Conscience, Freedom, Choice and Decision Making in Relation to Morality
By Agbom Kenneth
Introduction
Human experience gives strong evidence for their existence. This experience is greatly influenced by what one believes in. The question is whether the moral agent will earnestly ask himself/herself whether his/her experience of the Ultimate influences his actions. Holistically, how does this experience in our daily action relate to our conscience, freedom, choice and decision making? How does it affect us in our daily lives? What must we do to live out the intention of our creator according to the dictates of our moral codes irrespective of our worldview? It is in the light of these pertinent questions that this study intends to examine conscience, freedom, choice and decision making in relation to morality.
To this end, this study is divided into three parts. The first part dwells on conceptual clarifications. The second part dwells on conscience, freedom, choice, and decision making in relation to morality (Christian morality), then, followed by a conclusion.
1.1 Conceptual Clarifications
Conscience is a judgment of reason. Even though reason can sometimes err, we therefore have a duty always to learn more through our actions. For Madison, (1792), he sees conscience as the most sacred of all property. Indeed, it is the free decision to heed or reject the voice of God in one's conscience that defines whether a person is good or evil. In the same line of thought, freedom is a means to human excellence, to human happiness to the fulfillment of human destiny. Freedom is the ability to act or change without constraint. Saliba, (2007) in his words opined that freedom is not the right to do what one wills, but the will to do what is right without constraint. Choice on its own part is seen as an outcome of a process which involves assessment and judgment; that is, the evaluation of different options and making a decision about which option to choose. In order for these processes to take place and a choice to be made, one may have two or more alternatives from which to choose. Decision making means the process of deciding about something important, especially in a group of people, institution or in an organization. Newport & Trewatha (2002) remarked that decision making involves the selection of a course of action from among two or more possible alternatives in order to arrive at a solution for a given problem. Brown (2008) divided the decision-making process into seven steps: Outline your goal and outcome, gather data, develop alternatives (i.e., brainstorming), list pros and cons of each alternative, make the decision, immediately take action to implement it and learn from and reflect on the decision. This makes it a continuous and dynamic activity that pervades all other activities pertaining to any institution. Since it is an ongoing activity, decision making process plays vital importance in the functioning of an institution/organization. Since intellectual minds are involved in the process of decision making, it requires solid scientific knowledge coupled with skills and experience in addition to mental maturity as we discuss them in the context of morality (moral ethics)..
Conscience, Freedom, Choice, and Decision Making.
2.1 Conscience in relation to Morality
In relation to morality, conscience is that moral faculty of man which tells him subjectively what is good and evil and manifests his moral obligation to him (Lecture Note on Moral Theology, 2012). Law as the subject norm of moral conduct remains a call which comes to man from outside, it stands over against the moral person. But there is a faculty in man that corresponds to the call of law; it hears the call and lead man to concrete moral action. This faculty is called conscience. The law as the objective norm provides general information about the moral character of various actions while conscience executes the action for the moral person’s conduct. Moral law of various societies as the adjective norm of morality cannot reach its purpose and guide human activity towards humans’ ultimate end unless the law is captured by conscience and the conscience recognizes its obligatory character.
2.2 Freedom in Relation to Morality
Freedom means the capacity to make choice that are genuinely your own. With free will comes moral responsibility which deals with our ownership of our good and bad deeds. Augustine, in his book the City of God opined that freedom is likened to human beings endowed with power that is called the ‘will’. He emphasizes the will as being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. He narrows it down as the absence of constraint, the capacity to follow one's own desires and inclinations without hindrance. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Suma noted that Human beings have free will and are masters of themselves through their free will. Free will can be impeded by obstacles or ignorance but naturally moves toward God. Yet, equating freedom to being human does not mean that it is human to be free but, to be free is to be human. The question then is ‘what is human?’ Murray, (1965) remarked that “what is human is remarkably open to determination with the sole provision that whatever comes out of it must be human. The idea and the reality will not be completed until the last man has lived and died, and has had his last thought. An attempt to describe human will lead one to these three basic terms: nature, God and freedom itself.
However, human is a natural being created by God (the freedom) out of grace (unconditional love). This pinpoints the fact that for a human to be free, he or she has to move from the state of being human to being God. It is the “non posse peccare” of a holy character and so, it is not in the nature of man to attain freedom in immediacy unless one is nurtured by God’s spirit. Thus, “man’s moral nature is threatened from this side of nature, because while the moral life rises up in self-defense against, it feels secure in dependence on the Divine (Hastings & Selbie, 1974). Hence, for man to be free, one has to be in mutuality with God. Subjectively, this is what the clarion call made by Paul (you were called to freedom) entails. Essentially, this is what we call freedom with responsibility which makes a man to be responsible to his/her actions.
To buttress this, the sovereignty of God is thus essential to this freedom because it means the conservation of spiritual values, and it gives the individual certainty of moral victory while it frees him or her from the tyranny of sin and the world. Negatively, it is freedom from sin; positively, for righteousness. By and large, for man to be free, one has to align oneself to the will of God who created humans (by His grace) to be free (not by keeping laws). As a being with gift of freewill to choose, possessing this freedom is the by-product of one’s choice and decision making (Hastings & Selbie, 1974).
2.3 Choice in relation to Morality
Choice is simply the outcome of a process which involves assessment and judgment; that is, the evaluation of different options and making a decision about which option to choose. However, it suggests that different people in different situations frequently think about choice making in the same way. Hastie & Dawes, (2001) noted that human beings have a common set of cognitive skills, these cognitive skills and their limitations are also influential in constraining choices so that choice making in reality varies from what may be seen as ideal and logical.
Nevertheless, Choice-making has both cognitive and emotional components. To substantiate this claim, Lemerise & Arsenio (2000:71) postulate that emotion and cognition are both types of information processing, but they have different functions. Many theorists see emotion as alerting individuals to important features of a situation and providing direction for cognitive processes and behavior in relation to choice, people think about the options and the likely consequences of choosing an option, but in addition there are strong emotional factors in play. People have feelings about the decision and expectations about feelings that might result from choosing different options. The emotions actually experienced as a result of the outcome of a choice may or may not concur with earlier expectations. This emotion helps to prioritize between different options and reduce the amount of information to being processed. Affective reactions are often the first reactions to stimuli and may then guide processing and judgment. For Zajonc, (1980) in some cases individuals may choose things they find attractive and then justify choices with reasons. The mechanisms by which emotion informs choice are known as ‘somatic markers’; for example, when a negative outcome becomes linked with a specific thought or behavior, a negative ’somatic’ or gut feeling is experienced which adaptively can protect against future losses and narrow down the field of alternatives to choose from. This mechanism is usually adaptive, but can produce bias which is maladaptive.
2.4 Decision Making in relation to Morality
Decision making expressed in the context of retrenching a staff from an organization based on stealing, or a student expelled from an institution as a result of examination malpractice, or an expulsion of a seminarian based on moral issue such as an abortion etc., are all moral issues that require appropriate decision-making. When people come across moral conflicts in their life the question they are faced with is: “what should I do?” which is different to “what should one do?” Reasoning in real life situations involves decisions, which are much more practical, self-serving, and less rational than reasoning of hypothetical characters.
Thus, human rationality is guided so as to be modeled in recognizing and promoting the created values. There are cases in different institution where staff are caught stealing, instead of terminating their appointments they are suspended, some heads of secular institution even at times retain the victims based on self-recognition while some go to the extent of expelling the victims.
Contrary to the above, the seminary treats issues of truancy/moral with strong decisions making so that it does not go against their moral codes. The essence of decision in the context of morality is to achieve the missions, vision of the institution. To achieve these goals, institutions may face lot of obstacles in administration and operation. Such problems are sorted out through comprehensive decision making process. The very core of moral decision is the spirit of obedience to God. It is saying yes to God’s will. But this decision is essentially more than a simple saying yes or no to a fixed order. The understanding of God as a lawmaker, who presents men with a code of rules and laws which have literally to be followed, is not fully adequate. The moral decision requires a humble and docile attention to the will of God. This includes that man seriously submits himself to the rule he has recognized as the will of God. For this reason, men and women are not only called to obey the law, but also to take care of it responsibly, so that it will express the will of God always more correctly and remain in authentic expression of the divine command in the varied conditions of human existence.
4.0 Conclusion
From all indication, responsibility is taken to be the core value of morality because man is responsible in his/her decision making, choice and knows when to choose good and reject evil, ability to accept the responsibility of our actions is a proof of maturity. The complexity of modern life entails that whole areas of life in respect to conscience, freedom, choice and decision making has vastly outgrown the relatively simple plan of moral principles provided by handbooks and are not covered by detailed rules. The principle of responsibility requires that the responsible man, salesman, general, politician or physician carries the spirit of the ethical principles which they adopt into those areas where no clear rules exist. Responsibility not only requires conscientious commitment to principle, not only the careful critique of principle, but also a moral creativity. It is good to note that only a formed conscience that can positively accept responsibility and freedom is only manifested fitting in responsible moral behavior.
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