The Voice of Conscience as Internal Speech

In some cases, the voice of conscience may take the form of internal speech, and we may engage in dialogue with ourselves about our past and present actions. We may talk to ourselves about what we should or shouldn't do, and we may ask ourselves what we should or shouldn't have done.

      Internal speech as the voice of conscience may precede external speech, which may take the form of publicly acknowledged responsibility for our past actions. The voice of conscience may in some cases bring to conscious awareness thoughts and feelings that wouldn't otherwise have been recognized and articulated. It may praise or condemn our past or present actions, and it may serve as a guide to possible future courses of action. 

      The voice of conscience may tell us how to atone and make amends for our past errors and moral failures. On the other hand, it may be silent if there is nothing to praise or condemn in our moral conduct. It may also be silent if we are lacking in conscience, and if we are motivated by purely selfish or narcissistic desires and concerns.

      Conscience as a moral faculty may also reserve judgment about actions that are morally neutral or inconsequential.

      For each of us, the voice of conscience may have distinctive characteristics. It may reveal a varying degree of urgency, intensity, persistence, resonance, and persuasiveness. It may be only one of many inner moral voices to which we may listen: other voices may include the voices of reason, wisdom, compassion, and understanding.

      The voice of conscience may always be present within us (or at least may always be accessible to us) if we retain the capacity for self-criticism and humility. However, it may have varying degrees of immediacy or remoteness with regard to our conscious awareness of it. 

      To the extent that it may reflect the attitudes, opinions, and judgments of other individuals, we may engage in dialogue with a variety of voices when we listen to it, and we may reflect on our actions from a variety of viewpoints.

      The voice of conscience may also be the voice of inner experience, the voice of the internal world of thoughts and feelings, the voice of the inner psychological world.

      What then does the state of speechlessness connote? That we are unprepared to express our thoughts and feelings? That we are so surprised, amazed, or shocked by events that we find ourselves unable to put our own thoughts and feelings into words? If we can have experiences that truly render us speechless, then thinking and feeling may not necessarily require speech as a medium of representation. There may be “speechless thought,” or thinking that occurs without internal speech. Indeed, internal speech as the voice of conscience may require the capacity to articulate thoughts and feelings.¹ If we cannot articulate our own thoughts and feelings, then we may also not be able to coherently formulate our moral judgments, and we may not be able to speak intelligibly to, or engage in substantive moral dialogue with, ourselves. 

      However, we may in some cases hold ourselves morally responsible for our inability to articulate our own thoughts and feelings, and if we regard such an inability as a moral failure, then the voice of conscience may bring this failure to our attention and censure or reprimand us.

      On the other hand, there are some things that we might very well say aloud but merely say silently to ourselves in order to avoid social disharmony or conflict.

      Internal speech produced by the voice of conscience may be monologic or dialogic.² Insofar as it simply dictates principles of moral duty, it may be monologic, but insofar as it allows moral questioning or invites moral reflection, it may be dialogic.

      The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934) describes inner speech as speech for oneself. Inner speech is directed inwardly rather than outwardly, in contrast to social speech, which is addressed to others, and which serves the purpose of communicating with others.³

      The Canadian psychologists Alain Morin and James Everett (1990) describe inner speech as a mediator of self-awareness and self-knowledge. They suggest that the extent to which we use inner speech may partially account for the extent to which we have self-awareness and self-knowledge.⁴

      The Spanish philosophers Agustín Vicente and Fernando Martinez Manrique (2011) explain that the concept of inner speech shouldn't be confused with the concept that there is a language of thought (or the concept that thought requires a representational system corresponding to a language).⁵ Thinking may occur with or without inner speech.

      The habit that we may often develop of silently talking to ourselves while we are performing daily tasks may in some cases be a consequence of our experience of internal speech as readers and writers of verbal and non-verbal texts. Just as we may listen internally to the sounds of the words we are reading, so we may listen internally to the sounds of the words we are writing. Internal speech may occur when we imagine ourselves reading a text aloud or when we imagine ourselves hearing the voice of an author reading a text to us.  The imagined voice of the author may in fact be quite different from the author’s actual voice. It may be tempered or conditioned by our own subjective attitudes and personal experiences.

      The voice of conscience may be singular, insofar as each person may have their own individual voice that is in some way distinguishable from other voices.⁶ At the same time, it may be plural, insofar as individual voices may unite to express a shared or collective conscience.

FOOTNOTES

¹Caryl Emerson, “The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Dec 1983, 245-264), p. 255.

²Simon McCarthy-Jones and Charles Fernyhough, “The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults,” in Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011), p. 1586.

³Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, edited by Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), p. 32.

⁴Alain Morin and James Everett, “Inner Speech as a Mediator of Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness, and Self-Knowledge: An Hypothesis,” in New ideas in Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 3, (1990) pp. 337-356

⁵Agustín Vicente and Fernando Martinez Manrique, “Inner Speech: Nature and Functions,” in Philosophy Compass 6/3 (2011), p. 209.

⁶Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 41.

Looking Beyond Morality

Are there some actions that transcend morality? Are there some actions about which it is useless to say they should have been performed in this way or that way, or that they should have come about in this way or that way?

      Are there some things that we have to accept, and that have nothing to do with morality? Is there a realm of facts to which morality does not apply? Are there some things that have no moral meaning, unless we project it onto them?

      Why must we feel compelled to project some moral meaning onto everything and to insist that there is a moral purpose to everything? Perhaps some things have a purpose that transcends morality.

      Surely, there can be non-moral objects and properties, just as there can be moral objects and properties. Surely, actions can be motivated by non-moral purposes and intentions, just as they can be motivated by moral purposes and intentions.

      Must every action have a moral meaning? Why can’t there be morally neutral actions? If actions may in some cases be morally neutral, then their moral neutrality may depend on the context in which they occur. Actions that are morally neutral in one context may be morally right or wrong in another context.

      Does every object or property require a moral explanation or interpretation? Why can’t there be supra-moral objects or properties that are neither moral nor non-moral and that transcend moral explanation and interpretation?

      Why should moral properties necessarily have to be associated with, or supervene on, non-moral properties? Perhaps we should examine the arguments for and against a soft or moderate projectivism, according to which some properties are actually moral, while others are merely projected as moral. This kind of projectivism would also amount to a soft or moderate realism, according to which some moral properties exist independently of our perceptions of them, while others do not.  

      Subjective morality may try to make moral properties of non-moral properties (and moral objects of non-moral objects), while objective morality may try to avoid making moral properties of non-moral properties (and moral objects of non-moral objects).

      Moral objects may be objects of a moral world, while non-moral objects may be objects of a non-moral world. Could it be possible that there are parallel or coexisting worlds, a non-moral world and a moral world, which are independent of each other?

      A compound object (an object that includes more than one object) may include moral and non-moral parts. The non-moral parts of a compound object may not contribute to its overall moral value or may enhance its moral value by enhancing the value of its moral parts.

      What does it mean to say that a situation is beyond right and wrong? Perhaps it is, in some cases, to say that punishing an individual for having acted wrongly is not always the best way to persuade that individual to accept responsibility for his actions. Perhaps it is also, in some cases, to say that enacting retributive penalties against an individual for his having wronged others is not always the best way to help the victims of his wrongdoing to recover from the wrongs that he has done to them.

       What should we do when we find conventional moral norms to be insufficient to guide our actions? What should we do when we find a particular code of ethics or system of morality to be mistaken, misplaced, or unfounded? What exactly should a reevaluation of ethical or moral values in such cases entail? Is there perhaps a post-moral mode of thinking and acting or a way of looking beyond morality that we should adopt?