compunction
/kəmˈpʌŋkʃ(ə)n
/noun [mass noun, usually with negative]
A feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad: they used their tanks without compunction...
- If the ancient human habit of taking what we want without understanding, without compassion, and without compunction continues unrestricted, it will lead us to extinction.
- The ‘nice’ party has been revealed as no such thing - rather, enthusiastically and without compunction, it destroyed its greatest electoral asset, a leader who had delivered its finest hour only months before.
- V operates without compunction or mercy, and his brand of enforced anarchy is just as dictatorial as the forces to which he is opposed.
Synonyms
scruples, misgivings, qualms, worries, unease, uneasiness, hesitation, hesitancy, doubts, reluctance, reservations;
guilt, feelings of guilt, guilty conscience, pangs/twinges of conscience, remorse, regret, contrition, contriteness, self-reproach, repentance, penitence
Derivatives
compunctious
/ adjective ...- We are so conscientious and compunctious and compassionate that we did the EIA as early as in 1988 for the 2007 project.
- And yet the point remains: the true psychopath has not in the first place the compunctious visitings whose passage needs to be stopped up.
- The actual audience, like the heavenly one, can peep through the blanket of stage dark, and what it sees is that a compunctious visiting of nature prevents Lady Macbeth from carrying out the act at all.
compunctiously
Origin
Middle English: from Old French componction, from ecclesiastical Latin compunctio(n-), from Latin compungere 'prick sharply', from com- (expressing intensive force) + pungere 'to prick'.