What Is Your Conscience?

Greetings Citizen Philosophers All,

The latest Thinking Out Loud podcast has been released on iTunes. The session was recorded Wednesday, Jan 2, and the topic was "What is your conscience and can it be trusted?" Thank you, Billie Lagerwerff, David Rood, Deborah Martin, George Garrett, John Tytus, and Steven Stokes for your participation. We had a great discussion. We also set a new record for cyber participation. Three cyber guests is our highest so far. We might of had five, if Alice from Australia and Mark from London had not had scheduling difficulties. It would be nice to include international perspectives, so we will continue to try to work around vastly disparate time zones and other scheduling difficulties.

In any case, for those of you who missed out, here are some of the questions we wrestled with:

Is our conscience that voice inside our head, telling us what to do? Is there only one voice? How can we tell which voice is our conscience and which is the little devil on our shoulder? Can meditation help us hear the right voice? Is our conscience a voice in our head or a feeling in our gut? Is our conscience culturally acquired or innately present? When Huck Finn was running away with his slave, Jim, what was his conscience saying? Was it a reliable guide? Is our conscience a passive resource to be consulted or an active agent that intrudes itself upon us? Rather than an instrument providing an answer, could it be just an innate drive to grapple with the question? Are pangs of guilt a reliable indicator of wrong-doing? Does our conscience speak to us on multiple levels? Which is more reliable, our gut, our heart, or our head? How do we reconcile these multiple "voices" with the fact that we are really just one being? How does empathy relate to conscience? How universal is the conscience? Why do some individual get different answers from their conscience than someone else in the same situation? To what extent is our conscience programmed by our upbringing and our culture? Does the conscience mature with life experience? Are there universal stages of development for the conscience? Is our current narcissistic society and culture of rudeness a result of a lack of proper moral or ethical nurturing?

To subscribe to the podcast with your podcast software (such as iTunes or iPodder) copy and past the following link into your software:

www.citizenphilosopher.com/rss/tol_podcasts.xml

If you have iTunes, you can find us listed in the Apple Music Store directory under Podcasts/Society & Culture/Philosophy, or just do a search in iTunes on Thinking Out Loud People. The direct iTunes link is:

phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=214321935

If you don't have iTunes or other podcast software and just want to download the mp3 file directly, use this link:

Listen to the broadcast (mp3)

You are invited to add your thoughts by clicking on the "comments" link at the lower right hand corner of this post.

The next Thinking Out Loud will be Wednesday, February 6, at 7:00 pm. Here are some suggestions for the topic:

Mark has suggested: "What is friendship?"
Debbie has suggested: "Is it moral/ethical to collect someone's DNA without their consent?"

Both suggestions are full of possibilities. A variation on Debbie's questions might be "What are our medical privacy rights?" If you have other topics you would like to add or modifications to these you would like to suggest, send them to me. Your input is most welcome.

Finally, I would like to put in a plug for one of my favorite philosophy magazines and draw your attention to one of its regular columns in particular. The magazine is Philosophy Now and the column is Moral Moments by Joel Marks. Philosophy Now is tailored specifically toward the thoughtful layperson, that is, citizen philosophers such as ourselves, and Joel Marks' column succeeds in providing a continuous stream of stimulating food for thought, perplexing questions, and insightful observations. You can subscribe to the magazine though their web site here:

http://www.philosophynow.org/

You can find more about Joel Marks and his writings from his blog site here:

http://moralandothermoments.blogspot.com/

Cheers,

Steve