Despite their variations, these assessments of conscience conceive moral judgment as the spontaneous product of each subject's idiosyncratic feelings, impulses and experience. Such a subjectivist account of conscience posits moral judgment as an unmediated decision of the isolated individual. Since such decisions of conscience are not based upon reason, they are impervious to rational scrutiny by another. To counter the subjectivist impasse fostered by emotivist and intuitionist approaches, it can be useful to revive the neoscholastic theory of conscience. This definition insists upon the intellectual dimension of conscience.
Conscience emerges as the judgment of reason upon human action to be performed or shunned.
In practice, however, this process of practical reasoning is often problematic. This particular approach to conscience not only defends the role of the intellect in moral judgment. It permits the elaboration of a more social account of conscience than theories built upon sentiment or intuition. This social note emerges in the formation of conscience. The effective development of the conscientious intellect involves a recurrent transcendence of the self through critical dialogue with secular and religious communities.