Conscience, morality, remorse

One’s conscience can be examined with frankness only posthumously, as Machado de Assis’ creation the comfortably moneyed Brás Cubas discovers in narrating his own epitaph1. “Give your conscience plenty of air!”, he advises the reader from beyond the grave, citing an example of finding a gold coin in the street. Being neither inherited nor earned, the coin was clearly not his to keep. He hands it in to the police, and feels his conscience breathe freely again.

Although his fastidious moral sense goes on to win approbation at a dinner party, Brás Cubas has already stumbled across another little fortune, this time amongst beach flotsam, in the shape of a package filled with lovely gold coins and carefully stacked banknotes. The new windfall, hardly something anyone would just lose, is “a blessing to be thankful for, in this case perhaps an act of Providence.” He elaborates by contrast to a crime and comparison to the lottery, “and I go so far as to maintain that my good luck was merited, for otherwise I would have felt badly about it and unworthy of the rewards of Providence, and I did not feel so.” On the fate of the coins and bills in his possession, he solemnly pledges: “I must use them for a good purpose, perhaps a dowry for some poor girl or … I’ll see …”.

In fact, Brás Cubas later converts his winnings into a retirement fund for ageing and poverty-stricken seamstress Dona Plácida. See then how virtue is its own reward2 after all! Or more prosaically, it was Dona Plácida’s reward, for agreeing to compromise her morality by renting out her house to his clandestine lover Virgília and acting as Virgília’s chaperone. “I was not unappreciative”, he notes, ever the utilitarian3.

Having thus suffocated his conscience with pillows of reason, Brás Cubas can reflect on its nature only much later, in his own post mortem, that “if it considers itself beautiful, it looks at itself again and again. Remorse is nothing but the wry face that a conscience makes when it sees itself hideous.”

• Machado de Assis (1880) Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by William Grossman (1952) as Epitaph of a Small Winner; here quoting from pages 71, 105-108, 131, 215.
• The proverbial ‘virtue is its own reward’ has roots in Roman scholar Cicero’s 45 BCE De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). Cicero reasoned that to be honourable can rightly be praised in itself, as opposed to being valued for its utility. He developed this maxim in his subsequent 45 BCE Tusculanae Disputationes (Tusculan Disputations), finding that true happiness depends on virtue alone, independently of any ensuing rewards.
• The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (c. 300 BCE) considered virtue as instrumental to living the good life. Its value for him was only as a means to that end, of pleasurable freedom from pain and disturbance. This is the view that Cicero attacked in his De Finibus, and that Brás Cubas gravitates towards in his life. Does virtue actually bring any of those desired pleasures? Unfortunately not for Brás Cubas. Despite donating his fortuitous riches towards Dona Plácida’s retirement, he later finds himself having to fund her palliative care so as to save his reputation with his now former-mistress Virgília, because Dona Plácida had loaned the donation to a swindler in exchange for affections and marriage (Epitaph pages 208-210).

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index