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. While the individual subject maintains responsibility for his or her moral decisions, the practical intellectual capacity to render such judgments can only emerge through social mediation. The intellectual nature itself of conscience, as delineated in the neoscholastic tradition, places conscience within a network of social interaction. In order to reason concerning a proposed course of action, the moral agent must inform himself on general principles and specific applications.
Specific applications require even more detailed interaction.
The determination, for example, of whether a particular military action does in fact constitute the direct killing of an innocent human being requires a careful weighing of the evidence provided by different actors in the public policy debate. The particular judgments of possible actions in different circumstances engage the moral subject in analogous reasoning, which cannot rely on the moral subject's limited experience alone but must depend upon the moral judgments of others in the agent's community. Moral sentiments can be communicated by osmosis. Repugnance to members of a particular ethnic group, for example, can be successfully transmitted in the humor and gestures of a given family. The social communication of moral principles, however, inasmuch as they are built upon justificatory evidence, are open to the critical scrutiny of the reason which transmits and the reason which receives such information.