It’s about conscience, stupid; not consciousness
Why has the English language not coined a word that speaks to the concept of conscience without the confusion associated with the concept of consciousness? There must be a psychological aspect here. What would Freud say?
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory contained a number of polarizing inner conflicts. The Ego constantly faced a battle between the Id, the pervasive aspect of human experience, and the Superego, which was considered to be the moral part of the human personality.
Human conscience is often considered from three perspectives. In contrast with Freud there were the views of Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Butler; both of whom viewed the matter from a religious perspective. Aquinas theorized that conscience was a moral tool of reason while Butler considered conscience to be an intuitive sense assigned to humanity by God.
Etymologically ‘conscience’ means with-knowledge. The English word also implies a moral standard of action inherent in the mind. Conscience deals with rational questions of right and wrong in matters of human interrelationships.
I was raised as a Catholic; I went to Catholic schools where the nuns taught me that guilt and conscience was a pair that went together like a ‘horse and carriage’. Guilt seems to be a word closely associated with conscience in everyday vocabulary.
Freud indicates in his theory that guilt is the result of the conflict between id and the superego.
“Repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead”
This phrase is part of an article “Coming to Terms with Vietnam” documented in Harpers by Peter Marin, Dec. 1980.
Coming to terms with Vietnam: Settling our moral debts, By Peter Marin (Harper's Magazine)
"All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm: first by what they do, then by what they make of what they do. The condition of guilt, a sense of one's own guilt, denotes a kind of second chance. Men are, as if by a kind of grace, given a chance to repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead.""
This quotation rang my bell on the first time that I read it and it has continued to resonate for me each time that it comes to mind.
