Argument from Conscience

[Esquilax]

I recently learned of an interesting apologetic argument. I think it has some merit, but I have never seen it presented on AF before:

1) Each person is obligated to follow his or her moral conscience.

Obligated by what, exactly?

I mean, that's ignoring the fact that the contents of an individuals conscience can vary wildly, and that immoral acts are not precluded from being acceptable in that metric; sociopaths have it perfectly within their consciences to do immoral things, and yet will opt not to do so for pragmatic reasons. I'm also ignoring the evolving nature of the conscience and its contents too, since there can and have been things within the moral conscience of a given time period that were actually immoral; as an example, it was considered a moral good, at one time, for the Australian government to abduct any "sufficiently white," Aboriginal children from their parents to forcibly indoctrinate them into European culture by downright abusive means. That was easily within the bounds of the collective consciences of those people at that time, because they viewed the Aboriginal people as inferior, and that their kidnapping program was effectively giving those children a life promotion, in spite of how poorly they were treated in the process.

We now know that none of that is true, that it was reflective of the self serving prejudices of the time, despite it being in the consciences of those people. Their moral obligations were not to what they ended up doing, but to the opposite of it. So no, people are not uniformly obligated to follow their consciences; if anything, their obligation is to what reason and empathy can tell us, collectively, is the best path. Not to their moral intuition; we have too many examples in the past of that turning out exactly wrong.

Of course, the factual inaccuracy of your first premise doesn't change the fact that you haven't even explained where you think these obligations come from.

2) The human conscience is the product of something: either instinctual nature, the individual, society, or divine.

False dichotomy, but that isn't terribly surprising from an apologetic argument; setting up limited categories to knock down, while assuming those categories are the only possible ones is par for the course. It's basically a form of straw man.

3) No one is morally obligated to follow instinct since instincts easily fail upon rational consideration.

And the conscience can't?

4) No one individual’s conscience is absolute and morally binding on others.

Oh, so we have no obligations to god's commandments, cool. Thanks for refuting your own argument, and/or engaging in blatant special pleading which undercuts this specific premise.

5) Individual consciences cannot be added together unless each person relies on their own conscience to feel morally obliged to the group. Thus it is functionally equivalent to individual conscience as a source.

You can't be obligated to the many other people within your group who will do what's best for them, including stopping you if you attempt to do otherwise?

6) The only remaining source is something that transcends nature, the individual, and society. Such a source must be divine.

Okay, Chad: do you have any argument, at all, for why it "must be," divine, or is this just another in a long line of apologetics that get to the end and then just blurt out "it's god!" to try and get over the remaining gaps in the argument?