The experience of conscience is addressed, not merely felt

The argument

A second line of argument offered for this position attends to conscience as people actually report it. The report is not of an inclination but of being summoned. Conscience arrives unbidden, frequently against what the person wants, often against what those around them expect, and it speaks in the register of demand rather than preference. It also persists: having done the thing, the person is not merely dissatisfied but answerable, and the sense of answerability does not lift when nobody discovers the act. Proponents note that remorse for a wholly undetected wrong is a very common human experience and a strange one if moral rules are simply the rules of the group, since there is no one to have offended. They argue that a vocabulary of address fits this better than a vocabulary of attitude. We speak of being called, of knowing we must, of being judged, of standing condemned in our own eyes. On this account that is not metaphor but accurate reporting of something that behaves like law: it commands, it permits no exceptions in one's own favour, it holds whether or not it is enforced, and it treats the person as responsible rather than merely as caused. Defenders of the view are careful about what this does and does not establish. They do not claim that the feeling of being addressed proves who addresses; conscience can be mistaken, and traditions differ about its reliability and its training. Their claim is comparative. Of the available accounts, they argue, one that takes morality to be genuine law from a genuine source explains why moral experience has the grammar of law, whereas accounts that reduce it to custom or inherited impulse have to treat that grammar as a systematic illusion about which almost everyone is almost always wrong.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that the grammar of address is exactly what internalised authority would produce. A demand learned early, from figures whose approval mattered enormously, and enforced long before it could be examined, would be expected to speak in the second person and to go on speaking when no one is watching. They note too that undetected wrongdoing still offends someone in most cases, that remorse frequently attaches to acts no tradition condemns and fails to attach to acts every tradition does, and that conscience varies with upbringing in ways that fit a trained faculty better than a received transmission.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A demand can present itself as addressed because it once was addressed, by parents and community, and then internalised early enough that its origin is forgotten. [Rejecting P2] The absence of a discovered victim does not mean no one was wronged, and the residue of training would be felt in private exactly as it is in public. [Rejecting C] Taking an experience at face value is a weak form of explanation where there is an independent account of how the experience would arise, and the developmental account supplies one.