes when the Bill came to be passed. He would be prepared to dissent (and not resign). But I also suspect that, in formulating what his conscience dictated, he would ask himself not just about the consequences of a divorce law but also about the consequences, for the effectiveness of future Christian political action, of incurring the consuming political wrath of the electorate.

ranierfsadni@europe.com