CONTEMPLATION51the orthodox interpretation of Con-
fucianism. Orthodoxy was enforced by
the civil service examination system, the
principal means of recruiting govern-
ment officials from the seventh century
to 1905, when the Confucian civil service
examinations were abolished.
CONSCIENCE. The power to discern
what appears to be morally right or
wrong, a virtue or vice. Religious ethicists
debate the extent to which a person’s con-
science is normative: if a person’s con-
science leads her to think X is morally
required, does she have a duty to do X?
Problem cases include cases when a per-
son’s conscience may be disordered but
not due to any blameworthy act of the
person herself.
CONSCIOUSNESS. Widely acknowl-
edged as difficult to define, the English
term “consciousness” was employed by
Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth cen-
tury to designate the state of awareness
or experience that persons have when
awake, as when persons think, feel, sense,
emote, desire, intentionally act, and so on.
In modern philosophy, controversy arises
over whether consciousness is a real state
distinct from bodily states and processes
or whether it is a configuration of non-
conscious states and not a genuinely
distinct, irreducible property. The philos-
ophy of consciousness has relevance for
a great deal of philosophy of religion:
theists argue, for example, that they offer
a better account of consciousness than
naturalists, while some naturalists seeks
to explain consciousness in exhaustively
scientific, nonconscious terms and argue
that they offer a better account than
theists. Some Buddhist and Hindu phi-
losophers have developed sophisticated
accounts of consciousness to bolster
either no-self theories of human nature
or for the articulation of the relationship
between Brahman and atman.CONSEQUENTIALISM. Theories that
determine the value of an act by its effects:
if doing an act will result in greater good
than harm, a consequentialist will see
doing the act as possessing a greater value
than omitting to do the act. Foremost
among consequentialist theories are ver-
sions of utilitarianism. Consequentialism,
and utilitarianism in particular, are often
viewed as secular ethical theories, but they
have different religious advocates. Jeremy
Bentham, who is commonly seen as the
father of modern utilitarianism, was
preceded by theistic utilitarians. William
Paley was a leading theistic consequen-
tialist. Contrast with DEONTOLOGY.CONTEMPLATION. The practice of
meditative reflection on a subject, e.g.,
on the divine. Religious orders are some-
times contemplative, when such a practice
is central, as opposed to active, when the