Thanks for your response. And apologies for
my delay. Unfortunately, with two small daughters to entertain I don't
get much time to think or post at the weekend!
You don't recognize an inborn conscience then? That is, a sense of guilt for wrongdoing that is at least somewhat independent of what you have been taught?
I certainly don't believe in an
inborn conscience. (Very young children, though they're very sweet, certainly don't seem to have a conscience!) It seems to me that we
develop a conscience as we grow, initially by mimicry of our parents, later by a more autonomous judgement that takes in other respected arbiters of right and wrong.
I think discussions of morality can be a bit misleading, sometimes. The way we talk about it, you'd imagine that we're constantly having to take difficult moral decisions. Maybe I've had a sheltered life, but the real moral dilemmas I've had to face I could count on one hand (or maybe two!). Most of the time, I have a whole lifetime's worth of internalized moral rules to guide me. Sometimes experience forces to me to review these rules, and sometimes I force myself to review them, but it's pretty handy to have them all the same. Without them it would be pretty much impossible to act.
I'm going to think a bit more about 'guilt'. I'm not sure offhand how it fits into my view of morality and conscience, except that it provides an internal sanction in addition to the social and legal sanctions that act upon us externally.
However, the Biblical laws of the OT have served as a pretty solid foundation for law in the West
I beg to differ on this again. Western legal systems have a Romano-Greek rather than a Judaic origin. The only Judaic element that has been retained is the Ten Commandments. I'm not saying this to denigrate the role of Christianity (it's clearly had an influential role, for good and ill), only to put that role into perspective.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible