Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

REVIEWS / RECENSIONES 507cies: that of absolutizing freedom at the cost of the objective pole ofmorality and that of absolutizing truth at the cost of recognising thehistorical nature of human life. This section of the book brings outexplicitly what has been implicit all along, namely that the debateabout conscience is not only, and maybe not primarily, a debateabout conscience as such but rather about different ways of understandingmorality tout court. “Conscience” becomes a kind of ethicalbarometer that comes under more or less pressure depending onwhat is at issue at a given time in fundamental ethical and theologicaldebate. There is a real temptation in this context to wheel on conscienceas a kind of deus ex macchina when confronted with ethicaldilemmas. Schockenhoff rightly rejects such abuses, but the coursehe follows seems to me to leave more than one aporia surroundingthe idea of conscience unresolved. To mention but one example, theuse of the idea of conscience (201) as “personal truth” (in itself unexceptionable)does not constitute a refutal of the claim that conscienceis dispensable as a moral category, because a synonym forpractical reason, unless one assumes that access to personal truthcan obtain without reason!This however is to descend to a level of discussion not possiblein a review. It is probably more useful in this context, having unreservedlyacknowledged the value of this study, to offer a number ofmore general critical comments.There is an understandable tendency in such a work to read thehistory of the term under investigation in evolutionary terms: as ifwhat we understand by conscience today (if one could agree on thatmuch) were the product of a naturally progressive process leading toan ever-richer and better conception. Another possibility is that thehistory of the term is not one of linear and progressive evolution butof contradiction, incoherence and confusion. If this latter is closer tothe truth, then it is somewhat hazardous to talk of“Gewissenserfahrung” as if this were some univocal reality self-evidentlyshared by the ancient Israelites, St. Paul, St. Augustine,Newman, “Gewissentäter” of the past and modern-day nurses. Oneof the paradoxes of this work is that the author, having pointed outthe degree to which the term “conscience” is historically conditioned,proceeds to use terms such as “Gewissenserfahrung” as if they wereless problematic in this respect.On a similar note, in the face of divergent and even rival conceptionsof conscience, both in the past and the present, it is surely