In this article the author discusses about the relationship between consciousness and conscience. In addition to the preface and conclusion, this article is divided into three parts: first, the importance of conscious feelings from the Confucian points of view is discussed, suggesting that consciousness is the premise to recognize moral concepts such as "benevolence" and "conscience", and is the basis for generating moral behaviors. Secondly, it is pointed out that experience of pain is a fact in this empirical world, and the Buddhist "Noble Truth of Suffering" already presumes the necessary existence of conscious experience. It would be our perception of pain that facilitates the formation of morality. According to Buddhism, the quality of our mental consciousness is directly related to the continuum or liberation of karma, showing a close correlation between psychology and ethics (or soteriology). Finally, it is shown that our moral sense and conscious experience are deeply associated, just as the words consciousness and conscience are inseparable in Latin, Spanish, French, and also English before the seventeenth century. The moral judgments of good and evil or right and wrong presuppose real existences of our experience of suffering and pleasure. Thus, that the mainstream academic study of consciousness at the present stage, which is strongly dominated by the scientific approach, focuses on the physiological side of perceptual experience while ignoring the ethical side leaves much space for reflections.
