🎧 Listen Here
“Respect for a person’s conscience does not mean accepting moral relativism.”
~ John Paul II, 1993, para. 32-34
Ask yourself a couple questions: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why?
These questions matter because buried inside Go Set a Watchman, under the slow pacing and the difficult protagonist and the conversations that make modern readers deeply uncomfortable, live one of the most precise and devastating portraits of conscience formation put on an American page. Sadly, nobody talks about it because almost nobody finishes the book.
But we’re going to finish it today. And we’re going to unearth the gifts contained within.
The Unlikeable Hero: Jean Louise Finch
Jean Louise is not an easy character to like. Opinionated, self-righteous, impatient, and absolutely certain that she sees more clearly than the people around her, she has the particular confidence of someone who has left a small town and believes that departure alone is the same as wisdom. She lectures. She bristles. She judges. She is also right about a great many things—the Supreme Courts decision that obliterated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution—as well as her instincts about justice, about human dignity, about the ugliness of what she witnesses at that Citizens’ Council meeting. But being right does not mean your conscience is formed or that you have achieved real understanding. And she doesn’t. She has reactivity that leads to destruction, not resolution or even love.
The Catholic Catechism says conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary, there he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. It is not a feeling. It is not an opinion. It is not what your father believes.
Jean Louise has a certain conscience but that is very different than a formed one. She has inherited Atticus’s moral clarity by has bypassed what he went through to form his own questions. He has wrestled, his brother has wrestled too, but Jean Louise has not. And she’s never had to test her convictions against reality, against love, against violence, and against the complexity of people she knows and cannot simply dismiss. Up to the crisis in the book, Jean Louise just knew — because Atticus knew — and that was enough. Until it isn’t.
The Plot is what . . . Rebirth? Or Voyage and Return?
At first, it might seem a Voyage and Return plot. Jean Louise leaves her world, comes home, finds it threatening, escapes back to herself. That arc is present. But Rebirth is the deeper truth of what I believe is actually happening to Jean Louise.
In each of these stories we see the heroine first falling under the shadow of the dark power when she is very young. For a while it still seems to be comfortably remote, although we are aware of it unresolved and menacing in the background. Then there is a mounting sense of threat as the dark power approaches, until finally it emerges in full force, freezing the heroine in its deadly grip. Only after a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed, does the reversal take place; when the heroine is miraculously redeemed from her imprisonment by the life-giving power of love.” (Page194-5)
- The vulnerable heroine with limited awareness falls under the shadow of a dark power, and Booker writes that that power may spring from her own personality and enthrall her. In Jean Louise’s case it does. Precisely. But the dark power is not Atticus. The dark power is her own unexamined certainty. Her own borrowed conscience elevated to absolute truth. Her own ideas of what is right and just but these are ideas she has never had to test because Atticus’s version of them was always there to confirm her.
- She is enthralled by her own righteousness. And the poison of it. It’s the slow freeze of a conscience that has never been truly tested and that has been working on her for years without her knowing it.
- Things go well for a while. The warmth of homecoming. Henry Clinton. Aunt. The familiar streets. The threat seems distant.
- Then the floor drops. She goes to the courthouse. She looks down from the balcony. And there is Atticus — her father, her watchman, her entire moral foundation — sitting at a Citizens’ Council meeting. The world does not just feel wrong. Her understanding of the world has been catastrophically wrong. The man she built everything on is not who she thought he was. Or is he?
What Atticus Finch is actually saying and doing:
Before hitting number five, let’s talk through this turning point of the whole book. In that confrontation when Jean Louise calls her father every name in the book and accuses him of believing that Black citizens can only go so far. That Jesus loves them less. That they need to be kept down, she’s missing it. Atticus never said any of those things. She says them.
What Atticus argues is narrower and more specific. He argues against federal government overreach. Against outside organizations imposing change on a community from above. Against the mechanism and pace of forced integration, not against the destination. His concern is about who governs Maycomb. He believes change imposed from Washington without the formation of local conscience produces resentment and backlash rather than genuine progress. He believes you cannot legislate a conscience. You can only form one.
That is a gradualist argument not a white supremacist one. And Jean Louise, blinded by her own rage, with her borrowed and untested certainty, cannot yet distinguish between the two.This is her failure and it’s not emotional but intellectual. Worse, she’s not listening. A formed conscience listens before it judges. Jean Louise is not there yet.
And turning this whole thing around, falsely accused and not listened to, Atticus says three words that become one of the hinges of the entire book: As you wish.
She has told him she’s leaving. She has called him everything she can think of. She has prepared to sever the most important relationship of her life.
And he says: As you wish.
This is a man brimming with love. 1 Corinthians 13 love that “does not insist on its own way, that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Remember The Princess Bride and Wesley saying “as you wish” to Buttercup. In that story, it meant I love you. It means you come first. It means I will be a farm boy to your pompous certainty if that is what love requires. In Watchman, those words mean, “Your freedom matters more to me than my vindication.” And in that that act of true, unselfish, unconditional, and non-grasping love awakens her. And now we tip into number five of the Rebirth plot: The Heroine miraculously wakes, liberated through the power of love. The rescuer is often a child representing goodness and light (Tiny Tim), or a figure of the opposite sex, representing the “complete Self.” Atticus is the figure of the opposite sex.
The Mother. The Stunting. And the Gift
There is a line Jean Louise delivers almost as a joke that is actually one of the most important lines in the book. She tells Atticus he should have remarried so she could have been raised a proper Southern woman, like Auntie. And this takes us back up the plot chart to the falling that creates this elder Jean Louise. She lost her mother young and Atticus raised her which means she was formed almost entirely in his image, by his values, inside his moral atmosphere. There was no counterweight and no other adult voice with a different formation, a different set of certainties, a different way of seeing.
It stunted her in the sense that she never developed the fully rounded social formation a mother figure in that Southern context would have provided. The feminine grammar of Maycomb with all the proprieties, the expectations, the careful social navigation is something she has no patience for because she was never shaped by it. But it’s also what sets her free. Atticus gave her something most Southern women of her generation never received. Permission to think. Permission to question. Permission to be a mind first and a social creature second. The freedom that made her an alien in her own hometown is the same freedom that makes her the only person equipped for what comes next.
Uncle Jack: The Second Necessary Hinge
Dr. John Hale Finch, Uncle Jack is a retired physician, an eccentric, and brilliant. He’s the person in this story who actually understands what is happening and refuses to let it end in disaster. To stop that disaster, he slaps Jean Louise very much in the way a doctor slaps a baby that’s just born. Jean Louise is that baby only she’s twenty+ years old.
Jean Louise is in full flight. Not just emotionally, she is preparing to make a permanent decision that cuts Atticus off and severe famille relationships. She is ready to declare her father a moral monster and herself free of him. She is doing what our culture now calls healthy, what therapists encourage young people to do right and left, which is blame the parents and cut them out of their lives in order to “have a life” but this is the supremacy error, and one Jean Louise is about to make. She’s treating her own devastation as the final moral word. Uncle Jack will not let her do this.
Paired with Atticus’s: As you will and I love you, Uncle Jack steps in and completes the picture of what love does in the formation of a conscience. One holds open the door (the birthing). One prevents the flight (the slap). Both are necessary. And then Uncle Jack talks to her for a very long time and right away, points out she is the bigot in the room.
Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. “‘Bigot,'” she read. “‘Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief or opinion.’ Explain yourself, sir.”
“I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all Father things, so you ran. And how you ran.“
Uncle Jack explains what this whole story is about and yes, the slap is shocking, surprising, jarring and challenging to our sensibilities but the point he’s making here is that the core structure was in her and had always been in her (like the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz). And the fact that she was so furious and unable to simply agree with Atticus, unable to simply walk away, and unable to pretend none of it mattered was all a sign that her conscience was there and working.
“You are not losing yourself, Jean Louise,” Uncle Jack says. “You are, for the first time, finding yourself.”
And then he gifts her one of her core gifts (the one that was part of her original self) which is that she’s never seen color.
In a town entirely organized around color, that cannot see past it on either side, this is the thing that makes Jean Louise unlike everyone else in the conversation. She grew up so close to Calpurnia, so genuinely unseeing of color, so formed by a father who told her to climb inside another person’s skin and walk around in it that the filter simply never developed. This is her immaturity in one sense, she cannot fully inhabit the reality of people who see color because she has never had to build that particular awareness. Her innocence is real. And a conscience that cannot account for how the world actually operates is not yet fully formed. But it is also her formation. Tested now. Real now. Not naivety anymore but a genuine and hard-won quality. A Southerner who truly does not see color. Who loves Maycomb and cannot accept what Maycomb does. Who is equipped to be something the conversation has never had.
The Finch
Harper Lee did not name this family the Mockingbirds but the Finchs. The mockingbird is pure innocence. It only sings. It harms nothing. And the world destroys it. IE: Tom Robinson, Boo Radley. The mockingbird cannot protect itself. But the little finch is different. It’s small, unassuming and extraordinarily resilient surviving in almost every climate on earth. It does not mimic like the mockingbird but it sings something native to itself and that comes from its own formed interior.
In medieval Christian iconography the goldfinch appears in paintings of the Madonna and Child. The infant Jesus holds a goldfinch because the finch was believed to eat thorns and thistles, and its red marking was said to come from a drop of Christ’s blood when it tried to remove a thorn from the crown of thorns.
The finch touches what hurts. And survives it.
Jean Louise approaches the thorn. The courthouse, the confrontation, the shattering of everything she thought she was. She sustains the wound. She does not die from it. She does not flee it permanently. She survives it. Marked. Changed. Formed. And her nickname, Scout is a military term for the one who goes ahead of the main body into unknown territory and reports back what she sees.
Jean Louise is a Finch who scouts. A songbird who goes first. And she is likely coming back to Maycomb, not as Hank’s wife, that would be the expected resolution, the social grammar of the town asserting itself one last time, but as a Finch. She will take up the mantle that Jem, the firstborn son and natural heir, couldn’t.
Jean Louise then is the next generation. The true heir. Formed in fire. And she’s carrying what was best in Atticus forward and further.
🤔 Questions to Ponder:
Either take up the discussion born in you with the two questions that started this teaching: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why?
Or ask yourself this one: Who is your Atticus? Not an enemy. Not a villain. The person you loved so completely that their moral certainty became yours and you called it formation when it was really devotion. What would it take for their floor to drop? And if it did, would you leave? Or would you stay, and do the harder, slower, more terrifying work of finding out what you actually believe? Perhaps do a bit of writing about these core questions and bring to class.
Before arguing about moral relativism, it helps to ask a simpler question. Can a person ask what is good? And when they act, do they not act on what they take to be good in some way?
When we face questions about how to live, this is not abstract thinking. At some point, each of us decides whether a way of life is good for us. People answer differently, shaped by culture, experience, and belief. But one thing is hard to avoid. We do not remain neutral. We do not stand back and compare ideas forever. We act. And in acting, we choose.
That means we are already moving toward what we take to be good.
But here is the difficulty. What we take to be good is not always what truly is good. People can be sincere and still be wrong. Someone can chase success and find it empty, or justify something in the moment and regret it later.
So the question cannot end with what do I think is good. It becomes harder. Am I right about what is good?
At that point we are no longer just following our beliefs. We are examining them. Some forms of moral relativism suggest that what is good depends on a person or a culture. That helps explain disagreement, but it does not end the question.
Because when we encounter different ways of living, we still ask: which one is better? Should I change? Am I missing something?
Those are not just questions of comparison. They are questions of judgment.
If that is true, then moral thinking is not confined to a single point of view. It reaches towards what is actually good, not only what we happen to believe.
Relativism does not stop us from asking these questions. But it makes moral thinking seem like comparison without commitment. In practice, the moment we act we have chosen. We are moving in a direction.
And if we can be mistaken about that direction, then it matters whether we are right. That only makes sense if there is something to be right about.
This does not make the answer easy. People will continue to disagree. But in other areas of life, disagreement pushes us to look more carefully, not to stop looking. The same is true here.
We do not approach these questions from nowhere. As Alasdair MacIntyre argues, we begin within traditions we did not choose. We inherit ways of thinking before we ever question them. But we are not trapped in them. We can test what we inherit. We can find where it fails. We can look for something better.
When different moral visions conflict, the question is not only which one we belong to. It is which one makes better sense of human life. Which one holds together. Which one can face its own failures without collapsing.
Some ways of living do this better than others.
And this points to something deeper. We are not making isolated choices. We are living lives that unfold over time. What we believe, reject, revise, and pursue becomes part of a whole.
A human life has the shape of a story. Some stories lose direction. Some fragment. Others hold together.
Bravo! Wonderful…great thinking…
Don is arguing that we are already moving toward what we take to be good by even asking the question: What is good, and then the harder question is not what do I think is good but am I right about what is good?
This is Jean Louise’s entire arc stated in two sentences.
She arrived moving toward what she took to be good and is, in her own estimation, unambiguously on the right side. From this place, she levels verbal and emotional violence at Atticus, accuses him of things he has not said and positions he does not hold.
Her instincts about human dignity are real, that inability to see color is genuine but she is wrong about significant parts of her argument, which Jack shows her). Her certainty elevated to absolute truth paired with a refusal to actually listen is not a formed conscience. That is what Don calls moral thinking that has stopped at what do I think without ever asking am I right.
And she knows she’s done wrong in the form embarrassment and regret that comes after the slow dawning that she has done violence to someone she loves based on a position she cannot fully defend. And this the moment Don’s essay is pointing toward. Jean Louise is now examining her beliefs which will be painful, humiliating, and costly and is the beginning of what John Paul II means by a formed conscience. Not relativism. Not my truth. But the harder: Am I right? And if I am not, what is actually true here?
Don clears the philosophical ground. Jean Louise walks across it the hard way.
Reading To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman brought up a lot for me, because I cannot read those books as just stories about somebody else’s family or somebody else’s town. They connect too closely to my own life. When I think about race, conscience, and moral truth, I am not thinking in an abstract way. I am thinking about my mother, my family, and the things I did not fully understand until I was older.
My mother was Italian American, the daughter of immigrants who came to the United States in the 1930s. She married my father, who was a Black man, even though her parents disapproved so strongly that they eloped. On one level, that story has always seemed brave to me, and I still think it was. But as I got older, I also had to face something harder: my mother had internalized racism, and so did her parents. That has been painful to admit, because it means the family story is more complicated than I wanted it to be.
What makes it especially painful is realizing that this did not just affect my parents’ marriage or my grandparents’ attitudes. It affected me. Looking back, I can see that at some point I started distancing myself from the fact that I am part African American. I do not think I made that choice in some clear, intentional way. It was more subtle than that. It was like I learned, without anyone fully saying it, that this part of me was harder to hold onto or less safe to fully claim. That realization has really stayed with me.
That is why the question of conscience matters so much to me. I do not believe moral standards are just culturally defined. If they were, then I would have to say the racism in my family was just part of their culture or their time, and that would be the end of it. But I cannot accept that. My conscience tells me that racism is wrong, even when it is inherited, quiet, and mixed in with real love. So where I land is this: I believe there is moral truth, and I believe each person has the responsibility to seek it. Family, culture, and history shape us, but they do not get the final word on what is right.
That is one reason To Kill a Mockingbird affected me. The novel is often praised for showing a child waking up to racism and prejudice in the South, especially through the trial of Tom Robinson. At the same time, many critics point out that the novel focuses more on white moral struggle than on fully developed Black humanity. That makes the book meaningful but also limited. That tension feels familiar to me. In my own life, I have had to wrestle with the fact that love and moral blindness can exist in the same person. My mother loved my father and loved her children, but she also carried harmful beliefs that affected the way I came to understand myself. Conscience, to me, means being honest about that.
Go Set a Watchman hit me even harder because it is really about what happens when the moral figure you trusted turns out to be more complicated than you thought. That feeling of having the floor drop out from under you matters. Sometimes conscience begins there: when you realize loyalty and truth are not the same thing. For me, conscience means separating what I inherited from what is actually true.
So my reaction to Harper Lee’s books is very personal. They make me think about race not just as a public issue, but as something that lives inside families and identities. They push me to tell the truth about my own life: that I was shaped by both love and prejudice, and that I do not want prejudice to have the final word. I am both African American and Italian, and I want conscience to mean moving toward truth, dignity, and wholeness rather than away from myself.
Karina, this is serious and courageous work.
The line that stopped me: Sometimes conscience begins there, when you realize loyalty and truth are not the same thing — is one of the most precise things anyone has written in response to these books. You arrived at it not through literary analysis but through your own life. That is the harder road and the more honest one.
What you are describing: love and moral blindness existing in the same person, being shaped by both without being defined by either. is exactly what these books are asking us to sit with. Your mother’s story. Your own. The part of yourself you learned without anyone saying it to distance from.
And your conclusion holds. Family, culture and history shape us. They do not get the final word.
That is not relativism. That is a formed conscience speaking clearly. Thank you for bringing your whole self to this.🐦⬛
Karina, thank you for sharing this. <3
The question really cannot have an either/or answer in my opinion, and this is why. If we take as a given that there is a God (and I think there is) then can we assume that morality comes from God? (Let’s assume that it does for a moment). And let’s assume that we (our soul, our spirit ) are made by God . (I’m not sure if we are made in his image or if we humans anthropomorphize in our image). Then yes we certainly have the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it.
However,
It seems that there are at least two situations when morality also becomes culturally defined. 1. When a moral dilemma arises, 2. when we believe that morality is kept inside a specific religion.
Here’s an example of the first situation. A medical condition arises in a pregnant mother that often is fatal unless the pregnancy is ended. If the baby is delivered it is so premature that it will likely die or have severe problems. If the mother continues the pregnancy then the mother has a high probability of dying. The decision of the mother, husband, and doctors often differs – but does that make their decisions immoral?
Now for the second example. Religion “G” believes that anyone not subscribing to their religion must be converted to be “saved”. People in religion “O” don’t want to convert to “G” and resist any attempts by “G” people to do so. Then religion “G” gains control of the state/government and they have the political power to make the”O” people stop their practice of the “O” religion. The moral decisions of “G” people and the “O” people then become more and more culturally divergent and radical groups on both sides emerge.
In both scenarios it seems like moral decisions will be decided by one’s culture. Only when one develops the capacity to see that “morality” is not always black and white , that we can’t always see the future or absolutely know the outcome can one live with one’s moral decisions or those of others.
You opened with the strongest possible answer. We are made in the image of God and therefore possess both the capacity and the responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it. That is a fixed reference point outside the self and outside the culture.
But your two examples do something worth examining: They cluster groups of people into situations and asks: Are their decisions moral or immoral? The clustering makes the question look unanswerable. Break it down individually and it becomes precise again.
In the medical situation the morality rests not in the group decision but in whether each individual is reasoning honestly toward what is genuinely good. With a formed conscience. With full accountability to the dignity of every life involved. Not for the outcome, which may be tragic regardless. But for the honesty and seriousness of the seeking. And the doctor who withholds information to protect a patient from the weight of the decision is acting immorally, removing the person’s capacity to bring their own conscience to bear.
In the G and O situation, the reason we can call G’s coercion actually wrong, not just different, is the fixed reference point you named at the start. Every person bears the Imago Dei. No political majority can legitimately override it.
Your opening answer describes Atticus. Your clustering examples describe Jean Louise arriving in Maycomb. Certain without formation. Morally capable but not yet morally responsible in the deepest sense.
The whole series is about the journey from one to the other.
In my memoir writing, the harder, slower work has begun. The truth is, I’ve always known it: like Jean Louise, I had an Atticus for a father. Not the racist Atticus, but a man who was my only living parent — attractive, musical, beloved by so many as kind and generous. He had been my compass; wherever he pointed, I followed.
I believed he was steady and wise until the day I finally saw the limits of his understanding, his compassion, his fears. Six years ago, I confronted him about all of it — the abuse he allowed, the way he let me go, the way he replaced me with a stepmother and a new daughter. At the time, I thought the dust had settled. I thought we had moved on. A clean slate. A new understanding of what I could expect from him.
But I hadn’t looked as closely as I needed to. In my writing, pieces keep surfacing — almost imperceptible at first — especially when I work hard to show the love I still have for him, the light in him that everyone sees. That light is real.
And yet, I’ve begun to sense the outline of a self that wasn’t built from his beliefs. I’m learning to trust the questions I was never allowed to ask, and I’m hoping that the answers I find on my own will finally set the past free.
This is serious writing happening right here in a class comment.”I’ve begun to sense the outline of a self that wasn’t built from his beliefs.” That is the formation moment which is exactly where Jean Louise stands at the end of the book. And your insistence that the light in him is real is what separates honest memoir from score settling. You are not collapsing him into a villain to make your story easier. That takes more courage than the confrontation did.
The harder slower work you mentioned at the beginning.
Keep going.🐦⬛
From Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be”
“The theological assertion that every human soul has an infinite value is a consequence of the ontological self-affirmation as an indivisible, unexchangeable self. It can be called “the courage to be as oneself.” But the self is self only because it has a world, a structured universe, to which it belongs and from which it is separated at the same time. Self and world are correlated, and so are individualization and participation. For this is just what participation means: being a part of something from which one is, at the same time, separated….The self is part of the world which it has as its world.”
This is all to say, how can talk as if selfhood exists in the absence of participation? I do feel that morality springs from within and moves culture by degrees, otherwise, who can we say makes culture? But of course, culture moves the self as well. Where do we begin and end? If Scout must meet her father as a member of the human race (which she must), she must also meet herself as human and flawed–as part of Maycomb, however separate she feels. A participant who has been complacent, who’s blindness has caused her to miss things.
In the final scene, after Uncle Jack gives Scout a drink and asks her how she feels, she says: “I’m sitting right here, and it’s just like I’m sitting in my apartment in New York. I don’t know. I feel funny.” The author may be telling us that Scout has finally left No Man’s Land, or “the hell of eternal apartness” to face reality, which is messy and full of contradictions. In his only novel, Rilke’s main character says, “It amazes me sometimes how readily I relinquish all expectations in favor for what turns out to be real, even when what is real is terrible.”
Charlie, a very sophisticated response in the thread.
Your Tillich point is precise and it productively complicates the conscience formation teaching. You are right that the self cannot be abstracted from its world. Scout is not a free floating moral agent working out her conscience in isolation. She is a participant in Maycomb — shaped by it, implicated in it, complacent within it even as she stands apart. Her blindness is not merely innocent childhood innocence. It is the blindness of someone who has been inside a system without fully reckoning with what the system is doing around her.
That is a harder and more honest reading than the one that simply celebrates her clear child’s eyes.
And the scene you cite, Scout sitting in Maycomb feeling like she is in her New York apartment, the strange doubled feeling of finally being present, that is exactly what Tillich means by leaving the hell of eternal apartness. She has been separate from Maycomb in a way that felt like clarity but was also a form of avoidance. Now she is finally in the room. Fully. As a participant. Which means accountable.
The Rilke quote is the perfect close. What turns out to be real, even when what is real is terrible.
That is where genuine formation begins. Not in the clean apartness. In the terrible real.
Beautifully done.