“Unguarded Eyes”: The Doorway to a Politics of Conscience

David E. DeCosse (@daviddecosse.bsky.social) is the director of the Religious & Catholic Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are his own.

We are badly in need in the United States of a new politics of conscience.

To develop this politics, we need to do something that now feels awkward if not unfathomable: Choose to look – literally or imaginatively – into the unguarded eyes of the strangers across our vast, brooding divides.

I mean to look into the frightened face of an undocumented Latina mother tackled by masked ICE agents. And I mean to look into the humiliated face of a Pennsylvania laborer keenly aware that he can’t support a family nearly as well as his steelworker father and grandfather did.

At some point, we need to develop a shared sense of conscience that binds people together across such divides and becomes the basis of a story that leads to the renewal of our political world.

In a basic sense, “conscience” refers to an abiding awareness of personal responsibility: We know, sometimes clearly and sometimes dimly, that we have a capacity to direct our lives and that implicit in this capacity is a duty to direct our lives in a morally good way.

Having a conscience doesn’t mean that we always heed it. But recognizing that each person has a conscience is a step toward accepting that we live in a moral universe.  

We used to have a vivid politics of conscience. At the height of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., appealed to a shared understanding of conscience to combat racism. In doing so, King relied on the Christian conviction that God’s creative power has imparted to all persons – Christians and otherwise – a disposition toward truth and justice.

King could also presume that he was speaking to a culture in which persons’ consciences – both segregationists and civil rights leaders – were often shaped by the same Christian stories. King believed that nonviolent protest in a spirit of love was a way to appeal beyond the false consciousness of white supremacy to what the created human conscience would finally recognize because it was dimly aware of it all along: the equal dignity of all persons.

We don’t live in King’s world anymore. Our ideas of conscience are as divided as we are. On the one hand, we live in a libertarian world in which claims of individual conscience abound – I opt out of this vaccine! – but with little or any connection to other persons’ consciences. On the other hand, we have surrendered the idea of conscience as if it only belongs to traditionalist religions claiming a right of conscience to opt out of involvement with changing norms of sex and gender.

Our postmodern politics have made conscience a function of the power games of today. Left-wing identity politics has dropped the language of conscience in favor of the rigid sorting of people into categories of the oppressed and oppressors. On the right, Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of conscience – “the proud knowledge of this privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate…sovereign man calls it his conscience” – sounds like a perfect fit for the solitary entrepreneurial hubris of too many tech bros. 

We need to develop a way of thinking about conscience that recognizes a common humanity. And we need to clarify the content of such a shared conscience: For whom and for what are we responsible?

Here religions can help – if they could re-imagine their ideas of conscience beyond the narrow confines of culture war framings that widen our gulfs. Jesuit moral theologian James Keenan pointed to the need for such a shift when he said recently that the greatest failure of the moral and religious conscience is not recognizing someone in need. The Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis in 1945, had a similar concern: Beware the conscience preoccupied with moral purity and indifferent to the human catastrophe unfolding across the street.

The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas developed an especially powerful understanding of conscience relevant for our times. A survivor of the Holocaust, Levinas came to his understanding of conscience from the crucible of experience.

In powerful language that challenges the contempt and stereotypes that often today accompany the passionate intensity of expressions of American freedom, he said: “The freedom that lives through consciousness is inhibited…when I really stare, with a straightforwardness devoid of trickery or evasion, into [a person’s] unguarded, absolutely unprotected eyes. Conscience is precisely this straightforwardness.”

For Levinas, the decision to look without evasion evokes a recognition within us that we are meant to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Conscience doesn’t make me autonomous. It challenges me to be a brother.

It’s important to be clear about what Levinas is saying and not saying. His idea of conscience is intended to apply to everyone: To the undocumented immigrant and to the Pennsylvania laborer; to Democrats and Republicans; to Jews and Christians and to everyone else.

Moreover, his view of conscience lays down a moral baseline for a common humanity that commands our responsibility and should inform our policy.

Finding a shared sense of conscience is an urgent task. Levinas doesn’t ask that we all agree on the meaning of human nature. Instead, he asks us to reflect on an elemental aspect of our human experience. No masks, no stereotypes, no contempt: What do we discover when we gaze without evasion into another’s unguarded eyes? Conscience waits for us there if we have the courage to look.