Looked upon from this angle, the matter of conscience might be considered simplistically.
There is a tendency that the process of developing a conscience in humans should be somehow equated with that of ripening in fruits for example. Just as various fruits become sweeter and softer after a while children gradually develop the ability to distinguish right from wrong, right? Wrong.
The frequent occurrence of human beings who fail to develop the sense of right and wrong without suffering from a mental disorder demonstrates that conscience is neither a biological necessity nor a quality that resides in various degrees throughout the human race or even the entire animal kingdom. The fact that crows steal the seeds the farmer has sown only after he has gone away, or that the dog tries to make himself less conspicuous after breaking one of his master’s rules do not show conscience in an nutshell, but “mere” intelligence.
Intelligence is necessary, but not enough for conscience to form. On the one hand, language and self-awareness are fundamental because they endow people with self-control, planning, reasoning and abstract thought. On the other hand, without the cultivation and assimilation of moral values and feelings of moral integrity under the influence of the group, infants grow up to be feral children or sociopaths.
Although aspects of intelligence, self-awareness and social behavior are present throughout the animal kingdom, the human brain uses a greater number of functions and aptitudes to form relationships that result in a system whose emergent quality we name conscience is unique to homo sapiens. Hence, the quote in the OP is a distortion of reality and the notion that a professor may teach such oversimplifications seems to me quite shocking.
Does the occurrence of children born without limbs mean dogs have no legs? You seem to be advocating for a position you are already invested in.
To present a contrary, albeit fringe, viewpoint, Jon Franklin has argued in his book, *The Wolf in the Parlor *, that we humans acquired the social morals to which we aspire from dogs. Not the morals we chimpanzees (and we are essentially mutant chimpanzees) evolved…the looking-out-for-number-one, backstabbing, cheating, lying, primate behaviors, but the die-for-the-pack cooperative behavior we so admire. Franklin notes that the rise of human societies roughly coincides with one estimate of when we began living with dogs, and suggests we had to find a model for altruism somewhere…it’s not normal to chimpanzee society. And we still only occasionally manage to live up to the ideals we admire when displayed by dogs.
Probably also an oversimplification, but an interesting talking point.
That is, however, entirely your opinion and stated without basis. The counter-argument to that is that conscience is nothing more than a rationalization of our understanding of consequences, whether those consequences be disapproval, a scolding, jail time, or an imagined eternity in some very hot place. And the persuasive evidence for that is the history of atrocities that we have committed against each other throughout the entire span of human history, requiring only the tacit approval of authority or being the authority itself and therefore having no fear of consequences. There have even been a variety of psychological experiments done that bear that out, two of the most famous being the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment.
I’m fine with the idea of emergent properties that occur at sufficient levels of system complexity, but I don’t regard “conscience” as one of them, or indeed as being a thing at all. I think we do have a tendency towards empathy with creatures that we identify as being like ourselves or that we otherwise have an affinity with, but that’s something entirely different, and history has shown that it’s pretty ephemeral.