THE

DEVELOPM

ENT O

F

ONE’S

CONSCIENCE

There is no simple recipe for developing your conscience. There are 5 things that help influence your development.

1.Your conscience develops as you mature and becomes refined with time.

2. Your conscience develops as you take account of and follow the norms, values, virtues and commandments found in our Christian tradition as guidelines.

3. Your conscience helps you deal with moral failures and sins. You become aware of your weakness and fragility as a human being and of your need for support from others, especially from God.

4. Your conscience develops as you participate in the Eucharist and prayer life of the church.

5. Your conscience develops as you grown in the virtue of humility which leads us to seek direction of the church.

Becoming a morally mature and responsible person entails an ongoing effort to form and inform your conscience.

“For Catholics to make a decision of conscience with indifferent to, or in spite of the magisterium (the teachings of the church) would be forfeiting one’s claim to be acting as a loyal Catholic and according to a properly informed conscience.”

Sometimes we lack the information we need to form right judgments or make good decisions.

Conscience can be malformed through immoral actions, faculty reasoning, faculty value structures and misinformation received from other.

It is possible that we are doing what is right, when in fact we are doing something evil in order to affect a desired good.

CAN YOUR CONSCIENCE BE WRONG?

RATIONALIZATION: Stealing may be wrong sometimes, but large stores can afford it because they’re making huge profits.

TRIVIALIZATION: It’s no big deal—everybody else does it.

MISINFORMATION: My doctor told me that all teenage girls should take the birth control pill to prevent getting pregnant.

MISINFORMED CONSCIENCE

THE ENDS JUSTIFIES THE IMMORAL MEANS: I had to steal the chocolate bar—I didn’t have any money and I hadn’t eaten for 12 hours. I get sick if I don’t eat.

MEANS TO AN END: By dropping a nuclear bomb to end the war, we’ll end up saving lives.

DIFFICULT TO REASON: Having been kicked out of his home and finding himself with no place to go, a teen acts without thinking. He breaks into an empty home to keep warm when he could have asked for help from the police.

MISINFORMED CONSCIENCE

In chapter 3 we’ve examined six aspects of the human person that are important for ethics.

Together these six aspects are what make us individuals who are self aware and understand the importance of our actions upon both ourselves and others.

In the following chapters we will expand this perspective to include broader social dimensions.

REMEMBER your quiz is WEDNESDAY

MARCH 20TH after March break.

Read the summary on page 60 and complete

review question #1