In her brief article entitled “The Lady in the Mirror,” Lorraine Murray offers a powerful account of how, like so many women in our society, she has struggled much of her life with being acutely conscious of her weight. Though she never claims she had a clinical eating disorder, she poignantly describes the trials of her journey from an overweight childhood to a normal-sized adulthood where she still continues to obsess over what she should, and should not, be eating.Lorraine Murray. “Loving the Lady in the Mirror,” America, Feb. 17, 2003, 14–16. At one point she reveals how exactly this fixation continues to play out in her adult life. “Although I was delighted to wear smaller sized dresses and jeans, when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see the new me. Instead, I saw a fat lady staring back.”

There are numerous facets of her story that invite analysis: social pressure on women to have a certain body type, whether one should obsess over eating even if one is overweight, and the like. But the part of this story that nicely introduces this chapter concerns how Murray saw herself—“the trouble is that when I gaze into the mirror, a fat lady stares back.” Murray’s obsessions about her diet and body are the result of how she sees herself. Even though she knows she is not overweight, since it is she who reports her adult dress sizes, she also admits that she still sees herself in another fashion. It is the latter way of seeing, or grasp of how things are, that drives her actions. Thus it is sadly no surprise that she continues to obsess over her eating, even when the tags on her dresses have smaller numbers. The relevant lesson for this chapter is that how we see the way things are, whether our vision is accurate or not, drives how we act.

Given how Murray says she sees herself, it is less surprising that she agonizes over her weight. One contemporary moral theologian describes the moral importance of how we see things and claims it is crucial that we have “truthful vision.”Paul Wadell, Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002), 121–30. Put simply, we cannot act rightly if we do not see rightly. If we do not have an accurate grasp of the way things are, it is impossible to act virtuously. So the question for Murray is, why does she see things in the way she does? Why doesn’t she just open her eyes and see things rightly? Then she would not obsess so about her eating!

Using a story of a woman who struggles with her weight and diet to introduce the meaning of a virtue may seem offensive. Is Murray sinful because she saw herself as fat? This is a legitimate question, and the issue of what someone like Murray is responsible for in how she sees things will be addressed below in a discussion of conscience. However, this question may also reveal a morality-of-obligation perspective, focused primarily on following rules and assigning blame. Though these are important, moral theology is presented here first and foremost from a morality-of-happiness perspective as a way to live a good life. It is a life that is most in accord with the truth, or the way things are. Blameworthy or not, Murray is not living in accordance with the truth. She is not seeing herself rightly, and it is impeding her ability to live a good life.

Consider another example of the moral importance of seeing things rightly. In the last chapter’s discussion of habituating virtuous passions, cognitive manipulation was suggested as a way to shape your emotions by reimagining how you see a situation. We even saw an example from the movie A Beautiful Mind, where a wife employed this technique to change how she saw, and thus felt about, her husband struggling with schizophrenia. But this also raised a disturbing possibility. Can’t someone reimagine a situation in a manner that is not virtuous, but self-destructive? Indeed, this happens with many victims of spousal abuse, who convince themselves that “he doesn’t really mean it” or “this isn’t who he is; he is just under stress.” Does the possibility of such self-delusion mean that one should not ever re-imagine situations?

The guard against self-deception and delusion is not, of course, refusing to see things differently. That may at times be needed to get one out of self-deception. The key is to reimagine things accurately, so that our grasp of situations is more, not less, in accordance with the truth of how things are. So if we were friends with the wife in A Beautiful Mind, we would try to help her ensure that she understood her relationship with her husband more, not less, accurately. If we were friends with Lorraine Murray, we would help her see herself more truthfully, as a woman who need not obsess over her eating. In both cases, we would be helping people see things more truthfully, more accurately, so that they could then act well. The key insight for this chapter is a simple phrase used by one twentieth-century thinker who wrote extensively on virtue: “the true precedes the good.”Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 2. Later, Pieper (23) offers a different formulation of this same claim based upon a quote from Thomas Aquinas: “the good presupposes the true.” Doing good actions requires a truthful grasp of the way things are around us. As Murray’s story sadly illustrates, and the wife’s cognitive manipulation in A Beautiful Mind suggests, a failure to see things rightly is a great impediment to the good life.

This chapter explores two crucial topics in moral theology that both pertain to seeing things rightly. The first is the virtue prudence, which enables us to both see things rightly concerning practical matters, and to translate that truthful grasp of things into action. It is so important to the virtuous life that it has consistently been seen in the Western tradition as pre-eminent among the cardinal virtues. The first half of this chapter defines prudence, explains its importance, and provides some examples of ways to be prudent or imprudent.

The second half of this chapter examines the meaning of a related term: conscience. This section will explain the meaning of the term and explain why the Christian tradition makes the radical claim that one must always follow one’s conscience. Nonetheless, that tradition has also maintained that one’s conscience can be in error, setting up the disturbing possibility that one may follow one’s conscience, and in doing so may actually be acting wrongly. Explaining how and why this is so, and how we can determine blame in such situations, is the last task for the second section of this chapter.

The purpose of this first section is to explain the meaning of the cardinal virtue, prudence. Being a prudent person is what enables one to see rightly and translate that truthful vision into action. After defining this crucial virtue, the section goes on to explain the different ways prudence operates, why it is preeminent among the cardinal virtues, and how the right seeing of prudence is related to being smart. It concludes with examples of skills needed to be prudent and ways of being imprudent to help fill out your understanding of the virtue prudence.

Defining Prudence

Even more so than temperance, prudence is a virtue that is easily misunderstood, given the English translation of the term. The Latin term prudentia does not simply mean, as the English term “prudence” often does, being cautious or wary. Prudentia is better translated “practical wisdom,” or as one recent moral theologian prefers, “good sense.”Herbert McCabe, OP, God Still Matters (London, Contimuum, 2003), 152–65. Nonetheless, the translation “prudence” is still used here, given its prevalence as the English term for this virtue.

What is prudence? Prudence is the virtue that disposes us to see rightly, the way things are in the world around us, and to employ that truthful vision to act rightly. It enables us to size up a situation accurately, to determine the best course of action, and to embark upon it.For three stages of prudence, see Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948) II–II 47,8. For an outstanding (and difficult) contemporary discussion of prudence, see Daniel Westberg’s Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). It is practical wisdom because it is not simply an aloof knowledge about how things are. It is what the Catechism (citing Aquinas) calls “right reason in action.”Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 1806. This is an absolutely crucial point in understanding prudence. If prudence were simply right knowledge about what to do, it would be possible to have this virtue and never put the knowledge to use by acting rightly. We see the importance of this point in Murray’s depiction of her struggle with her weight. If asked, she knows the truth about her weight and how she should thus act. But that is not what she puts into action. Prudence is not simply knowing better, in the sense that Murray knows better that she is not overweight. Sadly, Murray is not prudent. Prudence is not only good deliberation about a situation and settling on the best course of action; it is also acting well based on that deliberation.

Why do we need to see rightly, or have a truthful grasp of things, in order to act well? Shouldn’t we just do what is good? And can’t we just follow the rules to be sure to do what is good? It is certainly true that the prudent person knows what the rules are. And at times it is abundantly clear how to follow the rules. Yet prudence is not simply the deductive, mechanistic application of general rules to particular situations. Prudence is the ability to see and act out what is good in specific situations. For instance, a consistent theme in this book thus far has been that virtue resides in the mean. Virtue is having well-ordered, or reasonable desires, for things such as eating or drinking. But of course that simply raises the question, what constitutes a proper or well-ordered desire? For instance, what constitutes moderate drinking of alcohol? Or in the case of Lorraine Murray described above, what is the true way things are concerning her body size, and how does that determine what she should eat? The prudent person sees the mean in particular situations and puts it into action.

Prudence is therefore a more elusive virtue to understand than, say, temperance. It is easier to call to mind ways our sensual desires have, and have not, been virtuous. Occasions of moderate or immoderate eating, drinking or sexual desire are immediately obvious to us. Actually, occasions of prudence or imprudence are just as prevalent, but they may be less obvious due to the type of activity governed by this habit. Prudence is the virtue that disposes us to do practical decision-making well. Practical decision-making, or practical reasoning, is our capacity to effectuate our desires, or put them into action effectively. It concerns not what we desire, but how to achieve it.

Consider the example of a mother with two teenage daughters. She loves her children dearly. Her family knows this. But it is also clear to her family that despite how much she loves her children and wishes them well, she continually makes poor decisions to live out that love effectively. At times she is very lax in setting rules such as curfews, not out of indifference but because she wants her children to enjoy themselves and not be burdened by too many rules. At other times she worries she is being too lax and thus sets overly strict rules for her girls out of a genuine concern for their own good.

The problem is that, though intended for their own good, these practical decisions on how to raise teenagers actually harm these girls. The lack of consistency of the rules makes the girls distrust their mother and wonder if she really wants what is best for them. Furthermore, the lack of coherence in the rules prevents the girls from understanding and adopting for themselves the purpose and meaning of those rules. Sadly, the mother fails to see the inconsistency of her rules, and how it actually hurts her daughters. Though the mother has good desires, and truly does love her daughters, those good wishes are not enough to effectuate her desires. Despite what the Beatles’ sang, it is not true that “all you need is love.” The mother needs prudence to be able to make good decisions that will put her love of her girls into action effectively. If the mother did her practical decision-making well, we would call her prudent. But in this case she is imprudent.

The Preeminence of Prudence

As is clear in this example, prudence is needed to effectively exercise any virtuous action. Raising kids (a matter of justice), pursuing pleasures moderately (temperance), and facing difficulties well (fortitude) all require a truthful grasp of the way things are in order to put virtuous inclinations into action effectively. For precisely this reason, prudence has consistently been called preeminent among the other cardinal virtues. It has been labeled the “charioteer of the virtues.”Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1806. See also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II 47. The image of charioteer is likely taken from Plato’s Republic. Though Western thinkers have consistently understood prudence as preeminent, they do so in different ways, a point not necessary for our analysis (though hinted at in the final section of last chapter on the difference between Plato/Kant and Aristotle/Aquinas). In other words, it is needed to steer, or guide, the other virtues into action. Without it, they flounder and remain ineffective.

How exactly does prudence help effectuate virtuous action? One contemporary moralist claims it is not enough to understand prudence simply as setting the path for our virtuous desires. That is one role, but she suggests three in all. See Jean Porter, Nature as Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). The following examples also come from Porter, 313–16. The first is indeed setting a specific means or path to putting a virtuous desire into action. Imagine you wish to give money to help victims of a recent natural disaster. This is a generous intention. But of course, you have not yet effectuated that virtuous goal. If you give the money to an unknown person with no credentials who claims to be raising money for those victims, it may never find its way there and thus you never serve those you intended to help. So a potentially generous act is done imprudently, and thus not done well. But if you give the money to Catholic Charities or the Red Cross in one of their drives to aid victims of that disaster, you can be reasonably sure, given the history and reputation of these organizations, that the money will find its intended target. Here a virtuous inclination is effectuated with good practical decisions, so that a virtuous act actually happens with the guidance of prudence. This example reveals one of the tasks of prudence: how to carry out a virtuous intention.

In this first role for prudence, it is clear how to act generously, and what needs to be seen rightly is simply how to carry out that action. A second example reveals that sometimes prudence helps us determine what a virtuous act is in the first place. Consider the example of a father who wants both to provide for his son financially, and also to teach the son an appreciation for the value of money. Should the father provide the son’s college spending money, if possible? Would that be generous? Or should he require the son to work, so as not to spoil him? Like the first example, prudence is needed in this case for a well-meaning person to know what decisions to make. But in this second role for prudence, the issue is not simply setting the path for an obviously good action, but rather determining what counts as a virtuous action given the particular situation at hand. This is a second way that prudence functions to enable us to make good decisions.

Consider a third way that prudence is needed for good practical reasoning. In real life, our reflection about how to make practical decisions does not always concern executing an obviously good act (giving money to charity) or figuring out what actions are virtuous given the particularities of one relationship (the father and son). Prudence is often a matter of properly balancing many diverse commitments and projects in one’s life. For example, toward the end of an academic term I commonly have a student tell me he wants to come to my office to explain why he has completely fallen behind in my class. Quite often this is neither a health or family emergency, nor a case of negligence or indifference. Frequently students simply get overwhelmed by their commitment to various good projects, and find themselves unable to balance them all. As a result, they neglect an important task (like a course), or manage to do all of their projects but none of them well. This is a perfect example of the third role for prudence. The prudent person sees rightly what the truly most important projects are in one’s life, and knows how to prioritize them accordingly. That may indeed mean not being able to participate in something worthy. It may entail saying no. But the prudent person neither neglects important commitments nor gets overextended. This necessitates seeing things rightly and deciding accordingly.

Are Only Smart People Holy?

These examples hopefully illuminate why the prudent person’s seeing rightly is not simply a matter of opening her eyes. Prudence is not a matter of eyesight, but rather of good sense. It means having an accurate grasp of the way things work in the world. Some immediately wonder if this means that one has to be smart to be holy. If seeing things truthfully is so important for living virtuously, are intelligent people at an advantage? Two twentieth-century Christian authors (Herbert McCabe, OP, and C. S. Lewis) address this question beautifully. It is obviously not the case that people who score higher on their SAT’s are necessarily more holy. So if by smart is meant book smarts, smarter people are not necessarily more virtuous. As McCabe says, “what is in question is not theoretical thinking and the handling of concepts and words, but practical shrewdness and common sense in matters of human behavior.”McCabe, God Still Matters, 155–56. Lewis says bluntly that “God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.”C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 77.

Nonetheless, Lewis goes on to say, “He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have.” McCabe is even more direct, when he claims “no stupid person can be good.” McCabe indicates that the issue is not only using what sense you have, but also the type of sense or smartness truly necessary to be virtuous, when he goes on to say, “Unreasonableness, pig-headedness, bigotry, and self-deception are all in themselves blameworthy, and are constitutive of the kind of stupidity that is a vice.”McCabe, God Still Matters, 155. The reason these latter are types of stupidity is that they are inaccurate grasps of the way things are. You are not always right (pig-headedness). People of different races are not unequal (bigotry). And refusing to see that you might be wrong leaves you ignorant as well as blameworthy (self-deception).

As McCabe notes, “there is a sense of ‘education’ (rather different from the one in common use) in which the educated person does indeed have a moral advantage over the uneducated; if this were not so, education would not be a serious human endeavor.”Ibid., 156. This sheds some light on why Aristotle famously claimed that the young could never be fully wise.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1142a. It takes life experience to understand how people behave, to be able to foresee consequences of one’s acts, and to learn what is truly important. And these skills, among others, all enable us to see things rightly and act accordingly. They are parts of prudence, and thus needed in order to be virtuous, since prudence is the charioteer of the virtues.

Before elaborating on some of the specific skills prudence entails, two observations are warranted. First, it should be noted that practical decision-making is as much a communal activity as it is an individual one. Therefore, prudence is thoroughly social. In one sense this is obvious. We often consult others for guidance that shapes the decisions we make. But in an even deeper sense, how we see the way things are and thus act is deeply shaped by our formative communities. We learn how to raise children by how we ourselves were raised, and how we see others do it. We may even learn to view members of one race a certain way by growing up in a certain society at a particular time period. All of this is simply to say that how we see things and act accordingly is very much shaped by the communities in which we live, for better or for worse.

As for the second observation, it is appropriate to end this section with some words on the moral importance of education. As McCabe notes, the common use of the term education—meaning the formal sense of going to a school and taking classes—has little to do with virtue. But in the broader, informal sense he prefers, education is crucial for becoming virtuous. It is through education in this broader sense that we learn about how our family, churches, and society all see things and live out that vision. The way certain activities such as sexual activity, alcohol use, and eating food are all modeled, shapes how we see what those activities mean and what their place is in a good life. How we see the poor, children, spouses, and those of other races treated by those around us shapes how we see and relate to others, and thus our capacity for justice. In all of these senses, formal education, like informal education, can be a powerful tool for passing on truthful or deceived ways to see things. Both can also equip one with the vision to see falsity in prevailing practices. In this larger sense, there is no more morally important endeavor than education.

Parts of Prudence and Types of Imprudence

Before moving on to conscience, it is worth pausing to give examples of some parts, or sub-virtues, of prudence. Recall that Aquinas claims each cardinal virtue covers a host of related virtues. Any habit of doing practical reasoning well is rightly called a part, or sub-virtue, of prudence.The classic treatment of this topic in Aquinas is found in his Summa Theologiae II–II 48–9. Thomas uses the term “part” in a technical sense that is not necessary to explain for our purposes. We will consider three such sub-virtues of prudence here, and note the Latin equivalents of these terms to be precise as to what each one does and does not mean. The three are memory (memoria), docility (docilitas), and nimble decisiveness (solertia).See Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 14–18. Though this chapter follows Pieper in selecting which three parts from Aquinas to explain more fully, the explanation here extends beyond what Pieper does in his own text. A quick look at these sub-virtues will further illuminate exactly how prudence enables, and imprudence impedes, truthful action.

It may sound odd to call memory a virtue. Isn’t memory simply a container where things are stored and later accessed? Where is there room for praise or blame with such a capacity? This sense of memory may be the case with basic pieces of information, like phone numbers. Though one could forget a number, or remember it wrongly, it seems odd to blame someone for that. But truthful memory is also crucial for being able to make good decisions, and at times this may indeed be a matter of praise or blame. Ask two friends who are in a fight what happened to get them there. Chances are you will receive two stories that are similar but importantly different. People tend to remember what happened in ways that benefit themselves. They tend to make themselves look better by neglecting things they might have done wrongly and accentuating what they have suffered unjustly at the hands of others.

This happens not only on the individual, but also on the communal, level. Look at a pre-1950s American textbook on slavery to see how we remembered what happened in the slave era. Look at even more recent Japanese textbooks for what happened in China before World War II, and you will fail to find mention of Japanese atrocities committed there. In these cases you will read communal memories where truth is skewed. Failing to remember history accurately inhibits one’s ability to make good practical decisions. Thus the virtue of truthful memory is needed to exercise prudence, at both the individual and communal levels.

A second sub-virtue of prudence is docility. This word commonly connotes slavish following of others. That is not the sense of the term here. Docility as understood here is an open-minded willingness to accept guidance from others. If having a true sense of how thing are is needed to act rightly, and if we grant that we do not know it all, it follows that we should be willing to enlist the help and guidance of others in order to see things more truthfully and thus act more rightly. This is what chapter 1 described in its discussion of authority. Of course, this entails an act of trust, and one can be deceived. Indeed, having the sub-virtue of docility includes a sense of whom to trust for guidance and when to seek it. For failing to hear others out of fear of deception leaves one close-minded and half blind. We consult friends, mentors, and teachers regularly in coming to a better sense of how things are. Docility is simply the skill of seeking and accepting guidance well.

Finally, the term solertia has no obvious English cognate. It seems best translated as “nimble decisiveness.”This is in line with Pieper’s thought, though his term is “nimbleness” (ibid., 17).Solertia is the ability to quickly size up an unexpected situation and act well to achieve one’s good goals. Consider a mundane example of this. You and your seven friends are meeting in a campus parking lot to drive into town together for dinner. One person unexpectedly cannot come, and she, with you, was one of the drivers. What to do? The person with solertia is the one who steps up to evaluate the situation and make happen what you all had planned, given the new circumstances. They can quickly assess possible actions. Is there someone else with a car? Can someone use their roommate’s car? Do you go somewhere closer and walk? Though such a case is morally insignificant, this sub-virtue is needed in cases where the good of all involved is morally significant. One could easily imagine a boss having to address the sudden boorish behavior of a worker to her peers, or a parent of four having to react quickly and decisively to tend to an injured child while not neglecting the other three. The prudent person who displays solertia makes good practical decisions in such unexpected situations.

Of course, one can also be imprudent, which is simply the name for the vice of not doing practical decision making well. There are also several types of imprudence, but two nicely encapsulate the essential features of prudence as both seeing things rightly and allowing that practical knowledge to drive good action. The person with the vice of thoughtlessness, on the one hand, acts quickly but without adequately attending to the situation, and thus often fails to attain a truthful grasp of the situation to guide his action. On the other hand, the person with the vice of irresoluteness deliberates endlessly over what to do, but never lets such deliberation translate into action. Thus even if there is seeing rightly it is not in action. Both of these habits, in this case vices, are examples of different types of imprudence.

“Conscience” is a commonly used but often misunderstood term. We hear people speak of guilty consciences, and wonder in exasperation if others around them doing wrong action have any conscience. There are better and worse ways to understand conscience, so this second section of the chapter takes on the important task of explaining this term. It is relevant here because, like prudence, conscience is crucial for seeing rightly so that we may act rightly. For this reason, conscience has always been a foundational term in moral theology.The basis of the term conscience in the Christian tradition is a scripture passage where St. Paul affirms that those who do not have the law of God still have the moral law “written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:14–16), to which their consciences bear witness. Conscience also plays an important role in 1 Cor. 10.

Defining Conscience

In a helpful introductory article on conscience, one contemporary moral theologian asks what constitutes the main challenge to living the virtuous life.Darlene Fozard Weaver, “Conscience: Rightly Formed and Otherwise” Commonweal, September 23, 2005, 10–13. Many assume that it is resisting temptation. The familiar image of deciding what to do with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other comes to mind here. In this model, we know the right thing to do—the angel tells us. Yet we are also tempted to do what we want to do; that is what the devil encourages. The similarity to Glaucon’s vision of morality and the good life should be clear. In this model, what we really want to do is in tension with what we should do. The little angel telling us what we should do in this model is our conscience.

We have all surely been in exactly such a situation where we felt tempted to do what we knew we should not do. Resisting temptation is indeed an important part of living virtuously. Of course, reminiscent of chapter 1, the claim of this book is that the little devil is not encouraging us to do what is truly best for us. It may seem to be what we want for the time being, but what we really want (reminiscent of Socrates) is to be virtuous, not only because it is the morally good thing to do, but because living virtuously is what leads to genuine happiness.

But note that in this first model of the main challenge to living virtuously, the right thing to do is already clear to us. It may be experienced as a burden or obligation (even though it is truly not), but there is no doubt as to what living virtuously entails. Yet often the main obstacle to living virtuously is not knowing what the right thing to do is in the first place. For instance, perhaps a college student is considering becoming more sexually involved with her boyfriend. (A later chapter examines sex in more detail, so this case will be purposely vague as to what exactly is being considered.) She has well-intentioned reasons to become more sexually involved. She cares for him deeply and wants to physically express her love for him. She also has well-intentioned hesitations about doing so. She knows it will have a huge impact on their relationship and is not sure how exactly their relationship will handle it, or indeed what their long-term plans together are. Again, this is not simply a case of knowing the right thing to do and convincing one’s self to do otherwise, as we all have done when we fail to resist temptation. This is a matter of being able to truly determine what exactly constitutes the virtuous thing to do.

This second scenario reveals another important obstacle to living virtuously, not knowing what exactly is the good thing to do. Unlike the first model, here the person does not have the right answer already, so to speak. The virtuous life is a matter both of resisting temptation to do what we know is wrong, and knowing what is right in the first place. Knowing what is right is the domain of conscience. Simply put, “conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed.”Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1778. It is what we honestly and sincerely think to be right, despite any temptations, peer pressures, or other challenges. It is what we think in our gut, in our heart of hearts, is the right thing to do. Sometimes the challenge to living virtuously is following what one’s conscience says is the right thing to do, since we want to do otherwise. Yet sometimes the challenge is developing, or forming, one’s conscience so we know what is right to do in the first place.

It is easy to see why conscience and prudence are being treated together in the same chapter. Both prudence and conscience entail seeing things rightly concerning practical matters for the sake of good action. But there are also important differences. Conscience is your ability to make judgments about whether a particular act is right or wrong, and the particular judgment you make in a certain circumstance. You can have a conscience that makes accurate judgments about what constitutes a good act, and still decide not to follow it and act well. In other words, you can do what you know in your heart of hearts is not the right thing to do. But the same is not true of prudence. Prudence is not simply deliberating and deciding well, but also putting right reasoning into action. Prudence requires a well-formed conscience, but more—if you do not act well, you are not prudent. The main point of this second half of the chapter is describing and evaluating how consciences are formed well or poorly, and explaining whether you are blameworthy or not if your conscience is poorly formed.

Does Everyone Have a Conscience?

The need for formation of conscience, discussed explicitly in the Catechism, surprises many people who assume that one’s conscience is simply a given.Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1783–85, 1798. The formation of conscience is called a lifelong task (1784). Don’t we all simply know what is right and wrong? And if people differ on what they think is right and wrong, doesn’t that simply mean that on some questions (like perhaps our college student considering her sexual relationship with her boyfriend) different answers can both be right? In other words, the underlying question is, can a person think they are right in what they are doing and actually be wrong?

One way to approach this issue is by asking if everyone has a conscience that tells them what is truly right. The answer is yes and no. Everyone has the general capacity to judge right and wrong, and does so in particular situations. The general capacity has traditionally been called synderesis. All have this awareness of the general principles of right and wrong, and the ability to make judgments based on that knowledge in particular cases. However, at the level of particular cases, people may indeed come to different judgments as to the rightness or wrongness of an act. Again, we are not speaking here of the obvious fact that people do wrong actions as well as right ones. We are making the stronger claim that some people sincerely judge, in their heart of hearts, that some particular act is good while other people sincerely judge the same act wrong.

Of course, there are many occasions where such diversity is legitimate, even beautiful. You may know in your conscience that it is right for you to enter religious life, while I know in mine that I am called to get married. You may judge it is best not to drink alcohol at all, while I judge it right for me to drink moderately. In these cases, personal differences, such as one’s vocation, or the nature of a particular activity, such as drinking alcohol, may allow or even call for different actions on the part of different people.

But are there occasions when presumably well-intentioned people differ on the judgment of some particular act, so one must be right and the other one wrong? This is indeed the case. In fact, it can happen not only in individual cases, but even wholesale at the societal level. The case that best illustrates this point is slavery. Consider a slaveholder in 1700 America who genuinely believes in his heart of hearts that owning his slaves is a virtuous act. He treats them fairly and humanely. Today we would clearly say that this person was performing bad actions (buying and selling human beings, controlling their freedom, etc.), even though he really did not think he was wrong. In other words, he acted wrongly even though his conscience told him he was acting rightly. Whether or not we should blame this person for being wrong is a further question which will be addressed below. For now, note the simple claim that one can really judge with one’s conscience that one is acting rightly, even though one is actually not.

The slavery case makes a crucial point. There may indeed be a right thing to do, even if we are not aware of it. The view that there are objectively right and wrong things to do, regardless of whether or not people realize it, is called moral realism. There really is a morally right thing to do, even if one does not see it at times. Unless you wish to argue that systems like slavery, or societal policies like the Holocaust, are morally right as long as people engaged in them genuinely believe them right, then you are a moral realist. Thankfully, I find few, perhaps no, students who are not moral realists. Of course, moral realists may disagree on the questions for which there is only one right way, and which way that is. But as long as you are willing to say there are at least some things that are really wrong, even if the person committing them thinks them right, you are a moral realist. The basic insight here, which is crucial to the Christian tradition, and indeed most of the Western moral tradition, is that one’s judgment about what is right and wrong does not make it so.See John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Encyclical Letter, 1993), 60, on this point. The judgment of one’s conscience is an alarm about what is the case, and it may be accurate or inaccurate. This point must be kept in mind in the following discussion of following one’s conscience, and the possibility of erroneous conscience.

Follow Your Conscience—Always!

The recognition that one can err in a judgment of conscience would seem to indicate that one should not always follow one’s conscience, but only when it is accurate. But this position actually makes no sense. One’s conscience is one’s most sincere judgment, in one’s heart of hearts, of what the right thing to do is. There is no getting underneath one’s conscience. Telling someone not to follow his conscience would, in effect, be telling someone to not do what he sincerely thinks is right. And this would make no sense. Hence, Christians have famously affirmed that one should always obey the certain judgment of one’s conscience.For a recent example of this claim, see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1790.

Of course, the injunction to always follow one’s conscience, coupled with the realization that one’s conscience can be in error, sets up a disturbing possibility. One can follow one’s conscience, and in doing so honestly think in one’s heart of hearts one is acting well, and yet be acting wrongly. The reason the Christian tradition has maintained that people should always follow their consciences is largely due to a trust that they generally do indeed know what is right and wrong, even if they do not always act on it. But nonetheless, one can have, and act on, what has traditionally been called an erroneous conscience. In this situation one acts wrongly but “doesn’t know better.” One honestly thinks that one is acting rightly. The case of the slaveholder above is an example of an erroneous conscience—assuming he really thought that his actions were virtuous. This raises a further question: Is a person blameworthy for following an erroneous conscience?

The short answer to this is, it depends on why one’s conscience is erroneous. If one should have known better, then one is blameworthy for following an erroneous conscience, even though the person really did not know better. This ignorance is called vincible ignorance, since it is conquerable if someone is duly attentive and conscientious. Yet if one could not have known better, the ignorance is called invincible ignorance (unable to be conquered), and one is not blameworthy. An example may help make this distinction.

Say you are driving down a road and are pulled over by the police. The officer says you were speeding, doing 45 in a 30 mph zone. You could respond that you did not know the speed limit, so you should not get a ticket. But, of course, you are going to get a ticket. As a driver, it is your responsibility to know the speed limit, to keep an eye out for signs and drive accordingly. Note that the assumption here is that you truly are ignorant, and not lying to the officer. You really thought, in your heart of hearts, that the limit was 45 mph, and acted accordingly. Here is a simple example of following your conscience when it is an erroneous conscience. The ignorance is vincible, and you are morally responsible for not knowing better.

But perhaps you were paying attention, and the last sign you saw did indeed read 45 mph. Since the road did not significantly change, you assumed that was still the limit. It turns out, there was a sign marking the change to 30 mph, but when you drive back out of frustration to see if you were truly inattentive, you find the sign was knocked over in an accident. Indignant, you take pictures of the spot, go to court on your hearing date, and explain the situation to the judge. Now note, you were still speeding and violating the law. The question is not whether you violated the law—you did. The question is whether you are accountable, or blameworthy, for that violation. In this case, you truly had no way of knowing the law. You acted sincerely out of an erroneous conscience. You acted wrongly, but are not blameworthy since the ignorance was invincible.

What this language of vincible and invincible ignorance provides is a way of evaluating situations where people are acting in good faith but doing morally wrong things. A perfect example would be the slavery example. Surely slavery was wrong then, as it is now. Let’s also assume that there were some people back then who honestly thought that owning slaves could be a morally good thing to do. They were wrong. It remains to be determined, of course, whether their ignorance is vincible or invincible. Should the slaveholder of the 1700s have known that slavery is wrong and not participated in the system willingly? If so, it would be vincible ignorance, and the person is blameworthy.Even if someone is blameworthy in a case of vincible ignorance, societal forces can impact someone’s freedom to lessen—though not remove—morally blameworthiness. For there to be no blame, the ignorance must be invincible. If such a stance were not possible given societal conditions, upbringing, and so on, the person would be invincibly ignorant and thus not blameworthy. As the slavery case makes clear, a lack of moral responsibility certainly does not mean one is acting rightly.

This discussion of slavery and the question of vincible/invincible ignorance prompts two observations before closing this section. First, the fact that slave owners several centuries ago seem to have genuinely thought they were acting rightly raises some humbling questions about our own contemporary societal practices. What are the things we do today that instrumentalize and victimize people—ourselves included—even though we do not see it? And should we see it? Do our national or international economic policies cause real harm to people in ways we do not see? Is the current U.S. penal system something people will look back on centuries later with horror? What about the place of alcohol in our society, particularly among college students? Is it dehumanizing people in ways we do not see clearly? What about common sexual practices, such as premarital sex? Again, the question here is not whether people are doing things they know are wrong. People are doing, have always done, and always will do things they know in their heart of hearts (in their consciences) to be wrong. The question is whether we are doing things we sincerely think are good, but which actually corrupt us, others, and society as a whole.

Another point revealed by the slavery example is that the point of moral theology is not determining whether we can praise or blame someone. This is important, for sure. But it is possible to act wrongly, even if one is not blameworthy. If acting wrongly simply meant being blameworthy, this would make no sense. But as we know from chapter 1, acting wrongly means acting in a manner where the genuine happiness of ourselves and others is impeded. This is certainly true in the slavery example. Even if slaveowners in the year 1700 were not blameworthy, they would still be inflicting enormous harm on other people (the slaves), themselves (by being deprived of seeing, serving, and enjoying the dignity of these people right before their eyes), and society. Or consider the Lorraine Murray example at the beginning of this chapter. Let’s assume that her struggle with eating is the result of biological and familial influences for which she is not to blame. Nonetheless, even if not blameworthy, she is certainly acting in a manner that is harmful to herself. Saying she is not blameworthy does not mean she is acting rightly. Therefore, though determining blame is an important exercise for us who have freedom and are responsible for our actions, it is not the primary point of moral theology. The main goal is, as Socrates said, to live well.

The basic insight of this chapter is that an accurate, or truthful, grasp of the way things are is necessary in order to act well. The true precedes the good. We cannot act rightly if we do not see rightly. Your conscience is both the general capacity to know whether acts are good or bad, and the concrete determinations on various occasions of whether specific actions are good or bad. You should always follow your conscience, because your conscience tells you what you truly and honestly think is the right thing to do. However, since your conscience recognizes, rather than determines, what is the right thing to do, it is possible that in following your conscience you are doing what is wrong. This is called an erroneous conscience, and you are blameworthy for it if you should have known better (vincible ignorance) but not blameworthy for it if you could not have known better (invincible ignorance). This is why a good formation of conscience is so important, so that we can make accurate judgments about what is right and wrong, and live accordingly.

Of course, one can have a well-formed conscience and thus know what is truly right and wrong, and yet still not act on that knowledge. Prudence is the virtue that enables us not only to see rightly what is right and wrong, but also to act rightly based on that knowledge. If you have a well-formed conscience, it is possible to not be prudent. But it is impossible to be prudent without having a well-formed conscience. Though prudence is just one of the cardinal virtues, one that enables us to do practical decision-making well, it is actually preeminent among the cardinal virtues, because without it we cannot effectively live out temperance, justice, or fortitude. The virtuous person must be prudent in order to be able to see rightly and act accordingly.

Although it is prudence that sets the course of action for one who lives out good desires, this chapter on prudence has still been rather general in explaining how that happens. The examples used here are all rather obvious; no one claims that slavery is actually a good thing! It may be frustrating to the reader that even with a chapter on the virtue that sets the specific course for virtuous actions, we have still not gone into detail on any issue and said exactly what is right or wrong. These first five chapters were required in order to even start to do that. Later chapters will be necessary to do it even better. But at this point we are adequately equipped to begin that task, and the next chapter does so by looking at the place of alcohol in the virtuous life.

1. Why is seeing rightly essential for acting virtuously?

2. Define the virtue prudence. What human capacity does it govern?

3. Why is prudence called preeminent among, or charioteer of, the virtues? Give three ways that prudence helps effectuate virtuous action.

4. Are smart people more holy? Explain.

5. Why is prudence a communal activity?

6. Name and describe three sub-virtues of prudence, and two types of imprudence.

7. Define conscience. Why does a conscience need to be formed? Does everyone have a conscience? Explain.

8. Should one always follow one’s conscience? Why or why not?

9. Is one blameworthy for following an erroneous conscience? Explain.

prudence, charioteer of the virtues, docility, solertia, memory, irresoluteness, thoughtlessness, conscience, synderesis, moral realism, erroneous conscience, invincible vs. vincible ignorance

1. If prudence is so central to living virtuously, is it the only virtue you need? Put another way, are there examples of failing to live virtuously that are not simply examples of poor practical decision-making?

2. To what extent can prudence be taught? Can you think of examples of where you were helped to live more prudently?

3. Give some examples of when people seem to know what is best to do, but then not act on that knowledge? When is this a failure to be prudent?

4. Reminiscent of the example given of solertia, where you are trying to go out with friends and face an unexpected situation, what are some skills you may develop in life that do not at first seem to be about morality, but which are related to important moral skills?

5. Some people deny the possibility of an erroneous conscience by claiming that on any significant moral issue, it is clear to all thinking persons how to act rightly, and if they do not do so they are choosing wrongly and always blameworthy. How would you respond to such a person?

6. How can this chapter’s discussion of erroneous conscience help explain seemingly intractable debates over hotly contested ethical issues (like abortion)?

7. Can you think of some common contemporary activity (that is not a hot-button ethical issue) where people are acting wrongly even though they may be invincibly ignorant? If you recognize this activity is wrong, can some people doing it be vincibly ignorant? What would render other people invincibly ignorant?

The main contours of this treatment of prudence and conscience are again from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. The Catechism contains concise introductory material on these topics (1776–1802; 1806). The most formative twentieth-century texts on this chapter have been Josef Pieper’s The Four Cardinal Virtues, Daniel Westburg’s Right Practical Reason, and Herbert McCabe’s God Still Matters.