Conscience: Who Put That Voice Inside You?

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You have a ring that makes you invisible; zero chance of being caught, no punishment, no one will ever find out. Is there still something you wouldn't do — and if so, whose voice exactly is the one that stops you? Perhaps what we call conscience is nothing but a watchman planted inside us.

It is well past midnight. Three in the morning. You are in the middle of the city, at a completely empty four-way intersection. The light is red. You look right, you look left: not a car, not a pedestrian, not a traffic patrol waiting on the corner. You are not even certain there is a camera at the junction. Your foot is on the brake, your hand rests on the gear stick. And for those two or three seconds, one of humanity's oldest questions is born again inside your car, without your opening a single book, without your hearing a single philosopher's name: if nobody is going to see, why am I stopping?

This question was first set down on paper about two thousand four hundred years ago, in Plato's dialogue The Republic. A young man named Glaucon sits down opposite Socrates and tells him a deeply unsettling story. There was a shepherd in Lydia. One day there was a great storm and an earthquake, the ground split open, and a deep chasm appeared in the place where he grazed his flock. The shepherd gave in to his curiosity and climbed down. Below he found a bronze horse, a small door in the horse's side, and behind the door a corpse larger than a human body. On the finger of the corpse was a golden ring. He took the ring, climbed back out, and returned to his flock.

Some time later, when the shepherds gathered as they did every month to make their report to the king, the man was toying with the ring and turned its setting toward his palm. In that moment the men beside him began to speak of him as though he were not there. Startled, he turned the setting back and became visible again. He tried it, and tried it again; setting inward, invisible; setting outward, visible. And the moment he understood this, what do you suppose was the first thing he did? He had himself chosen for the delegation going to the palace. He reached the palace, seduced the queen, killed the king together with her, and took the throne.

Glaucon's real blow is not the story itself but the question that follows it. He says: if there were two such rings, and we gave one to the man we consider the most honest and the other to the man we consider the most corrupt, the outcome would not differ. Both would take the same road. Because nobody is solid enough to stay honest the moment they are certain of going unpunished. On this view, the thing we call justice is not a beauty inside a person but the shadow left inside by a fear that comes from outside. Reduce the chance of getting caught to zero, and morality drops to zero as well.

Now let us be honest: the ring Glaucon describes is no longer a fairy tale. In the twenty-first century that ring is in everybody's pocket. Its name is the anonymous account. That empty box you can write in without showing your face, without giving your name, without paying any price, is the most widespread ring of invisibility in history. And we all know how people speak there. The same person, on the same day, on the same subject, can be courteous and measured somewhere their name is attached; and the moment the setting turns inward, can become someone you would not recognize. We have a great deal of material for agreeing with Glaucon.

But right here there is a small and strange piece of evidence pointing the other way. It comes from an experiment carried out in two thousand six in the north of England, in the staff kitchen of a university department. In the kitchen there is an honesty box for tea and coffee; whoever takes some drops in the money, and nobody supervises it. The researchers hung an image above the price list that changed every week: some weeks a picture of flowers, some weeks a photograph of human eyes. In the weeks when the eyes were hanging there, the money dropped into the box rose to roughly three times what it was in the flower weeks. Nobody was watching anybody. There was a piece of paper on the wall, that is all. Which means that a human being reacts not to a genuine observer but to the feeling of being observed. Something inside us is extraordinarily sensitive to a gaze.

And at that empty intersection, a great many people still stop. There are people who run after a man to return the wallet they found when no one was looking, who carry the extra change back to the till, who keep a promise nobody will ever hear about. What stops them is not punishment. Then what is it? This is the question we will be pursuing in this episode: there is a voice inside, and sometimes that voice says the exact opposite of what serves us. Who put it there?

In Western thought, the first great figure to listen to this voice and take it seriously was the man sitting opposite Glaucon. In his defence, Socrates speaks of a sign that had followed him since childhood. He calls it his daimonion; a divine indication. This indication has a very strange feature, and it is the feature that matters most in the history of philosophy: this voice never tells him what he should do. It only holds him back from something he is about to do. It does not command, it forbids. It does not point an arrow, it pulls him by the sleeve.

Socrates offers this as the reason he stayed away from politics; but the truly striking scene takes place in court. In the year three hundred and ninety-nine before Christ, before a jury of more than five hundred citizens, he is accused of corrupting the young and of not recognising the gods of the city. He is sentenced to death. And on that day he says that the sign which had stopped him for years at the smallest wrong did not make a sound even once: not that morning as he left the house, not on the way to the court, not while he was speaking. For him, this is proof that what was happening was not a bad thing. So here is a man accepting his own death sentence by reading the silence of the voice inside him. The voice within is not a watchman of fear here; it is the very thing that quietens fear.

Centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his book on education published in seventeen sixty-two, placed this voice in an almost divine position. In his view reason can deceive us; our interest makes reason say whatever we want, and cleverness finds a covering for everything. But conscience does not deceive. Rousseau described it as an unerring instinct planted inside the human being, an infallible judge of good and evil. This view was very beautiful, and also very fragile; because throughout history most of the people who did terrible things had an untroubled conscience.

Immanuel Kant took the matter up from here and set it on far firmer ground. At the end of his Critique of Practical Reason, published in seventeen eighty-eight, he writes one of the most often repeated sentences in the history of philosophy: two things fill a person with ever new wonder, however long they are thought about. The starry sky above, and the moral law within. The pairing here is entirely deliberate. Kant treats the voice inside as something as real as the universe outside, as ordered as the laws of that universe. Just as the movement of the stars is not arbitrary, neither is morality.

Kant's description of conscience, on the other hand, is cool and chilling. For him, conscience is a court set up inside the human being. And the oddity of this court is the following: you are the defendant, you are also the prosecutor, you are also the judge. What is more, you cannot withdraw from the case. A person can flee an outward court, leave the country, hire a lawyer, destroy the evidence; but there is no possibility of failing to appear at the hearing inside oneself. The session continues even while you sleep.

The fine distinction Kant draws here should not be missed, because it is still constantly confused today. Conscience, in his account, is not the thing that tells you what is right. Finding out what is right is the work of reason; and for that Kant lays down his famous test: can you bear to turn the rule of the thing you are about to do into a law that everyone follows? If everyone lied the moment they gave their word, would there still be such a thing as giving your word? Making that calculation is not the work of conscience. The work of conscience is to judge whether you acted according to your own conviction. So conscience is not a compass but a witness. It does not know what you should do; it knows whether the thing you did agrees with what you yourself knew.

We already live this in everyday life. On the day you keep a promise you told nobody about, nobody congratulates you; but inside there is a silent approval. And on the day you choose the easy thing, when you make that small calculation not a soul heard about, nobody reproaches you; and yet in the evening, in bed, after you have switched off the light, that court convenes of its own accord. This is exactly what Kant wanted to say: there is no way to close the courtroom.

But at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, two figures appeared and put a far more uncomfortable question to this lovely picture. What if this voice is not a law that came down from the sky, but nothing more than a domesticated fear?

In the work he published in nineteen twenty-three, Sigmund Freud added a third storey to the human mind: the superego. According to Freud, in the first years of life the child is surrounded by the prohibitions of the mother and father, by their looks, by the tone of their voice. In time these prohibitions do not stay outside; the child takes them in and makes them part of its own mind. And so a day comes when the mother and father are not in the room, are perhaps not even alive, but the voice is still there. Freud's claim was this: the thing we call conscience is, to a large extent, an authority that has moved in with us. The observer from outside has settled inside, and is now working without wages.

There is one oddity Freud noticed about this, and it is what makes the matter genuinely dark. In the book he wrote on civilisation in nineteen thirty, he says that the harshest consciences often come not from the harshest upbringing but, on the contrary, from the most affectionate homes. Why? Because a child cannot direct anger at a mother and father it loves and who do it no harm. And when it cannot be directed, that anger does not evaporate; it changes course and turns back on itself. So a person begins to inflict upon themselves a punishment nobody imposed on them. In Freud's account, the sense of guilt comes before the offence; a person can feel guilty without having done anything, because the prosecutor inside does not wait for the deed, it counts even the intention as sufficient.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book investigating the origins of morality published in eighteen eighty-seven, went further still and described the birth scene of this voice. In his account, for tens of thousands of years the human being was a creature that hunted, attacked, fled, and discharged its strength outward. Then one day walls were raised; settled life came, the city, law, peace. All those instincts that had flowed outward were shut in at a stroke. But energy does not vanish, it changes direction. In Nietzsche's phrase, the human being turned inward: he turned upon himself the wildness he could no longer release outside. And on that day a creature was born that makes itself suffer, judges itself, tears at itself. Nietzsche gives this the name bad conscience. For him it is at the same time the story of how the human soul acquired depth: the human being grew deep thanks to the whip turned upon himself. The subtlety we gained was the invoice for the price we paid.

He also points to an interesting detail of language that supports this thought. In German, the word meaning guilt also means debt. Setting out from this, Nietzsche says that at the root of the feeling of guilt stands not a divine law but a much older and much more concrete relationship, the relationship between creditor and debtor. An unpaid debt is one day collected in pain. And the pang of conscience, in his view, is the continuation of that collection inside us.

Both of these figures point to the same place: perhaps the owner of the voice inside is not you. Perhaps it is your father's voice, perhaps the voice of the herd, perhaps the voice of a habit thousands of years old that taught you to whip yourself.

So how strong is this voice? In nineteen sixty-one in America, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram set out to measure exactly that. Volunteers were told they were taking part in an experiment about learning. They would deliver an electric shock of steadily increasing severity to a person in the next room for every wrong answer. The person in the next room was in fact part of the experiment and was receiving no shocks at all; but the volunteer, who did not know this, heard the protests from behind the wall, then the cries, and then the silence. Whenever the volunteer wanted to stop, the official in the white coat said in a calm voice: please continue. The responsibility is mine.

In the first arrangement, twenty-six people out of forty, that is sixty-five percent, turned the dial all the way to the final level, up to four hundred and fifty volts. What this means is not that most people have no conscience. The truly frightening detail in the records is a different one. Almost everyone who continued was suffering. They were sweating, their hands were shaking, they were laughing strangely, they said over and over that they wanted to stop. Which means the voice inside was speaking. It was shouting. But it could not stop the hand. One sentence, a single sentence, was enough: the responsibility is mine.

And this should not be forgotten either: thirty-five percent stopped. In the same room, facing the same white coat, hearing the same sentence, they stopped. So the voice is neither as solid as a settled law nor something that can be silenced altogether. It stands somewhere; sometimes it is pressed down, sometimes it rises to its feet. And when it is silenced, where does it go?

While following the trail of that question, the word we use in Turkish gives us a clue of its own. Vicdan, the Turkish word for conscience, comes from an Arabic root meaning to find. From the same root comes vecd, the state of finding, the state of being carried out of oneself. Which is to say that conscience, in the memory of the word itself, is not a rule learned from outside but something found inside. Not a piece of knowledge, but a finding.

Islamic thought approaches this matter not with a single voice inside the human being but with layers that contend with one another. In the Quran, three states of the nafs, the self, are mentioned. One is the self that commands evil. One is the self that has come to peace, that has made peace with itself. And between the two stands the self that reproaches itself; its name is nafs-i lawwama. At the opening of the chapter of the Resurrection something remarkable happens: the oath is sworn not by the self that has come to peace, but by the self that reproaches itself. Which means that what is honoured here is not inner peace; it is restlessness itself. A person turning back on themselves after what they have done and calling themselves to account is treated in this tradition not as a weakness but as the precious side of being human. A person who does not reproach themselves has not been promoted, but blunted.

A conversation attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and recorded in the collections of hadith carries the matter somewhere that is still surprising today. A man named Wabisa comes to ask what righteousness and sin are. The answer he receives is not a list. He is told to put the very question he came to ask to his own heart. Righteousness is what the heart settles into, what the self finds peace in; sin is what circles inside you like a wound, what scratches at the soul. Another saying, among the sound reports collected by Muslim, gives the same measure: sin is what you would not want other people to find out about. Notice what this means: the measure is not the chance of being caught; it is shame itself. Even if you had put on the ring of Gyges, that shame would stay exactly where it is, because there is already someone who sees you.

But the most realistic side of this tradition is that it does not claim this voice is flawless. Ghazali likens the human heart to a mirror. When the mirror is clean it shows the truth in front of it as it is. But every wrong leaves a stain on it, a layer of rust. When the stains pile one on another the mirror is not damaged, not broken, and does not move from its place; it simply stops showing. This is precisely what the silencing of conscience is. That voice does not die, it becomes inaudible. And the most dangerous thing that can happen to a person is not the loss of the voice but the failure to notice the day the voice stopped. Because as long as you are troubled you are still there; when the trouble ends, everything looks fine.

In our own tradition of thought, the one who perhaps said this inner presence most plainly is Yunus Emre. There is an I within me, deeper in than me, he says. The whole matter in a single line. Someone further inside than the person themselves, belonging to them yet not taking their orders. You cannot lie to them, because they are in the same room as you. You cannot talk them round, because they have heard all your justifications too.

In more recent times, the figure who placed this voice at the centre of a moral philosophy was Nurettin Topçu. In the doctoral work he defended in Paris in nineteen thirty-four, he examined the tension between conforming and rebelling. Where he arrived was this: morality is not doing what the crowd does. Doing what everyone does is not being moral, it is only avoiding notice. Morality begins where a person's conscience is able to object to the crowd. For Topçu, real rebellion is not a noisy quarrel but a person's ability to stay faithful to the voice inside them while everyone else is saying the opposite.

And today, nobody needs to send us an official in a white coat to silence that voice. We silence it ourselves, and with entirely reasonable sentences at that. Everyone does it. My share in it is tiny. That is how the system works. If I don't do it, somebody else will. Every one of these sentences may be true; not one of them refutes that voice, they only turn down its volume. What that single sentence did in Milgram's experiment, we do to ourselves every day: we hand the responsibility over to somewhere else.

To the question of who put the voice inside you, these thinkers do not give the same answer. For some, God put it there; for some, it is the very structure of reason; for some, a voice you heard in the first years of childhood; for some, a whip that has been turned inward for thousands of years. This argument is not finished, and probably never will be. But there is one point on which they all quietly agree, and that is the point that really matters: this voice does not fall silent even when it has lost the argument. Even on the nights when you have proved yourself right, won the debate, and nobody could say a word against you, something goes on remaining inside. Perhaps that is the only proof that a conscience is alive: the debt you still feel is unpaid after you have closed every account.

At three in the morning, waiting at the empty intersection in front of the red light, you may not know who it is you are waiting for. But if you are waiting, it means there is someone there besides you.

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