Given increasing religious and political plurality, conscience is an important topic relating to contemporary tensions in public life. While contemporary accounts typically characterize conscience as a faculty, I suggest that this imports a subjective immediacy that risks curtailing public reasoning and deliberation while fostering ‘partisan epistemologies’.
My paper casts new light on current challenges facing democratic conceptions of citizenship vis-à-vis conscientious disagreement by exploring Augustine’s account of conscience—situated within late antique notions of conscientia as a virtuous practice of moral self-awareness—to enrich contemporary reflection. While Augustine affirms conscience’s interiority, he does not understand it as a faculty to be immediately followed but something fallibly formed by socio-cultural norms and warped by sin (conf. 3.8.15-16). I then explore how Augustine offers distinctive resources for contemporary tensions by re-envisioning conscience as a virtuous personal and civic practice that fosters public reasoning, resists epistemic self-enclosure, and provides resources for enduring and transforming disagreement.