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Introductory Blather:

I am assuming that you are thinking of a person who has no affect of "remorse". If one is a real live sho'' 'nuff psychopath, I think we have to consign that one to the mercy of God. Some organic thing went haywire or some traumata of early life really trashed the internal economy. And only God can amend it.

There's another disorder in the affective side of what we call "conscience" and that is the problem of feeling remorse when one has done nothing wrong. Some soldiers feel remorse, as do some parents, when in both cases they have done what is right but cause some kind of suffering to others.

I answer that
conscience, rightly so called, is the "practical reason" informed by the generally innate apprehension of moral law, natural law as applied to human type personnel.

Remorseful or satisfied affect is distinct from synderesis, I suggest. In this understanding, conscience does not spring full-grown from the infant brow, but is developed and enhanced, strengthened by the pursuit and practice of virtue, weakened by vice, and wonderfully informed not only by special revelation (who knew that two wives was one too many?) and by God's acting in the individual (come to think of it, I don't even WANT two wives -- one is quite enough!)

So saying "follow your conscience" is not saying, "If it feels right, it can't be wrong." HECK no! That is what we scholastics refer to as "the Country Music Heresy", and it leads to honky-tonks where the Pearl longnecks trash the affective and discriminative functions, and then to waking up in the beds of strangers.

So I wonder sometimes if one couldn't, assisted by grace and the careful but firm application of a two-by-four to the head, get a psychopath to (a)commit himself to Christ, and (b) work out in his head what right actions probably are, and (c) resign himself to acting w/o the encouragement and guidance of affect.

But for the rest of us, conscience must be developed by thinking, study, and the practice of virtues, and most of all by God's grace, besought in prayer and sacrament.

How'd I do?

MD, there is nothing innate in human beings. If you allow your child to grow in the back yard, on a leash, feed him like, give him enough water to survive, and never talk to him, he will not be human (as in "raised human") when he reaches the "age of reason," although genetically he had the potential to become one. But in this case, he will neither speak, not read, nor have social graces. He will act like a beast that we are in our nature.

In rare instances where children somehow survived in the wild, they never became fully integrated into the civilized society. What I am trying to say is: neither conscience nor synderesis, nor anything we associate with morality is innate in us. We only have a capacity for it and even that capacity is a limited window of opportunity.

What we are is what we have learned in life. We are domesticated beasts capable of being transformed into saints. This is where God's power is really evident in my opinion. It is a true transfiguration, and it is not "natural."

Yes, even a drug addict can be called to priesthood, and the lion can be next to a lamb, as the Desert Fathers remind us. The whole creation is restored under grace. But pride and arrogance stand in the way, beginning first and foremost with me.