Department of EDUCATION Sarhad University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar

Subject:EducationinPakistan
PresentationTopics:
֍TheoriesofConscience
֍ThePsychologyofMoralJudgment
Aqsa
SU-19-01-158-001
B.ED2.5
3RD Semester
Department of EDUCATION
Sarhad University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar
 CONSCIENCE:
 Definitions:
 A cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based

on an individual's moral philosophy or value system.
 Conscience is the knowledge back upon itself. (Alain)
 An inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or
wrongness of one's behavior.
 The sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness
of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of
obligation to do right or be good
 The feeling that you know and should do what
is right and should avoid doing what is wrong, and
that makes you feel guilty when you have done
something you know is wrong.
 Consciousness, at its simplest, is

"sentience or awareness of internal or external
existence".
 Islamic Approach to Conscience:
 About the conscience or self the Quran in Surah “Shams” says;

“And the self and what proportioned it and inspired it with
depravity and piety, he who purifies it has succeeded, he who
covers it up has failed.”
 Abu Umamah (RA) reported: A man asked the Prophet, “What is

faith?” The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said:
“If you are happy with your good deeds and
saddened by your evil deeds, then you are a believer.”
 Allah said in Surah Al-Qiyamah:
“And I swear by the self-reproaching soul…”

 Allah said in Surah Al-Qayyim:
In clemency, forgiveness, and forbearance are
the sweetness of faith, peace of mind, and
tranquility, as well as the nobility of the soul, its
honor, and its ascent over satisfaction with
revenge.
 Righteousness is serenity in the soul and
peace of mind in the heart. Sin is not
comfortable in the soul and not satisfying to
the heart, even if the judge (muftī) gives you
approval.
{Source: Musnad Aḥmad 17396, Grade: Sahih}
 Wabisa ibn Ma’bad reported: The Messenger of Allah,
peace and blessings be upon him, said to me:
Have you come to ask about
righteousness and sin?
I said yes. The Prophet clenched his fist and struck his
chest, saying:
Consult your soul, consult your heart, O
Wabisa. Righteousness is what reassures your soul and your
heart, and sin is what wavers in your soul and puts
tension in your chest, even if the people approve it in their
judgments again and again.
 THEORIES OF CONSCIENCE:
 Thomas Aquinas:
St Thomas Aquinas believed that the
conscience was a device or faculty for
distinguishing right from wrong through use of
reason. He believed that it is a natural part of
mental activity and provides an individual with
moral guidance.
• He argued that there are 2 parts to making a
moral decision:
• The synderesis: This is the right reason, the
awareness of being able to do good and
prevent evil
• The conscienta: it distinguishes between right
and wrong applies this knowledge and makes
the moral decision
• Although he thought that people basically
tended towards the good He also believed
that sometimes working out what good and
evil things were was the main problem.
• Aquinas claimed that there are 2 ways of
behaving badly:
• To do what is known to be wrong
• To go against one’s conscience
• Aquinas thought that the reason people
sometimes did evil deeds was because they
had made a mistake and their conscience was
mistaken. He believed that those who did
wrong pursued an apparent good and not a
real good.
• He believed that the error was to be treated in
one of the following two ways:
• A factual mistake were the individual did not
know that a general rule applied to a
particular situation (i.e. the individual is not
responsible for the wrongdoing)
• A mistake that was due to ignorance (i.e. the
person is responsible for the wrongdoing)
• For Aquinas conscience is the act of applying our knowledge of
good and evil to what we do. He believed that the conscience
derived its authority from God. God can and does also
supernaturally reveal what is and is not in accordance with his
will. Our conscience is our realization that what we might do or
have done is good or not but is not the actual doing or choosing.
• From this Aquinas therefore concluded that only one is excused

from wrong doing if one’s conscience is in error one is also
bound to do the wrong thing if one’s conscience tells one that it
is the right thing to do.
 Butler:
Butler believed that humans share a human
nature and that morality is simply a mater of
following human nature. He believed that
humans were influenced by self-love (desire for
happiness for the self) and benevolence (desire
for the happiness of others).
• Butler suggests that the conscience
adjudicates between these two interests and
it behaves as a guide. The conscience is a gift
from God and has the absolute supreme &
ultimate authority in ethical judgment and its
role is to show the way towards the good. It
then directs us towards focusing on the
benevolence and away from self-love.
• For butler it is an intrinsic part of human
nature and to dismiss morality (which
psychologists like Freud & Piaget does) is to
deny that intrinsic part of human nature.
• Butler also believed that the conscience is our

guide to moral behaviour, put there by God
and must be obeyed.
• Butler believed that if the conscience instructs
us to act in a certain way then you should not
even consider alternatives, as it is adequate
justification to behave in that way. You must
obey the conscience unquestionably
 Piaget:
• Piaget believes that moral sense is developed
alongside other cognitive attributes.
• He saw stages in the moral reasoning linked to the
child’s development with two stages in moral
development.
Heteronymous morality (between ages of 5-11 years):
In which rules are obeyed with an expectation of
swift punishment for lapses.
Autonomous morality (10years +):
A person begins to develop a
personal code of conduct based on perceptions
of socially acceptable behavior patterns and
have a more independent decision making
process.
• Piaget believed that most adults use a mixture
of these two approaches.
• When a person becomes less dependant on
the views and opinions of others they move
from the heteronymous to the autonomous
level.
 Sigmund Freud:
• An alternative approach to conscience comes

from Sigmund Freud. In his book, “The Outline
of Psychoanalysis”, (1949) he wrote that the
human psyche is inspired by powerful
instinctive desires that demand satisfaction.
• Freud’s theory about the development of the conscience is
based on his beliefs about the development of the adult mind.
He argued that the human mind is split into 3 parts:
• ID:
Basic instincts and ancient desires such as hunger. This is
present at birth
• Ego:
This balances the ID and the super Ego, perceptions of the
external that makes us aware of the “Reality Principle” one’s most
outward part and personality. The socialization of the individual
involves the repression of natural but anti-social desires.
• Super Ego:
The feelings of disapproval of society are
internalized to form the super Ego and restricts
the instinctive behavior of the individual. It
reflects anger and disapproval of other making a
guilty conscience to be created which grows into
a life and power of its own, irrespective of the
rational thought of the individual
• Freud therefore believed that the conscience
is pre rational and the inevitable outcome of
conflict and aggression. The conflicts caused
by the creation of the super- Ego lead to the
creation of a guilty conscience that develops
into a powerful force independent of reason
and instinct. It leads to feelings of guilt based
on the perceived expectation of society.
• For Freud conscience cannot be the voice of God
because of the different opinions on ethical issues as it is
the super-ego of the mind (a moral policeman)
developed during the phallic stage of childhood. He
therefore argued that in order for the psyche to be
healthy, there must be a balance between the ego and
the super Ego. For Freud, the Christian conscience is bad
for a person’s mental health because of the rules and
taboos it imposes. Freud’s concept of the conscience is
therefore psychoanalytical, a part of the unconscious
mind.
• MORAL JUDGMENT:
• Moral judgment refers to the determination a
person makes about an action (or inaction),
motive, situation, or person in relation to
standards of goodness or rightness.
• People articulate a moral judgment, for
example, when they say that an action is right
or wrong, that a person is good or bad, or that a
situation is just or unjust.
• Athletes frequently make moral judgments
about moral issues that arise in sports,
and such judgments have been investigated
by sport psychologists. This entry
distinguishes moral judgment from moral
reasoning, reviews methods of investigating
moral judgments, and summarizes key
findings from the sport-related moral
judgment literature.
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORAL JUDGMENT:
• The terms moral judgment and moral
reasoning have sometimes been used
interchangeably. For example, the influential
moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg called
his scoring manual The Measurement of
Moral Judgment. In reality, the manual was
written as a guide to scoring the developmental
stage of a person’s moral reasoning.
• As the field of moral research evolved,
however, a more refined vocabulary also
developed and moral judgment was often
distinguished from moral reasoning, typically
representing its conclusion. Thus, many
researchers use the term moral
judgment when referring to the outcome
of a process of moral reasoning.
• A moral judgment is the conclusion that a person reaches about
the ethical quality of something or someone. A moral judgment is
a moral evaluation.
• The term moral judgment, however, remains controversial.
Reflecting a broader debate in cognitive psychology, there is
dispute over the role of explicit reasoning versus more implicit and
unconscious processes. The central question is this: When people
say that an action is right or wrong, good or bad, is their
judgment the result of conscious, deliberative processes (i.e.,
moral reasoning), or is it a result of unconscious motives and
intuitions? Certainly people can offer moral reasons for their
beliefs, but some theorists see those reasons as genuinely
motivating the person’s beliefs, while others see those reasons
as simply post-hoc rationalizations for moral judgments that
Department
have their actual origins of EDUCATION
in unconscious processes.
• James Rest has provided one of the most
influential accounts of moral action processes,
which are instructive to how these relate
moral reasoning and judgment.
• For Rest, before a person can behave morally
in any situation, a set of psychological
processes, divided into four categories, must
activate and function optimally.
• First, a person must interpret the situation.
Second, a person must engage in moral
reasoning; that is, he or she must weigh any
competing moral issues and form a mature
and responsible judgment about what
should be done. Third, the moral
judgment must be prioritized over other
values and action choices. Finally, the person
must put their moral intention into action.
• It is Rest’s second set of processes that are relevant
here. In the second component of his model, the
potential moral agent needs to arrive at a moral
judgment. The agent needs to consider all of
the morally relevant information, apply their
moral reasoning to it, and make a decision
about what should be done. Rest acknowledges
that not all moral reasoning is conscious and
deliberate; some of it is rather automatic and
habitual.
• Moreover, moral reasoning itself has both structural and
content dimensions to it. In other words, it reflects
both a person’s mode of thinking, which is influenced by
their level of cognitive sophistication, and their
specific beliefs, attitudes, and values, which reflect a
range of individual and cultural influences. The key
point here is that this complex process of moral
reasoning—both conscious and unconscious, influenced
both by stage of development and specific moral beliefs
—leads to a situationally specific judgment about
what morality requires the actor to do.
 THE ASSESSMENT OF MORAL JUDGMENT:
• Moral judgments are typically assessed
in a straightforward fashion. The researcher,
for example, may present study participants
with pictures or stories of legal, illegal,
and/or ambiguous actions in a sport setting
and ask respondents to make judgments
about whether the depicted actions are okay.
• These determinations are often referred to
as legitimacy judgments. Judgments about
cheating, aggression, and doping have
been the most frequently investigated,
along with specific sets of actions
designated as antisocial or prosocial
behavior.
• Brenda Bredemeier developed a moral judgment
measure called the Continuum of Injurious Acts (CIA).
The CIA consists of a set of six cards describing
aggressive acts in basketball that have intended
consequences that become increasingly more serious.
The CIA cards are presented in random sequence to
respondents, who sort them into those deemed
legitimate and those judged as illegitimate. Variants of
the CIA, adapted to different sport settings, have been
used by a number of other sport researchers.
• Another moral judgment measure is the Hahm–Beller Values
Choice Inventory (HBVCI). Though it has sometimes been
said to measure moral reasoning maturity, it is more
accurately described as an assessment of moral judgment.
Respondents are asked to indicate how much they agree or
disagree with a set of scenarios, each of which briefly
describes a moral belief. The HBVCI items are designed
to determine the extent of respondents’ agreement with
deontic ethics (i.e., a philosophical approach that states
actions have inherent moral qualities that are independent
of the consequences of the actions).
• A number of instruments have been
developed by sport psychologists that
combine moral judgments with other related
constructs. For example, Dawn Stephens and
colleagues developed the Judgments About
Moral Behavior in Sport Questionnaire
(JAMBYSQ)
(JAMBYSQ)
(JAMBYSQ)
• The instrument consists of three soccer
scenarios, each depicting hypothetical
protagonists faced with choices about
whether to engage in unfair but
advantageous behaviors (specifically, lie to an
official, hurt an opponent, and violate a game
rule).
• Piloted with upper elementary female soccer
players, the instrument was designed to assess
respondents’ (a) fair play action tendencies; (b)
moral judgments—that is, what they thought
the protagonist should do; (c) moral motives; and
(d) perceptions of team norms pertaining to unfair
play behavior. Both Stephens and other
researchers have adapted the measure to fit a
variety of other ages and sports.
• Similarly, Sandra Gibbons and colleagues
developed a hybrid measure that asked
respondents to answer three questions about
each of 10 behaviors. The three questions
were designed to tap moral judgment,
moral reason, and moral intention.
 Moral Judgments in Sport Research
• In addition to demographic characteristics, there is

a range of other influences on moral judgments. A
person’s level or stage of moral reasoning, while not
determinative of moral judgments, is one
developmental variable that influences judgment.
Other sources have also been investigated, including
moral identity, affective self-regulatory efficacy, self-
esteem, and, most especially, motivation.
• Researchers in the area of achievement motivation (or
goal orientation) have shown consistently that there is
a significant empirical link between motivation and
morality. Those individuals who participate in
achievement contexts like sport because they are
motivated to pursue learning, growth, and mastery
are much more likely to make prosocial, positive
moral judgments, such as endorsing fair play and
condemning cheating and aggression, than those
whose motivation is primarily to demonstrate
superiority over others.
• A variety of contextual influences also
affect moral judgments. Not surprisingly,
moral judgments are influenced by the sport
and competitive level. For example,
recreational golfers may, on average, make
different moral judgments about the
legitimacy of steroid use than professional
baseball players.
• One major influence on moral judgments that has
received considerable attention is the moral
atmosphere. The term moral atmosphere refers to
the shared, collective moral norms of a group. David
Shields and colleagues opened this line of research in
the sport realm by developing the Team Norm
Questionnaire, a simple six-item assessment that
asked athletes to estimate the number of their
teammates who would engage in ethically
inappropriate behavior (i.e., cheating and aggression)
• If it would help their team win and, second,
whether the coach would want them to
do it. Other researchers have developed
similar measures of moral atmosphere and
have documented that shared norms have a
significant influence on individual judgments
and behavior.
• Like the moral atmosphere, the motivational climate has also
been shown to influence moral judgment. The motivational
climate refers to social cues that tend to elicit either a task or
mastery motivational orientation or an ego or
performance orientation. For example, when a coach
emphasizes winning or normative ability, it tends to
encourage an ego orientation. In contrast, when a coach
emphasizes doing one’s best and praises effort more than
outcome, a mastery climate is fostered that supports task
motivation. Generally, a performance climate—one that
augments an ego goal orientation focused on outperforming
others—tends to result in more antisocial judgments.
• Another important question is the relationship between
judgment and action. From research in both general
psychology and sport psychology (SP), it is clear that
moral judgments are neither irrelevant nor determinative
when it comes to predicting or understanding moral
action. People sometimes act consistently with their moral
beliefs, but situational factors may override moral
judgments. For example, when there are high expected
benefits associated with acting in antisocial ways, athletes
may act inconsistently with their more “abstract” moral
judgments. Similarly, when intense emotions are
activated, moral judgments may be overridden.
• Moral judgments also can be suspended through
processes of moral disengagement. In other words, an
athlete who normally judges aggressive acts as wrong
may, nonetheless, engage in an aggressive act and
excuse her behavior by blaming the other party—“she
started it.” Drawing from the work of Albert Bandura,
sport researchers such as Maria Kavussanu have
investigated a number of psychosocial moral
disengagement processes that function to suspend a
person’s normal moral judgment.
• CONCLUSIONIn conclusion, a moral judgment reflects a person’s
assessment of the moral quality of something (e.g., an action, person,
policy, institution). Athletes and coaches make moral judgments
frequently as they consider behavioral options ranging from the
obviously deplorable to the clearly praiseworthy. To increase the
likelihood that moral judgments will guide behavior, athletes and
coaches can seek to prioritize ethics, promote task motivation, foster a
mastery motivational climate, and implement strategies to counter
the temptation to use processes of moral disengagement.
----------------------------------------------------
………………..THE END………………

Department of EDUCATION Sarhad University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar

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Department of EDUCATION Sarhad University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar

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Subject:EducationinPakistan

 A cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based

 Consciousness, at its simplest, is

 About the conscience or self the Quran in Surah “Shams” says;

 Abu Umamah (RA) reported: A man asked the Prophet, “What is

“And I swear by the self-reproaching soul…”

• From this Aquinas therefore concluded that only one is excused

• Butler also believed that the conscience is our

• An alternative approach to conscience comes

• In addition to demographic characteristics, there is

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