Argument

Argument from Conscience

Intro

Everyone knows the feeling. You did something wrong, no one saw, no one will ever know, and yet you feel guilty. Not just unwise, not just inconvenienced, but guilty, as if you have been seen.

The argument from conscience starts there. The feeling does not behave like advice from inside your own head. It does not feel like a calculation about consequences. It carries the weight of being addressed by someone, and someone who has the standing to address you. John Henry Newman called this voice the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. C.S. Lewis built the opening of Mere Christianity on the same observation.

This experience shows up everywhere. Different cultures, different centuries, different religions, the inner voice is recognizably the same shape. People feel it even when no one human is watching. They feel it about acts they could rationalize. And the voice does not just suggest, it commands.

So the question is: what best explains this? Evolution can explain why we behave in cooperative ways, but not why the voice feels like a Person speaking. Social conditioning can explain rules we follow, but not why we still feel guilty after we have rejected the rules. Freud's super-ego can explain internalization of a parent figure, but conscience often condemns what parents praised. The simplest fit is the one Newman, Butler, and Lewis named: conscience reports a personal moral authority outside the self. That authority is what classical theism calls God.

In full

A moral / phenomenological argument: the universal phenomenon of conscience, the inner voice of moral approval and condemnation, carries the experience of being addressed by a personal Other; this experience is universal across cultures and persistent across history; the most natural explanation is that conscience reports a personal moral authority external to the self; therefore a personal moral authority (God) exists. John Henry Newman (Grammar of Assent, 1870) is the most-developed defender; called by him the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. This page is structured as debate prep: per-premise affirmative case, anticipated objections, numbered rebuttals (1:1), live-cite kit, and tactical notes for live engagement with skeptics deploying evolutionary, social-construction, or Freudian deflations.

Argument structure

Form

Phenomenological + abductive. The argument moves from a phenomenology (what conscience-experience is like) to an inference to the best explanation of that phenomenology. Not deductive proof, abductive: among hypotheses about the source of the conscience-experience, the theistic hypothesis (God addressing the soul) best fits the data; evolutionary, social-contract, and super-ego hypotheses each fail to capture some load-bearing feature (the interpersonal, imperative, or transcendent character of the experience). The argument is most powerful when paired with the Moral Argument (which addresses moral grounding) and the Argument from Religious Experience (which addresses encounter with the divine).

P1, The phenomenon of conscience carries the experience of being addressed by a personal Other

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. Newman's phenomenology of guilt-before. When we feel guilty, we feel guilty before, there is an implicit audience in the feeling. The audience is not human (we feel guilty even when no human knows our wrongdoing); the audience is not the self (one cannot feel guilty before oneself in the same condemning way one feels guilty before another, an other-than-self); the audience is personal (not impersonal Platonic "natural law"); the audience is authoritative (not merely observing). The phenomenology implies a Person. (Newman, Grammar of Assent, ch. 5; reaffirmed by C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, ch. 1.)
2. The imperative force of conscience. Conscience does not merely advise ("you might consider not doing this"); it commands ("you shall not"). The voice carries categorical, not hypothetical, force. This is unlike any natural-fact-based deliberation (which is always hypothetical: if you want X, then do Y). The categorical character is of-a-kind with personal address from a moral authority.
3. The asymmetry of approval and condemnation. When one acts in accord with conscience, the corresponding experience is approval, being commended by an authority. When one violates conscience, the experience is condemnation, being judged. This bilateral structure (commendation/condemnation) is the structure of interpersonal moral evaluation, not the structure of biofeedback or aesthetic preference. (Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, II-III: conscience is the natural superior in the human soul, possessing authority by its very nature.)
4. The prophetic moment. Conscience can condemn the prevailing culture itself, Wilberforce against slavery, Bonhoeffer against Nazism, the OT prophets against Israel. This prophetic dimension of conscience presupposes that conscience answers to a standard higher than the culture; the inner voice issues from beyond the social consensus, addressing the conscience-bearer in a personal-authoritative register.

Anticipated objections

1. "Conscience is just internalized parental voice (Freud's super-ego)." Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930.
2. "It's just an evolutionary cognitive module, pattern-recognition extended to social rules." Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt's moral-foundations theory.
3. "It's the internalized voice of culture / society, Hobbesian internalized social contract."
4. "Lots of people don't have this experience strongly, psychopaths, sociopaths, moral diversity."

Rebuttals

1. The super-ego account fails the prophetic-conscience test. Many people experience conscience as contradicting their parental upbringing; conscience outlives the death of the parents; converts experience conscience condemning the very moral framework they were raised in (the converted Nazi, the converted slaveholder). The phenomenology is of an authority higher than parents, the super-ego cannot be it. Freud's account also faces the standard psychoanalysis problem: it is an explanatory framework with no falsifying conditions and weak empirical grounding. Failure mode: projection (Freud's super-ego is itself a projection-explanation, ironically).
2. Evolution explains the capacity for conscience but not its content or imperative force. (a) Evolutionary accounts describe what is (selected behaviors), not what ought (binding moral commands); the is-ought gap reappears. (b) Evolution would predict alignment-with-the-tribe (fitness within the in-group), not the prophetic dissent that conscience routinely produces. (c) The Sharon-Street debunking move applies: if our moral intuitions are evolved heuristics not aimed at truth, the truth-tracking character of conscience is unexplained. Failure mode: evolutionary debunking that proves too much (it would debunk the cognitive faculties producing the debunking argument itself, Plantinga's EAAN).
3. The cultural-construction account fails the same prophetic-conscience test. Moral reformers stand against their cultures; their consciences cannot be merely products of those cultures, otherwise there'd be no leverage for reform. Wilberforce did not get his anti-slavery conscience from the dominant 18th-century English-Caribbean slave-trade culture; his conscience addressed him against the culture. The cultural-construction account has no resources to explain this. Failure mode: circular, culture explains conscience explains culture, with no anchor outside the loop.
4. The psychopathy objection misreads the argument. Psychopathy is precisely the absence of normal moral functioning, recognized clinically as a deficit, not as evidence against conscience-as-norm. The argument is from the normal phenomenology of conscience; the existence of color-blindness does not refute the reality of color-perception. The variability in strength of conscience-experience across persons is what one would expect of any psychological-cognitive faculty subject to formation, suppression, and pathology. Failure mode: pointing at exceptions to refute a generic claim about human nature.

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: Romans 2:14-15 (the locus classicus, syneidēsis); John 8:9 (woman caught in adultery, accusers convicted by conscience); 1 Timothy 4:2 (the seared conscience as the negative case).
• Scholarly: Newman (Grammar of Assent, 1870, ch. 5); Butler (Fifteen Sermons, 1726, II-III); Lewis (Mere Christianity, Bk I; The Problem of Pain, ch. 1); Budziszewski (The Revenge of Conscience, 1999).
• Aphorism: "Conscience does not whisper your preferences back to you, it commands you with a voice you did not invent."

Tactical notes

• Lead with the prophetic-conscience point, it disarms both the evolutionary and the cultural-construction explanations in one move. Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, and Solzhenitsyn are good examples; the opponent will have to grant that something more than tribe-fitness is happening.
• For Freudian opponents, force the question: whose parental voice? The conscience speaks against parents and culture often enough that the super-ego must be sub-divisible into multiple parental voices, each with conflicting demands, at which point the super-ego is no longer a unified faculty and the explanation collapses into "some voice in your head is loudest at any given moment."
• Do not litigate specific moral content here, the argument is about the form of conscience-experience, not about which specific moral judgments conscience yields. Defer specific-content disputes to Moral Argument and to passage-specific defeaters.

P2, This experience is universal and persistent across cultures

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. C. S. Lewis's Tao compendium. The Abolition of Man (1943) appendix lists parallel moral injunctions across Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Confucian, Greco-Roman, Norse, ancient Jewish, and Christian sources. The form of conscience, sense of moral obligation, distinction of right and wrong, capacity for guilt and approval, is documented in every literate culture and every culture studied anthropologically.
2. Anthropological corroboration. Donald Brown (Human Universals, 1991) catalogs hundreds of human universals including: prohibitions on murder within the in-group, theft, deception, broken promises; positive injunctions to fairness, reciprocity, care for kin and the weak; the experience of guilt, shame, and moral approbation. The form of conscience-experience is human-universal even where the content varies in periphery.
3. Cross-temporal persistence. Conscience-language and conscience-experience are documented from the earliest written records (Babylonian penitential prayers, Egyptian Negative Confession in the Book of the Dead, Sumerian wisdom texts) through every era. There is no documented era of human society in which the conscience-phenomenon was absent. The persistence across radical cultural change is itself evidence of a structural feature of human nature, not a contingent cultural artifact.
4. Convergence on a form despite divergence on content. Even societies with different specific moral codes (different food laws, different sexual norms, different in-group definitions) display the same form: a faculty that distinguishes morally salient acts, issues approbation/condemnation in personal-authoritative register, and persists against suppression. This convergence on form is what one would expect if conscience were a structural feature of imago Dei humanity, not what one would expect if conscience were a contingent cultural construction.

Anticipated objections

1. "There's huge moral diversity across cultures, therefore no universal conscience." Cultural relativism.
2. "You're confusing 'has some moral system' with 'has the same conscience-experience.'" The form-vs-content distinction is overstated.
3. "Universality could be cultural diffusion from a common origin, not innate human structure."
4. "Modern secular societies have weaker / different conscience-experiences than religious ones, this shows it's culturally formed."

Rebuttals

1. Diversity of application does not refute universality of faculty. All cultures have moral codes; they differ on which acts the codes apply to (in-group definition, specific food taboos, sexual norms). The presence of a faculty that issues moral judgment is universal even when the judgments themselves vary. The diversity-of-content objection presupposes the universality-of-faculty it claims to refute (one cannot have moral diversity without moral judgments, and moral judgments require the faculty being defended). Failure mode: confusing application with foundation.
2. The form-vs-content distinction is empirically robust. All cultures distinguish (a) morally salient acts from morally neutral acts, (b) acts deserving approbation from acts deserving condemnation, (c) the sense of being judged-by-an-authority for moral failures. These structural features are observable cross-culturally even where the specific acts judged morally salient vary. The distinction is not stipulative; it tracks documented anthropological reality. Failure mode: denying a real distinction because the line is fuzzy at the edges.
3. Cultural diffusion fails the timeline. Conscience-language appears in the earliest written cultures across geographically separated regions (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, China, Mesoamerica) without plausible diffusion paths in the relevant time windows. Even if some diffusion occurred, the universality of conscience-experience in pre-literate hunter-gatherer societies (documented ethnographically in groups isolated for tens of thousands of years) cannot be diffusion-explained. The convergence is best explained by structural human nature, not historical diffusion. Failure mode: historical hand-waving.
4. The "weakened secular conscience" objection cuts the wrong way. That secular societies often retain robust conscience-experience (and that committed secularists like Camus and Russell write extensively about conscience and moral force) suggests conscience persists despite the loss of theological framework. That suppressed or seared conscience is psychologically destructive (Solzhenitsyn on Soviet societies; Bonhoeffer on Nazi normalization) suggests conscience pushes back against suppression, exactly what the theistic explanation predicts. Failure mode: confirmation bias citing weakening without acknowledging persistence.

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: Romans 1:18-21, 32 (universal moral knowledge); Romans 2:14-15 (Gentiles a law to themselves); Acts 14:17 (God left witness in every nation).
• Scholarly: Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, with the Tao appendix); Donald Brown (Human Universals, 1991); Budziszewski (What We Can't Not Know, 2003); Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973, on conscience under suppression).
• Aphorism: "Every culture's conscience uses different words; none has been silent."

Tactical notes

• Use the Tao directly when possible, read or paraphrase a few injunctions from disparate cultures (Egyptian, Confucian, Norse, Christian) to make universality concrete. Skeptical opponents are often genuinely surprised by the convergence.
• For the cultural-relativist opponent: force-commit on a specific moral judgment ("Was the Holocaust really wrong, or just culturally disapproved?"). Most opponents will affirm realism in concrete cases even when defending relativism in the abstract; the inconsistency is the wedge.
• Do not get drawn into anthropology debates about specific cultures' specific practices, this argument is from convergence-of-form, not from agreement on every specific. Defer detailed cultural-comparative debates to Comparative Religion Map or similar hubs.

P3, The most natural explanation is that conscience reports a personal moral authority external to the self

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. The interpersonal phenomenology demands an interpersonal source. P1 established that conscience-experience is interpersonal in character (we feel addressed-by, judged-by, commended-by). The most natural explanation of an interpersonal experience is an actual interpersonal relationship. Inferring an impersonal source for an unmistakably-personal experience requires special pleading. (Newman's argument: the form of the experience is the best evidence of the kind of source.)
2. Cumulative-explanatory dominance over the alternatives. Every alternative (evolutionary, social-construction, super-ego, brute Platonic moral realism) fails to capture some load-bearing feature: evolution misses imperative force and prophetic dissent; social construction misses transcendence over culture; super-ego misses anti-parental conscience; brute Platonism misses personal address. The theistic explanation alone captures all the features, with one entity (God). Inference to the best explanation favors theism on standard explanatory virtues (scope, coherence, simplicity).
3. Convergence with Moral Argument grounding. The conscience argument's conclusion (personal moral authority external to self) coheres with the conclusion of the structural moral argument (objective morality requires a personal lawgiver). Two independent arguments converging on the same conclusion strengthen each other, the cumulative-case force is greater than either alone.
4. Convergence with the Argument from Religious Experience. Conscience-experience is itself a species of religious experience (a direct encounter with a personal moral authority). The principle of credulity (Swinburne) applies: in the absence of overriding defeaters, take the experience to be of what it presents itself as being of. Conscience presents itself as encounter with a Person; absent defeaters, this is what it is.

Anticipated objections

1. "Brute moral realism (Wielenberg, Shafer-Landau), moral facts exist objectively, conscience perceives them, no God needed."
2. "You're inferring God from a feeling, that's not evidence, that's projection." Feuerbach: we project our highest values onto the cosmos and call it God.
3. "Different religious traditions interpret conscience differently, Christianity reads it as God; Buddhism reads it as karma; this shows the underlying experience is theology-neutral."
4. "Even if conscience is real, it could be a mind-faculty without a transcendent source, perhaps an emergent property of complex social cognition."

Rebuttals

1. Brute moral realism leaves the personal phenomenology unexplained. Wielenberg-style robust moral realism can perhaps account for the existence of moral facts as Platonic abstracta, but it cannot account for why conscience-experience is personal (we feel addressed-by Someone, not contemplated-by an abstract truth). Platonic forms don't speak to anyone; they don't commend or condemn. The interpersonal phenomenology is the load-bearing data, and brute moral realism cannot fit it without adding a personal element, at which point it has imported the very thing it tried to avoid. (Adams, Copan responses.) Failure mode: explanatory dispensability claim that ignores load-bearing data.
2. The Feuerbach projection-charge cuts both ways and misreads the argument. First, the projection-charge applies symmetrically: atheism could be its own projection (the desire for autonomy, freedom from divine accountability, Plantinga and McGrath develop this tu quoque). Second, the argument is not "conscience-experience produces belief in God" (a psychological claim Feuerbach could deflate) but "conscience-experience is best explained by encounter with God" (an explanatory inference). Inferring an external object from a structured experience is the standard form of empirical reasoning; calling it "projection" without an alternative explanation is rhetorical, not argumentative. Failure mode: projection (the Feuerbach argument is itself a projection of psychological-reductive frame onto an explanatory question).
3. Different theological interpretations of conscience are exactly what one would expect on the theistic hypothesis. A universal divine address received by different cultural-theological frameworks would naturally be interpreted differently, Christians read it through the imago Dei lens, Hindus through dharma, Buddhists through karmic law. The interpretive variation is at the theological-frame level; the underlying experience (interpersonal moral address) is constant. The classical-theistic interpretation, a personal moral authority, is the most natural reading of the universal form of the experience; alternative frames are theological refinements within that base. (See Christian God is the Only True God for the comparative-religion case for the Christian theological interpretation specifically.) Failure mode: confusing interpretation-variation with experience-variation.
4. The "emergent mind-faculty" account does not avoid theism, it relocates the question. If conscience is an emergent property of complex social cognition, why is the emergent property structured as interpersonal moral address rather than as biofeedback, aesthetic preference, or game-theoretic calculation? The specific structure (personal-authoritative-categorical-prophetic) is not a generic feature of complex social cognition; it is a highly specific structure that demands its own explanation. Saying "it emerges" is not an explanation; it is a placeholder. The theistic account explains the specific structure (we are addressed by God because we are made in His image to be addressed). Failure mode: explanatory hand-waving with the word "emergent."

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: Romans 2:14-15; Hebrews 9:14, 10:22 (Christ's blood cleansing the conscience); 1 John 3:19-21 (if our heart condemns us, God is greater).
• Scholarly: Newman (Grammar of Assent, 1870, ch. 5); Adams (Finite and Infinite Goods, 1999); Copan (Loving Wisdom, 2007); Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief, 2000).
• Aphorism: "If conscience is a Voice, you have to ask Whose."

Tactical notes

• Pair this argument with Moral Argument and Argument from Religious Experience, the cumulative force of the three is much greater than any one alone. State the cumulative-case structure explicitly in debate.
• For the brute-moral-realist opponent: focus on the personal dimension of conscience-experience. They will defend the existence of moral facts but cannot explain why those facts feel like an Address.
• Do not over-claim deductive force, the argument is abductive (inference to best explanation). Defending it as deductive proof gives the opponent an easy reductio. Frame it correctly: best-explanation, cumulative with other arguments, defeasible but strongly evidenced.

P4, A personal moral authority transcendent to the self and universally accessible to human conscience is what classical theism calls God

This premise is largely terminological once P1-P3 are granted. A being that (a) is personal, (b) is a moral authority, (c) transcends every individual self, (d) is accessible universally to human conscience across cultures and history, and (e) issues categorical moral commands is, by the classical-theist definition, God. The premise asserts the identity of the being concluded to with the being classical theism affirms.

Anticipated objections

1. "You've defined God so loosely that any moral force could be 'God.'"
2. "Even granting a personal moral authority, why the Christian God specifically?"
3. "Maybe it's a finite moral authority, a god, not God."

Rebuttals

1. The defining features are not loose, they are tightly specified by the conscience phenomenology. Personal and moral and transcendent over self and universally accessible and authoritative, that conjunction picks out classical theism's God, not a vague moral force. The criteria are exactly what classical theism predicts and what naturalistic alternatives cannot deliver. Failure mode: equivocating on "loose."
2. This argument warrants generic theism, not yet Christian theism. The move to specifically Christian theism requires additional arguments, the historical case for the resurrection, the comparative-religion case (Christian God is the Only True God), the fulfillment of OT prophecy in Christ. The conscience argument is one premise in the cumulative case for Christianity; it does not claim to deliver Christianity by itself. (Newman himself paired the conscience argument with extensive engagement on the historical-revelational case in his later Catholic apologetics.)
3. A finite moral authority would be inadequate to the universal accessibility data. A finite moral being could perhaps address some humans in some cultures; but the universal cross-cultural cross-temporal availability of conscience demands a transcendent moral authority, one whose access to every conscience is not contingent on geographic, cultural, or historical proximity. That specification is met only by an omnipresent personal being, God in the classical sense.

Conclusion

A personal moral authority, God, exists, encountered universally in the phenomenon of human conscience. The universal voice of conscience is not a quirk of evolutionary psychology or social conditioning. It is the aboriginal vicar of Christ (Newman), the divine voice within the soul, addressing every human person with moral authority. To attend to conscience is to encounter God; to suppress conscience is to suppress God's voice. The Christian gospel meets the phenomenology of conscience as the gospel of forgiveness for the condemnation conscience justly pronounces, Hebrews 9:14, "the blood of Christ… shall cleanse your conscience from dead works." The argument is not deductive proof; it is best-explanation, cumulative with Moral Argument and Argument from Religious Experience, and a powerful element in the comparative-cumulative case for the Christian God.

Master objections to the argument as a whole

1. "This is just a god-of-the-gaps for moral psychology." Reply: the argument is not from current ignorance of how conscience could naturalistically arise; it is from the structure of conscience-experience (interpersonal, imperative, prophetic), features that no naturalistic explanation can capture without smuggling personal-address back in. The argument is structural, not gap-filling.
2. "Conscience evolves and varies, this should disqualify it as a divine address." Reply: that conscience is formed and can be suppressed is exactly what the Christian account predicts, Romans 1's progressive suppression of moral knowledge, the seared conscience of 1 Tim 4:2, the need for conscience to be trained by Scripture (Heb 5:14). Variation in conscience-formation does not refute its divine origin; it confirms the Christian doctrine of fallen-but-still-functioning imago Dei.
3. "Even granting the argument, it shows only a personal moral authority, not the full Christian God." Reply: correct. This argument is one premise in a cumulative case. It establishes generic personal theism (not deism, not impersonalism, not naturalism); the move to Christianity uses additional arguments (resurrection, prophecy, comparative-religion analysis). See Christian God is the Only True God.
4. "You're using the experience to justify the theory and the theory to legitimate the experience, circular." Reply: not circular, it is abductive. The experience is the evidence; the theory (theism) is the best explanation among rival hypotheses. This is the standard form of empirical reasoning; it is not circular any more than the inference from observed planetary motion to gravitational theory is circular.

Tactical opening / closing

Opening line: "When you do something you know you shouldn't have, who exactly are you guilty before? Not just yourself, you can't be the judge of yourself the way conscience judges. Not just society, conscience speaks even when no one knows. So who?"

Closing landing strip: "Conscience is the most-democratic experience of God, every culture, every era, every literate civilization knows the inner Voice that commends and condemns. The question isn't whether the Voice exists; the question is whether you'll attend to It or sear it shut."

Connection to Scripture

• Romans 2.14-15, syneidēsis; the locus classicus
• Romans 1.18-21, what is known about God is evident within them; suppression of moral knowledge
• John 8:9, accusers convicted by their conscience (woman caught in adultery)
• Acts 23:1; 24:16, Paul's "good conscience"
• Romans 9:1, conscience testifying with the Holy Spirit
• 1 Timothy 1:5, 19; 4:2, the seared conscience
• Hebrews 9:14; 10:22, the gospel cleanses the conscience
• 1 John 3:19-21, God greater than our condemning heart

Patristic / scholarly note

Classical / patristic / medieval:

• Origen (De Principiis 3.1; Commentary on Romans), the soul's coknower with God
• John Chrysostom (Homilies on Romans; Homilies on Genesis), extensive pastoral-moral treatment
• Augustine (De Sermone Domini in Monte; Confessions 10), God interior intimo meo (more inward than my inmost self)
• Aquinas (ST I-II, q. 19; q. 79; De Veritate q. 17), synderesis (innate habit of first moral principles) / conscientia (act of applying synderesis to particulars)

Reformation:

• Luther, "my conscience is captive to the Word of God" (Diet of Worms, 1521)
• Calvin (Institutes 1.3 on the sensus divinitatis; 2.8 on moral law and conscience)

Modern:

• Joseph Butler (Fifteen Sermons, 1726, esp. II-III), conscience as the natural superior in the human soul
• John Henry Newman (Grammar of Assent, 1870, ch. 5; The Idea of a University, 1852), the seminal modern argument; aboriginal vicar of Christ
• C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, 1952, Bk I; The Problem of Pain, 1940, ch. 1; The Abolition of Man, 1943, with the Tao appendix)
• Romanus Cessario (The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics, 1991); Servais Pinckaers (The Sources of Christian Ethics, 1985), Catholic Thomistic
• J. Budziszewski (What We Can't Not Know, 2003; The Revenge of Conscience, 1999)
• Paul Copan (Loving Wisdom, 2007)
• Robert P. George (In Defense of Natural Law, 1999)

Critics:

• Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930), super-ego account
• Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887), conscience as bad conscience / slave-revolt
• Frans de Waal (Primates and Philosophers, 2006); Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, 2012); Jesse Prinz (The Emotional Construction of Morals, 2007), evolutionary / cultural-construction accounts

Inference rules used

• Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE), evolutionary, social-contract, super-ego, brute-realist alternatives all fail to capture the personal-imperative phenomenology
• Phenomenological reasoning, the form of conscience-experience is evidence about the kind of source it has
• Argument from universal consent, the cross-cultural universality of the conscience-phenomenon

See also

• Moral Argument, the parent moral argument; conscience argument is its phenomenological wing
• Subjective Morality Defeater, sister argument against moral subjectivism
• Argument from Religious Experience, sister phenomenological argument from the experience of God
• Argument from Desire, sister phenomenological argument from the experience of Sehnsucht
• Stealing from God Argument, Frank Turek's CRIMES; the M of CRIMES converges
• Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure, sister anti-naturalist moral argument
• Argument from Reason, Lewis / Plantinga's EAAN; sister anti-naturalist argument
• Christian God is the Only True God, comparative-religion cumulative case
• Conscience (concept, pending)
• Natural Law (concept, pending)
• Synderesis (concept, pending)
• Sensus Divinitatis (concept, pending)
• John Henry Newman (entity, pending)
• Joseph Butler (entity, pending)
• C. S. Lewis
• J. Budziszewski (entity, pending)
• Paul Copan (entity, pending)
• Romans 2.14-15
• Romans 1.18-21
• Arguments, master index