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Good morning. At the age of 15, Shamima Begum ran away to Syria to become a Jihadi bride. Four years later, she is stuck in a refugee camp with a newborn baby and she wants to come home. Many Britons feel betrayed. Some say she chose to be there, so that’s where she should stay; others argue for mercy or, at least, for due process and a trial. I’d be willing to bet that the so-called Islamic State is laughing at all of this, at Britain contorting itself over what it should do. To the fundamentalist, debate or indecision are signs of weakness. Can you imagine how violent Jihadis would act if the shoe was on the other foot, if a woman asked them for clemency? The answer is found in the countless deaths of their critics, religious minorities and anyone else who failed to abide by their twisted interpretation of Islamic law. The self-styled Islamic State operates government by commandment, and to many of us it seems to lack reason and humanity. By contrast, I would argue that the heated legal debate in Britain around what to do with Shamima Begum is a strength, a sign of a society that tolerates conflicting opinion, entertains doubt and is doing its upmost to determine the best course of action. You might call this government by conscience. Catholics like me are taught that conscience is a law inscribed by God on a person’s heart – but you don’t have to take those words literally to recognise the idea of heartfelt judgement. It’s a judgement rooted in the religious and philosophical tradition you were raised in. It is based upon experience. And it is relevant to particular circumstances. A free conscience can make all sorts of calculations that a dictatorship probably wouldn’t bother with. For instance, does it make a difference to your judgement of Shamima Begum that she was an adolescent when she ran away? Is it important she has so far shown no remorse? How does her newborn child change your thoughts and feelings? The whirring of gears in our head is the conscience deliberating, and in a sense we operate a societal conscience when we come together as a nation to argue over what to do. This is democracy as an exercise in moral inquiry. We might accept that its decisions are not always correct, but the process is vastly superior to government by fear and compulsion.