Conscience

On my part, I believe conscience to be the sense of right and wrong within each person. Basically, if there weren't any, nothing would be morally right or wrong, anyone would just do whatever they wanted. Shooting a person point-blank or mugging a bystander would be regular everyday occurrences in the world. Consciences are what keep wholesome people from doing these acts.

So seeing as it has been established throughout the course of time that the conscience DOES in fact exist (if it didn't the world would probably be in World War [insert random number higher than 2 here], if not already destroyed and wiped clean of existence), it begs the question as to why people still have the nerve to lie, cheat, and steal their way through life. Now, that would either tell us that consciences differ between people (meaning some people get strong ones while others get not-so-strong ones) OR that those people are strong enough to defy their consciences, fueled by whatever force that drives them (e.g. poverty, depravement, etc).

The latter is really not very likely because there are still occurrences of people who are able to hold on to their resolve and strengthen it during times of great trouble. So that leaves us with the first one, that consciences differ among different people. I suppose that there is no such thing as a conscience that views right as wrong and wrong as right, although it would still technically fill the requirements of being a conscience, which is to distinguish between right and wrong (but come on, seriously, is anyone THAT messed up?). So, that leaves us with two potential kinds of conscience. One of them is obviously the good one, the kind that knows what is actually right and definitely wrong, and another that doesn't give a damn about what's right and not.

On a topic such as conscience, it can't be avoided to run into margins of confusion. Simply put, its about morality. Some people would say that lying is an absolute error, or sin if you will, while on the other hand, the other batch of people would actually say that as long as its for a good purpose or if its a tiny little fib, the world won't get launched into oblivion. I mean even if everyone actually follows their conscience, the fact that they aren't uniform means that they are, to an extent, subjective... And would that actually fit as moral?