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RE: What is Morally Right is What Doesn't Cause Harm to Other Beings
Morality and conscience are not identical (nor is ethics the same as morality). If that were the case, then your conclusion would be fair. But as that is not so, your notion of morality is easy to dispute. For it is a simple fact morality is the product of religion, whereas conscience is inborn to a self-aware creature. The distinction is important because one would not be capable of moral action without conscience. But without a god to which you're answerable beyond yourself, the 'morality' you enact would simply be your will and backed by your power to force your will on others - which wouldn't be universal, divine or good - so not a morality by any standard. #kierkegaard #neitzsche #arendt #heidegger
Moral is of Latin origin, the Latin for the Greek ethikos. Morality about what is actually right and wrong. Ethics are the conditioned impositions from society, super-ego, that can be right or wrong in actuality. Conscience is the moral judgment of the past to morally engage in actions in the future, to learn from our mistakes or the mistakes of others. It's a word to describe inner compass that can discern how to live rightly over wrong.
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.
I would like to add that I'm still trying, myself, to work out the power of language.
I have considered two examples. Firstly, a person defeated and at the feet of his vanquisher, who, granted his last words, manages to persuade hearts and minds and thereby to win the war, though he has lost the battle. Or say, not granted any last words, instead he accepts his deathblow nobly and through his demeanor his death acquires a symbolism that persuades the hearts and minds needed to win the war. That is a power that will not be sheathed and cannot be killed even in death.
Secondly, how if on your deathbed you look back and see you had a miserable life or that you were a horrible person and you would rather not have lived, what can you do? Find God? We scoff at the idea of it. And yet there is this truth wrapped up in the religion: that by the power of a word your life may be meaningful, if only you will it. (Alas most who repent are probably just hoping in the myth of a merciful god or in the spirit of Pascal thinks to better error on caution.)