Conscience and Experience: Choosing the True and the Good

Abstract

This essay examines the practical judgment called conscience that binds a person to do or not to do a particular action. Drawing from the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, scripture, tradition, reason/science, and human experience, it focuses on the connection between communal human experience and conscience. It concludes that the teaching that no one is to be forced to act contrary to her or his conscience and that no one is to be restrained from acting according to her or his conscience is a long-standing Catholic moral tradition.