Interview on New Book: 'Knowing Right From Wrong'

"Moments of important decisions, such as elections, furnish a golden opportunity to rethink our ideas about conscience."

ROME (Zenit) - The conscience is not like a referee that blows a whistle every time we step out of bounds, but rather like a coach that gives us the guidance we need to succeed, says the author of a new book on discerning right from wrong.This week saw the release of Legionary of Christ Father Thomas D. Williams' new book "Knowing Right From Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience." We spoke with Father Williams, who is Vatican analyst for CBS News and professor of theology and ethics at Rome's Regina Apostolorum university, about what the conscience really is and how it is misunderstood today.

Q: Why this book, and why now?

Father Williams: This book is more necessary now than ever before. If ever our society needed greater moral clarity, it is now.The two major errors concerning conscience -- conscience as infallible, unimpeachable guide and conscience as a mere vestige of Freudian superego -- are even more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago.

Q: Care to explain these errors in a bit more depth for the uninitiated?

Father Williams: Many today appeal to conscience as the final arbiter of good and evil. By this view of conscience, good and evil do not exist outside of our moral judgment, but are created by it. What I sincerely judge to be good and right becomes good and right because of that judgment. Sincerity is all that matters. By this logic, it makes no sense to try to tell someone else what is good or right, even, for example, if you are the Church's magisterium. In the end, conscience would not apply an objective moral law that stands above it, but would supplant the moral law. Conscience would trump everything.

While this first error overvalues conscience, making it into an infallible god, accountable only to itself, the second error undervalues conscience, placing it among the undesirable and irrational remnants of an earlier stage of humanity's moral evolution. The theory makes of conscience an echo of parental and societal prohibitions, which needs not to be obeyed but to be "tamed" and governed by the ego.

Q: All of this sounds a little heady. Can laypeople understand what you have written, or is this a book for professional ethicists only?

Father Williams: I apologize for the academic tone. Actually the book is written in straightforward English for the general public. It explains the notion of morality from the ground up, with stories and examples to help the headier ideas to sink in.

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Q: Did the upcoming presidential election motivate you to write the book?

Father Williams: Obviously moments of important decisions, such as elections, furnish a golden opportunity to rethink our ideas about conscience. But actually I had been intending to write this book for a long time. Pope John Paul II in his masterful 1993 encyclical on the moral life, "Veritatis Splendor," lamented the modern disconnect between freedom and truth. He affirmed in the strongest of terms the necessity of reasserting the existence of moral truth against a creeping relativism.And few will forget the powerful homily given by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the eve of his own election as Pope in April 2005, where he declared that today "we are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." My own conscience was prodding me to write a book that both dismantles relativism at the root and provides a clear, constructive approach to understanding and forming conscience.

Q: So this book is primarily about correcting errors and combating relativism?

Father Williams: I wouldn't say that is the main point of the book, though I do address these issues. The real aim of the book is to show the beauty of the moral life as a call not simply to "obey the rules," but to live a supremely good and happy life according to God's plan.We tend to reduce the moral life to a list of prohibitions and obligations. But that's a mistake. As Christians we are called to moral excellence, and not merely to the avoidance of evil. The wonderful thing is, this moral excellence coincides with the deepest human joy. God only asks us for things that are truly good for us. His commandments are not arbitrary but reflect the truth of the human person and our most profound aspirations to freedom, goodness and love.

Q: In this regard, you employ an analogy from athletics, and claim that conscience is more a "coach" than a "referee." Can you explain that?

Father Williams: Depending on how we view the moral life, our view of conscience and its role also changes. If the moral life is made up of rules, then conscience is only a bothersome referee, blowing his whistle when we step outside our boundaries or commit some foul. At best, conscience would be a necessary evil, but hardly a friend or ally.If, on the other hand, we understand the moral life as the pursuit of moral excellence, then conscience becomes much more than a referee; it becomes a coach. Conscience urges us toward personal moral excellence, not merely toward the avoidance of evil. Just as a coach helps us to play better, and fine-tunes our athletic qualities, so too conscience pushes us to be everything we are called to be. This is a much more positive -- and accurate --description of the role that conscience should play in the life of a Christian.In the end, conscience is a precious gift that God gives us to help guide us through life. It becomes the voice of God himself in our interior, inviting us, inspiring us, and impelling us toward moral greatness.

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Q: The table of contents indicates that you deal with conscientious objection. We normally associate this with a moral objection to armed conflict. Is this what you mean?

Father Williams: This is certainly one of the possible situations where conscientious objection can come up, but the concept is much broader than this. Whenever we are pushed to do something that we know is morally wrong, we have an obligation to resist. This is called conscientious objection.Usually this refers to resisting an order from a superior, or to choosing to disobey an unjust law, when it orders us to do something evil. It was St. Peter who said, "We must obey God rather than human authority" when ordered by the Jewish officials of his day to stop preaching about Jesus Christ (Acts 5:29). Typical examples of this nowadays can be found in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, where health care personnel are sometimes asked to participate in immoral activities such as abortion or the distribution of contraceptives.

In a still broader sense, conscientious objection can even mean going against the grain by bucking certain fashionable trends that would pressure us into doing evil or discourage evangelization. Here, too, conscience must be obeyed rather than the authority of popular opinion.

Q: What about when conscience differs from Church teaching?

Father Williams: There is much confusion in this area. Church teaching refers not to the imposition of one person's will over another's, but the continuation of Christ's mission as authentic teacher of the truth. This includes moral truth. Catholics are obliged to form their consciences according to this teaching.Usually when a Catholic's moral criteria diverge from magisterial teaching, the problem lies at the level of faith. We stop believing in the Church and the divine guidance that Christ promised, and instead start valuing public opinion and our own personal judgment more than magisterial teaching.

The Church's moral teaching is reasonable, but that doesn't mean that everyone understands it immediately, or spontaneously comes to the same moral judgment that the Church does. But it is precisely here that the gift of the magisterium shines in all its splendor. When moral questions are obvious, we really have no need for a magisterium. It is when good people disagree and confusion reigns that the magisterium shows its true worth. But believers must be willing to be taught; otherwise the magisterium would be just another opinion in the marketplace of ideas, and we would cease to be Catholics except in name.

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Q: You end the book with a discussion of moral dilemmas and how to resolve them. How does this work?

Father Williams: Here we must remember that many things that we call moral dilemmas are really just situations where doing the right thing is difficult. Doing good often means suffering unpleasant consequences, and this is tough for all of us. But it isn't a moral dilemma. It requires virtues such as courage, willpower and integrity, but our choice is clear.In the true sense, a moral dilemma involves a doubt at the level of conscience. We truly don't know what the right thing to do is. These situations are not common, but they do occur, and here we need guidance to be able to choose well.

Fortunately God has provided sources of moral instruction to help us choose well even in tough situations. We have God's word, including the Ten Commandments and a closer familiarity with Christ and his moral criteria. We have the natural law, the unwritten expression of God's eternal law on the human heart. We also have Church teaching, which proves especially important for the resolution of moral dilemmas. All in all, for the Christian who truly wants to do what is right, reliable answers are available.