There is the bicycle, a symbol of old-fashioned values, a green conscience, and everything that New Labour loathed.
No doubt noble sentiments are at work in this roster, but as a result, all specificity and judgment disappears; conscience consumes everything and contains nothing.
The wrenching "Hotel Rwanda" (2004) was a contemporary African "Schindler's List" in which a man of conscience risked everything to protect more than a thousand Tutsi refugees from slaughter by bloodthirsty Hutu thugs.
Alongside Ghavami, thousands of other ordinary Iranians are marooned in the Islamic Republic's prisons for crimes of conscience, facing everything from extortionate bails, indeterminate prison time and summary execution.
Kerrey countered: "I don't think every time you get a team of people working on the danger [to national security], one person can say, 'Oh, I don't like what we're doing,' and as an act of conscience blow everything we're doing and say we're not going to be prosecuted".
That he's able to keep a clear conscience about everything, that he claims to have no regrets after an eight-year presidency filled with wars and disasters and can spend his days mountain-biking and taking lucrative speaking engagements is maybe the most inexcusable thing of all.
He stretches the boundaries of storytelling in ways other writers wouldn't attempt, let alone pull off – and does it with a ferocious social conscience that challenges everything we are.
At the end of the movie, Senator Paine has an attack of conscience and confesses to everything.
"They cannot claim, with a clear conscience, to have done everything within their power to save those condemned people," Benzion Netanyahu wrote in 1944.
Lenny Henry, 45 Why: A comic genius with a highly effective social conscience, Henry has been everything from impressionist and stand-up to serious actor and fund-raising supremo of Comic Relief.
