Muslims may be acting in good conscience and Jews may be acting in good conscience, which is not to say that all Muslims and Jews act in good conscience or that all people representing any particular demographic act in good conscience. In fact, it is the assessment of many learned scholars that 98% of the people act according to other competing driving motives, such as, the fear of rejection accompanied with the need to belong and to be approved of by their similar cultural grouping.
"For Aquinas, our God-given reason, by synderesis, has an innate awareness of good and evil that cannot be mistaken – we all have this ability to distinguish from good and evil in the same quantity, and feel a moral obligation to avoid evil and pursue goodness. Aquinas also described synderesis as an awareness of the five primary precepts as proposed in his theory of Natural Law."
psychology.wikia.com
Yet most people do act against the pangs of conscience. They justify their actions on the basis of many complex psychological constructs but some obvious ones are patriotism, partisan loyalty, and even ironically religious authority. Where Aquinas equated actions based on good conscience as the definition of goodness and actions going against good conscious, as the definition of evil. |
