Sleeping Conscience: Crusius on Moral Fallibility

According to Crusius, conscience is a fundamental instinct of human beings. Conscience is required for agents to recognize duty at all, to know what is morally commanded in concrete situations and for an agent to be motivated to follow moral commands. Despite its central function, Crusius admits that conscience can err. In the present paper, I enquire into the causes of errors of conscience. In particular, I discuss how it is possible that errors of conscience are not the fault of conscience itself. Finally, I discuss critically how Crusius handles cases in which agents act conscientiously but immorally, as well as Crusius’ claim that, by nature, different consciences can be of different strengths.