Conscience and Moral Intuitions
When I was a child, I was told by my religious teachers that God had given me a conscience to use so
that I could tell whether something I was doing was right or wrong. But even without any remaining
religious beliefs, I still have a conscience, providing a gut reaction about the rightness or wrongness
of my own actions or those of others. For example, when I wanted an iPhone and thought about putting
it on my research grant, I got a bad feeling that this would be a misuse of government funds. More
seriously, the arbitrary retention and torture of people who are vaguely suspected of being terrorists
strikes me as wrong, not just in an abstract, purely cognitive way, but as part of a visceral, emotional
reaction.