Rule that conscience must be guided by morality and reason

The rule that conscience must be guided by morality and reason is the ethical principle set out in the closing sermon of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It rejects conscience as an independent source of moral law: conscience is a judge within, but its judgments are trustworthy only when informed by standards beyond its own fluctuating impressions. The distinction matters both for judging conduct and for judging oneself.## Conscience as an imperfect judgeThe sermon begins by acknowledging the high office assigned to conscience: it is placed within people as a judge and intended to be just and equitable. But the passage refuses to treat this intention as a guarantee of reliable performance. Through an unhappy succession of causes and impediments, conscience may take imperfect notice of what happens, perform its office negligently, or even act corruptly. Its inward position therefore does not make it infallible. Rather, its limitations create an absolute need to join another principle to it, one capable of aiding or governing its determinations.The sermon’s example of David reinforces the distinction between wrongdoing and the recognition of wrongdoing. From the first commission of his crime until Nathan came to reprove him, no sorrow or compunction is recorded. Conscience, left without correction, may fail to make a person feel or acknowledge the moral weight of what has been done. The example does not merely describe a mistaken verdict; it shows how the absence of judgment can itself persist until an outside admonition intervenes.## The standards that test conscienceFor a judgment about a person’s merit—as an honest man, a useful citizen, a faithful subject to the king, or a good servant to God—the sermon calls for several standards to be brought into consideration. Religion and morality supply moral obligations; the law of God is to be consulted; and calm reason, justice, and truth provide further measures. Conscience then determines the case on the basis of these reports. Its proper work is not to invent the standards, but to assess the person in light of them.This sequence makes conscience neither irrelevant nor sovereign. It retains the decisive task of judgment, but its authority depends on the quality of the grounds before it. If the heart does not condemn a person after conscience has been directed by those external standards, the sermon says the resulting rule is infallible, and that the person may have confidence toward God. Such confidence rests not on an unchecked feeling of innocence, but on a judgment formed through moral and rational examination and understood as anticipating the final divine judgment.## Conscience is not the lawThe sermon condenses its distinction into a direct warning: “your conscience is not a law;—No, God and reason made the law, and have placed conscience within you to determine”. The image is juridical. Conscience resembles a judge, not a legislator: its task is faithfully to declare a law already written, rather than produce new law according to its own passions. The contrast with an Asiatic Cadi, whose decisions ebb and flow with passion, and a British judge, who declares rather than makes law, presents impartial judgment as conscience’s proper model.The rule also turns outward as a test of trustworthiness. “Trust that man in nothing, who has not a CONSCIENCE in every thing.” Yet the adjacent distinction prevents this maxim from becoming a simple endorsement of whatever someone calls conscience. Having a conscience in every matter is not the same as treating private conviction as law. A trustworthy moral life requires conscientious attention, while the judgment of conscience must still answer to God and reason.## Moral judgment and self-examinationThe sermon’s practical subject is the danger of being misled about one’s own moral standing. Conscience can be a source of judgment without being a sufficient foundation for judgment; religion, morality, reason, justice, and truth must inform it. The difference between those roles guards against both neglect and self-authorization: a person cannot simply ignore conscience, but neither can private feeling decide what is right by itself.The passage accordingly gives conscience a disciplined, accountable function. It is an inward tribunal whose verdict becomes reliable through reference to standards that it did not make. Its final image is not of a person free to declare themselves innocent, but of a person preparing to answer for actions before God. The principle thus joins moral self-scrutiny to humility: conscience matters precisely because it judges, and must be guided precisely because it can judge badly.