What is primacy of conscience?

Joseph Butler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Joseph Butler answers

The primacy of conscience is the claim that one principle in us has authority over all the others, and that this holds quite apart from how strong any of them happens to be. Consider what a man consists of. He has appetites, passions and affections, each of which tends directly toward its object without regard to the means of getting it, and so will often desire what cannot be had without manifest injury to others.

Then conscience comes in and disapproves the pursuit, yet the desire remains. Which is to be obeyed? I say the question can be answered from the constitution of human nature alone, without asking which is stronger.¹ Conscience is manifestly superior and chief. However often the lower principle prevails, that is mere usurpation, and every such instance is a breaking in upon the constitution of man.¹

This is no more than the distinction everyone knows between power and authority, which in civil government marks the difference between what is possible and what is lawful. I apply it to the several principles of the mind.¹ You cannot even form a notion of conscience without taking in judgment, direction and superintendency; to preside and govern belongs to it as a constituent part of the idea.

Had it strength as it has right, it would absolutely govern the world.¹ This is why I speak of human nature as a system or constitution and not as a heap of impulses. A tree considered as so many parts without their natural respects to one another is no tree at all; add those respects and you have the idea. So in man, the chief respect is the subjection of appetites, passions and particular affections to the one supreme principle of reflection.²

Every bias and propension is a natural part of our nature, but not the whole. Add the superior faculty, whose office is to adjust, manage and preside over them, and you complete the idea.³ Hence a man may follow his strongest desire and yet act unnaturally. A brute lured into a snare follows the bent of his nature and acts naturally. A man who rushes into certain ruin for a present gratification follows his strongest desire too, but his action is disproportionate to his whole nature, which is what unnatural means.⁴

And so, exclusive of revelation, man is not left to live at large as passion and humour carry him. He is in the strictest sense a law to himself and has the rule of right within; what is wanting is only that he honestly attend to it.³

Sources

1. the principle of reflection or conscience being compared with the various appetites, passions, and affections in men, the former is manifestly superior and chief, without regard to strength? And how often soever the latter happens to prevail, it is mere usurpation

   Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, with the Preface of 1729

2. the chief of which is the subjection which the appetites, passions, and particular affections have to the one supreme principle of reflection or conscience.

   Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, with the Preface of 1729

3. Every bias, instinct, propension within, is a natural part of our nature, but not the whole: add to these the superior faculty, whose office it is to adjust, manage, and preside over them, and take in this its natural superiority, and you complete the idea of human nature.

   Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, with the Preface of 1729

4. he in this instance would follow his strongest desire, as did the brute creature: but there would be as manifest a disproportion, between the nature of a man and such an action

   Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, with the Preface of 1729