Abstract

I provide an account of "humanitarian conscience," a form of self-reflection in which we acknowledge the claims of humanity by coming to see ourselves in human fellowship and orienting our lives accordingly. An account of how we should live requires we explore more than just correct moral beliefs and proper principles of action. Accordingly, this project joins recent work on such aspects of moral agency as attitudes, habits, virtues, vices, orientations and practical identities. It broadens the field of normative moral theory, with attention to the complexity of the human agent. Focusing on humanitarian conscience, specifically, is important because such parts of our way of life as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism invoke or invoked humanitarian conscience. ;The first chapter of the project undoes some major objections to work on conscience and provides several positive reasons for work on conscience. The second chapter does historical work on Rousseau to set a precedent for contemporary work on the topic. In the process, I show how Rousseau avoids some problems found in Joseph Butler's and Adam Smith's accounts of conscience. Chapter 3 provides an account of what a sense of humanity is, criticizing Kantian and Utilitarian approaches to the topic, and suggesting an alternative methodology for understanding respect for marginal cases. Chapter 4 gives an account of reasons of humanity, the form of reasons that ground conscience and articulate a sense of humanity. Here, I provide an analogy with human rights claims, and explore historical and cultural specificity in our sense of humanity. Chapter 5 moves to the full account of humanitarian conscience, after a negative section undoing the grounds for supporting the dominant understanding of conscience in moral theory today, what I call "integrity-focused conscience." In the positive section following, I use the notions of a practical identity, an orientation, and a mode of attention to begin to articulate how conscience operates in a humane way of life. Finally, chapter 6 fills out how humanitarian conscience is ecological---open to the wider universe of life