Conscience and Conscientious Objections

Abstract

Conscience and Conscientious ObjectionsThe publication of this book is made possible by grants from the Blaise Pascal Instituut, the Vrije Universiteit, and the department of Philosophy of the Vrije Universiteit. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. 'No, not as people used to think that God existed.' All one can do is to appeal to certain areas of experience, pointing out certain features, and using suitable metaphors and inventing suitable concepts where necessary to make these features visible." IRIS MURDOCH, "On God and Good" "[I]t seems to me impossible to discuss certain kinds of concept without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analysed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance. Modern behaviouristic philosophy attempts such an analysis in the case of certain moral concepts, it seems to me without success." IRIS MURDOCH, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts" PrefaceThanks are due to many people, without whose support (of whatever kind) I could not have written this book. First of all, I owe many thanks to my parents for the important part they played in the formation of my conscience. The first resource for a philosopher is his own experience. Therefore, it is fortunate (from an academic point of view, at least) that I am not too good a person, in which case I would have had much fewer experiences of conscience to work with; of course it is equally fortunate, for the same reason, that I am not too bad a person. Secondly, special thanks are due to Bert Musschenga, for his sympathetic support and gentle guidance, to my former 'roommates' Govert Buijs and Jos Kole for inspiring and interesting (dissertation-and non-dissertation-related) conversations, to Dick van Lente, Kees Schinkel and Willem Schinkel, for their important and helpful comments in various stages, to Eva Moraal, for listening and for simply being there, and further, for various reasons, to Jonathan Jacobs, Heinz Kittsteiner, Arend Soeteman, and Ben Vermeulen. Thirdly, I would like to thank Nynke Eringa-Boomgaardt for telling me her private story so candidly and for allowing me to use it in my dissertation, as well as the Dutch Minister of Defence for allowing me to make use of conscientious objector files from the Defence Archives. I am grateful to the staff at these archives in Kerkrade, who were extremely helpful. Thanks are due to everyone at Amsterdam University Press, but especially to Patrick Weening, for patiently making one pdf after another. Fourthly, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this book in some other way: Jan Boersema, Jan Branssen, Patrick Delaere, Lasse Gerrits, Michel Heijdra, Lena Hoppe, Dorothee Horstkoet...

Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education

“…Elsewhere (Schinkel, 2007, ch. 8), I define conscience as a mode of consciousness, a ‘concerned awareness of the moral quality of our own contribution to the process of reality, including our own being’ 9 .…”

“…Rees (2006) writes: ‘Although Huck fails to recognise them as such, he is, nonetheless, aware of crucial moral reasons to reject slavery’; and ‘Huck has perfectly good ethical reasons to doubt the moral acceptability of slavery, but lacks the ability to recognize them as such.’ Huck cannot recognise these reasons; he has no reasons, deliberations, words, ‘on the side of feeling’, simply because the feelings he experiences do not have Huck's moral vocabulary at their disposal. As I put it in Schinkel (2007, p. 359): ‘Huck simply cannot think of his action as right, because the word has already been taken; it is not available for what he does.’ Herein, I contend, lies one of the main failures of Huck's moral education. I will elaborate on this in .…”

“…1) defined conscience as a ‘special kind of consciousness’. The historical and etymological connections between ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’ are obvious; much about them can be found in Schinkel, 2007, especially chs. 1 and 2.…”

Over het recht om wij te zeggen : Groepstegenstellingen en de democratische gemeenschap

“…Er wordt thans nog weinig over het geweten zelf geschreven, maar als men erover schrijft, vermijdt men zo veel mogelijk om een defi nitie van het geweten te geven (Boukema 1972;Schinkel 2007). Maar ik zou er toch iets meer over willen weten: wat is het geweten nu precies?…”

Martin Prozesky and 'Well-being': Retroactive and proactive perspectives on religion and ethics in the social transformation of South Africa

“…These four 'sources' provide the thematic focuses for chapters 2 -5 of Conscience(2007).13 Cf Schinkel (2007). for a good overview.…”