The rise and fall of America’s conscience: the disappearance of the conscience from collegiate moral education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship about the concept of the conscience has languished in the past half century, although some recent works have sought to revive it. One recent attempt proposes that the key to reviving the concept is its secularisation, since this secularisation would make it less dogmatic and more useful to a wider audience. In this paper, I argue that this process already occurred in American collegiate moral education. Yet, when the moral conscience in America became separated from its religious roots and the functions inspired by those roots, it eventually lost its place in any general approach to collegiate moral education. The secularisation of the concept cut it off from the roots nourishing its earlier multi-faceted religious understanding and led it not to be reutilised for a broader audience but to it being replaced by a secularised form of reason.