Originally Posted by
MrShrike
Actually no, intellect is something completely different. Mental models relating to the outside world are not necessarily intellectual and include such emotional-response-feedback systems as Conscience and Intutition. For example, we may learn from our parents from a young age that "hitting is wrong", even though we have no intellectual appreciation of why it is wrong. But once we have learnt the "wrongness of hitting", we will usually just "get a feeling" that it is the wrong thing to do and tend to avoid doing it, without necessarily knowing why. That is our Conscience emotionally informing our decision making process.
Our Conscience model is typically informed by intellect, particularly as we get older and become an adult, through direct experience and acquired knowledge including learned responses, but it is a independent faculty and has a direct emotional response relationship to our related emotions such as guilt, sympathy etc. We can easily do something that we intellectually know is morally correct, or which a cost/benefit analysis tells us is the best for everyone (or best for ourself), but still feel a sense of remorse over our actions. This what we call " having a conflicted Conscience" and is what we mean sometimes by a "moral dilemma".
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I think you misunderstand me; I'm saying that Conscience tends to help leads us (in combination with Intuituion) towards the optimal (WRT cost/benefits) actions, but it is not itself a logical faculty.
To give up Conscience means you may well intellectually know that your roommate might become angry if you drink the rest of the milk, but you are unable to experience any emotional impulse that would cause you to act in a particular way as a response to that knowledge. In other words, you would lose your moral sense of rightness or wrongess about the action itself.
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