I respectfully disagree with your definitions. I do not believe we are misunderstanding each other. It may be rather we are, so to speak, speaking different languages. But, as we do belong to the same community and there is a sort of kinship in our definitions, I suspect our understandings are just slightly different (and in difference is all the significance!). In reply I'll explain my disagreement.

As was so common in the Renaissance, the Scholastic translators inadvertently warped understanding of Greek philosophy which the Romans had done well in preserving (e.g. the concepts of political animal and polis). When translated, {moralis} (custom) and {ethikos} (habit) elided into a sense familiar to us today (convention or code), which the Scholastics then employed in their theology in the sense of "universal convention" or "universal code." However, in the Academy today philosophers observe the distinction whereby ethics regards individual behavior and morality is a set of values that obtain independently of the individual. Though, indeed in our modern understanding of morality and ethics, the two are inseparable even if not totally synonymous.

Conscience cannot be a kind of judgment. One may have conscience as one may have judgment; but judgment fundamentally is an act that verges on the worldly domain, whereas conscience acts solely within the intellect for it fundamentally acts in opposition to the intellect, hence the construction of the term con-science. Conscience is our "inner voice," that critical self with whom the Self speaks when we think, that which, telling us not to do something, restrains our impulses. Thus it watches our actions and evaluates our judgment. For this reason we do call it, as you say, our "inner compass"; however, what we connote by this is, not judgment, but the {daimon} who watches over each of us criticizing our past and present conduct and guiding future conduct through criticism.

Having said all this, I understand actions speak louder than words, the doing matters more than the philosophical understanding underpinning it; and I would believe based on your post you are an upstanding person, which is what really matters. But when you cannot move a finger in the face of a fate to which you or your world is doomed, the only terrain you have is ideas (if you cannot speak or have no one to listen, there is yet your own thought). Then it matters that you think rightly and powerfully. I think it probably is the supreme moral act because it can, meaning-wise, overturn mountains, remake the world: God made the world, not only in a day, but with a word.