Is a Guilty Conscience Good or Bad?

Most people have a guilty conscience from time to time. Being humans we are not always able to do the right things in all circumstances. From early childhood we are told what is right and wrong from all sorts of sources like parents, family members, the school, society in general, etc. Unfortunately this teaching may be contradicting and confusing. For instance, our parents might tell us one thing and the school a quite different thing. We receive a lot of impressions all the time, and it is obvious that people have very different opinions about a lot of issues. They may be for or against subjects like war, death penalty, abortion, etc.

The various religions also have different ideas about morality. Fortunately they all agree on some very important topics like: don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t lie, love and respect others, be compassionate and helpful, etc. Still the interpretation and the various types of sanctions if people don’t keep the rules are very different. Furthermore, the perception of right and wrong changes (sometimes dramatically) over time.

All this means is that some people have a guilty conscience about things that others would find completely acceptable. Should we not have a guilty conscience then? Are we only reacting to ideas put into our minds from people who are (or were) old-fashioned, mistaken, undeveloped, ignorant, or weird? Or is there an intuitive part of us feeling guilty whenever we react in ways that are not appropriate? Can civilization (as we know it) survive without the existence of conscience? How did we evolve from more primitive beings to modern day people living in democratic societies with social welfare and all that sort of thing?

To me it seems appropriate that somebody who hurts another person has a guilty conscience about it. In that way the individual will not be repeating the same thing and probably he/she will even try to compensate the person being hurt in one way or the other. To me it seems that some degree of guilty conscience is a necessary part of modern society, so the difficult part is to find out which kind of guilty conscience is derived from some kind of teaching from others and which kind is our own intuitive and original feeling. In the first case we should consider whether we have the feeling because we are or were hurting someone, or if we are just reacting according to some kind of norms defined by somebody else and in no way doing any harm to anybody. If no harm is involved, then maybe we should drop the guilty conscience?

Guilty conscience is a negative feeling and probably we should try to avoid it as much as possible. On the other hand, we seem to need it to some degree and we can’t escape it completely. Therefore we might try to consider all the guilty conscience that we have inherited from others without really questioning the reason; and if it is not corresponding to our real ideas, then why should we keep it?

Most of us also have some guilty conscience with good reason because we really did something wrong according to our innermost feelings. In my opinion this is good because it means that we have human feelings; but if it is destroying our lives with feelings of guilt, maybe we should do whatever we can to compensate for the inappropriate action and then try to forgive ourselves (as we would also forgive other people).