Be careful about what you think is right and wrong

 

I don't know about our inner compass, more often referred to as our conscience. I see people posting the most evil and heartless and bigoted things, about immigrants, alcoholics, suicides, and so on, all the time. Do they have a conscience to think that way? If inner compass is to be accepted as valid, do we need to accept their inner compasses? Also, slavery, as seen in this discussion, was perfectly acceptable to Christianity, and all the world's other religions too, for thousands of years. I Slavery is easily seen as an evil now, as cruel, arrogant, vicious, so why didn't even God see it for the evil it was back when the Bible was being written? In short we cannot trust our inner compass. Usually it is a good guide, and in good people it is an excellent guide (although of course we all think we are good people). Most of the time we can go through our lives living through habit and what others do, but sometimes we are faced with genuine moral choices, and we must then become mindful of what we are doing and ask ourselves if it meets rational ethical choices. Is it maximizing harm and minimizing hurt to the best of my ability to tell? Is it compassionate? Does it avoid "using" another person? Does it violate the Golden Rule or some equivalent such as Kant's Moral Imperative?

What you’re noticing is real, and it’s one of the central problems in moral philosophy: the thing people call an “inner compass” clearly does not point in the same direction for everyone. Some people feel perfectly justified—even righteous—while expressing views that others experience as cruel or dehumanizing. So either conscience is unreliable, or it’s not what people think it is.

A useful way to sort this out is to separate three different things that often get blurred together:

1. The capacity for conscience
Most humans seem to have some built-in capacity for moral feeling—empathy, guilt, fairness, aversion to harm. That’s the raw equipment.

2. The formation of conscience
What that capacity points toward is heavily shaped by culture, upbringing, fear, ideology, and self-interest. A person can feel morally “right” while holding beliefs that were absorbed from a narrow or hostile environment. In that sense, conscience is less like a compass and more like a needle that can be magnetized by whatever is nearby.

3. The use of conscience
Even when people have moral awareness, they can override it—through rationalization, tribal loyalty, or simple convenience. That’s where hypocrisy and selective blindness come in.

So when you ask, “Do they have a conscience?”—the uncomfortable answer is: yes, but it may be poorly formed, distorted, or selectively applied. And that means we cannot simply validate all inner compasses as equally trustworthy. Some are demonstrably better than others.

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Your example of slavery is a strong one, because it shows that whole civilizations—religious and secular—can normalize something we now see as obviously wrong. That tells us two important things.

First, conscience alone is not enough. If it were, large populations wouldn’t have accepted slavery for millennia.

Second, moral progress seems to happen when conscience is challenged and expanded, not when it is passively trusted. Abolition didn’t arise because people suddenly “listened to their inner voice” in isolation—it came from argument, lived experience, economic change, and moral critique. People revised their conscience.

As for your theological question—why didn’t God “see” slavery as evil in the texts—there are a few standard answers, none entirely comfortable:

• Some argue that moral revelation is progressive, unfolding gradually because humans couldn’t absorb more radical ideas at once.

• Others say the texts reflect human authors embedded in their time, rather than perfect moral dictation.

• And some accept the tension and conclude that religious traditions themselves must be morally evaluated, not simply obeyed.

Whichever view one takes, the historical fact remains: appeal to authority—divine or cultural—has not guaranteed moral clarity.

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Where that leaves you, I think, is actually quite a grounded position. You’re not rejecting conscience outright—you’re downgrading it from judge to advisor. That’s sensible.

When the stakes are low, habit and social norms carry us along. But when the stakes are real, you’re right that we need something more deliberate. The criteria you listed—minimizing harm, compassion, not using people merely as means, versions of the Golden Rule or Kant—those are attempts to build checks on the weaknesses of raw intuition.

And there’s a quiet but important addition to your framework:

Be willing to doubt your own certainty, especially when it flatters you or your group.

That may be the closest thing we have to a reliable “meta-compass.”

So no, we don’t have to accept every person’s inner compass as valid. But we also can’t pretend we’re immune to the same distortions. The best we can do is what you’re already describing: treat moral judgment as something to be examined, tested, and, when necessary, corrected—rather than simply trusted because it feels right.