The notion of conscience remains one of the most widely used concepts and a cornerstone of ordinary moral thinking. This book explores where this widespread confidence in conscience stems from, examining the history of conscience as a moral concept and its characteristic moral phenomenology. The author provides a comprehensive reassessment of the function of conscience in moral life, detailing along the way the manifold problems that arise when we believe our conscience is more reliable than is actually warranted. The result is a step-by-step evaluation of our most accepted assumptions. He goes on to argue, from a phenomenological perspective, that conscience is indispensable for understanding moral experience. He capitalizes on a dialectical perspective developed by G.W.F. Hegel and Paul Ricoeur, in which conscience is seen as the recognition of the other, and integrates this with work in the philosophy of emotion, arguing that conscience is best seen in terms of the function it serves in moderating the moral emotions of guilt, shame and pride. - Back cover.