Christian ethicists have neglected conscience, understood as an individual's moral self-awareness before a locus of accountability and judgment, over the last few decades. The aim of this essay is to suggest how this neglect came about. I draw on the work of Paul Lehmann and Oliver O'Donovan to illustrate how ethicists in the twentieth century became suspicious of conscience because of its association with the alleged ahistorical individualism of Immanuel Kant's work. I argue that a social-historicist conception of conscience, such as H. Richard Niebuhr offered, attempts to save conscience from this suspicion. Ironically, however, Stanley Hauerwas's development of Niebuhr's historicist, communitarian approach to conscience, appears to have led to a dismissal of conscience. I conclude with a brief comment about what this dismissal has cost contemporary Christian ethics, namely the Christian tradition's basic commitment to the singularity of an individual's accountability before God.

中文翻译：

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判断力的丧失：近代基督教伦理中对司法良心的否定

在过去的几十年里，基督教伦理学家忽视了良心，良心被理解为个人在责任和判断地点之前的道德自我意识。本文旨在说明这种忽视是如何发生的。我利用 Paul Lehmann 和 Oliver O'Donovan 的作品来说明 20 世纪的伦理学家如何因为良心与伊曼纽尔·康德作品中所谓的非历史个人主义相关联而对良心产生怀疑。我认为，像 H. Richard Niebuhr 所提出的社会历史主义的良心概念，试图从这种怀疑中拯救良心。然而，具有讽刺意味的是，斯坦利·豪尔瓦斯 (Stanley Hauerwas) 对尼布尔对良心的历史主义、社群主义方法的发展似乎导致了对良心的忽视。