What is conscience?

"You have no conscience!", "The conscience would have ravished!", "Conscience is the best controller". "Eating out of conscience." These and many other statements about conscience we have heard more than once and twice in life. So what is conscience? What do we need it for? How do we know if we have it or not, and how not to lose it?

Conscience is a kind of regulator of our relations with people around us. At the same time, this regulator has its own one. The conscience of man is a purely individual concept, there is no standard in it, one can not measure it and say: "My conscience is greater than yours." Everything depends on how able a person is to regulate his moral and ethical behavior, the norms of which are different for everyone and depend on education, social environment, personal qualities, life experience. At the level of the senses, conscience helps us evaluate the fallacy or the correctness of actions or actions.

What is conscience: conscience in life examples

Conscience has a strong influence on our lives and can entail serious moral suffering (especially in emotional and sensitive personalities) due to the commission of a bad or even just a wrong act in relation to someone. For example, we can poke a passenger in transport because of his irritation or lack of education. The so-called "conscientious" person will apologize for his unseemly behavior at once or will experience "conscience" for a long time, and for "unscrupulous" rudeness is the norm, there is nothing to be done about it. We can be rude to parents who do not tire us to teach life, but then we realize that we were wrong, because we were taught from childhood that it's bad to be rude to the elders. In many situations, where we become participants daily, conscience protects us, warns us against actions that we will later regret, as if giving an alarming signal about the wrongness, incorrectness or inexpediency of this or that act.

What is Conscience: Sources of Conscience

The foundations of conscience are laid by parents in us at an early age (3-5 years), and the process of its formation is called upbringing. In this case, the most important role is played not by verbal stories about what is bad and what is good, but the visual behavior of parents and their reaction to the actions and actions of the baby. To raise a conscience in a child, you need to work hard. So, if you say that lying is bad, and then you yourself are telling the lie, what to expect from a child who believes that all the actions of parents are the norm of behavior for him? If you teach the child respectful attitude to the adult generation, and then break on each other or on others, then will the rudiments of conscience give good results? If the kid did something wrong, do not immediately shout: "You can not do this!" And punish him for misconduct. Explain why it is impossible, how it can turn out to be negative consequences ("If you touch the hot surface of the iron, you will burn your fingers, it will hurt very much, you will not be able to play toys, draw", "If you do not pick up toys from the floor and Do not put it in place, someone will step on them and they will break ", etc.).

Shame, shame and conscience

When we condemn someone, we can say that we embarrass a person, we try to awaken a conscience in him. A sense of shame is an indicator of moral behavior. It is believed that he has such a synonym as shame. This is not entirely true. Shame really is a certain state of our soul, self-condemnation. Shame is - this imposed state of mind, we can say, a provocation. Someone insulted us, told us about an unpleasant story about us, and we took it upon ourselves, we feel disgraced (and it does not matter if the truth was said or invented). And here we are already ashamed. Shame eats the person deeper than conscience.

What is conscience: varieties and forms of conscience

The science of morality, in particular conscience, is called ethics. Ethics classifies conscience by:

1. Content (genuine, formal).

2. Form of manifestation (individual, collective).

3. Intensity of manifestation (suffering, muffled, active).

The forms of conscience are also represented by a fairly wide range of manifestations: doubt, conscience, painful hesitation, reproach, confession, shame, self-irony, etc.