Today is October 2nd, 2026. I’m William Michael, the headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. I’d like to post another Walk Talk on a topic that I think is of interest to many Catholics—maybe even every Catholic. And I was prompted to take up this topic today by a request from a friend who’s associated with the Academy, who asked if I would take some time to reflect on questions where we have decisions to make and our consciences are disturbed, but we really can’t be certain about what we should do.
The problem: uncertainty of conscience
These are questions where we have this uncertainty of conscience—where we feel like something might be wrong, but we’re not sure. And we feel confused, and maybe anxious, maybe even fearful, about a situation or a decision. But it just seems like there’s no way to make a decision. We can’t tell if it’s right or wrong. We can’t tell if it’s sin or not sin. It’s just confusing. And it may be, in modern society, a controversial issue. And if we talk to others about it, they may just dismiss it as ridiculous. They may assure us that there’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about. But for some reason we don’t feel that that’s true. We feel like there is something wrong, and for some reason we feel upset. And so we need to figure out what to do. We’d like to have peace on this issue.
And we can think of lots of different scenarios. One that came to mind for me, with children in the military, was the question of soldiers being sent into war and wondering whether they were on the right side—wondering whether their cause was just, wondering whether they might be the bad guy in the situation, and thinking about what the spiritual consequences of their military action might be. They don’t know what the government knows. They don’t know what their commanders know. What should they do if they’re not sure whether their military action is just or not—whether it’s sin, whether it could even be damning? We can see how that would torment a soldier who had this uncertainty of conscience.
And we could think of other things. We could think of a person working in a job where they’re dependent on this job for their financial support—maybe the support of their family. And they’re asked to do something. Maybe what they’re asked to do is legal, but they feel that it’s not moral. And they fear that if they do it, they’ll be sinning. And if they don’t do it, they may lose their job, and their family will suffer for it. But they’re not certain, and they don’t know what to do. And if they talk to others about it, it just seems like others don’t even care about these things. And so they struggle with that situation, and it just sort of eats at them every day.
Or with modern banking, investing, borrowing, lending. We look at these modern methods of doing business—borrowing money, lending money, putting money in the bank that collects interest—and then we go back and read old things about usury. And we ask ourselves, “Am I wrapped up in usury? Am I the person that I read about in these old books and these old laws? Am I the unjust person making money off of money, as it was said in the Middle Ages?”
And again, if we talk to anybody about that, they just sort of scoff and roll their eyes and say, “This isn’t the Middle Ages. We live in a modern, capitalistic, cash-based society where money is considered an asset. We’re not talking about gold and silver. We’re not talking about actual products that have intrinsic value. We’re talking about a fiat currency, where there’s inflation and all the other factors that make this very complicated. Interest on savings just offsets inflation, or it’s money that’s given as a reward for allowing the bank to use your money to help others who may be doing necessary things.” It’s very confusing, and we run into these situations all the time.
And what’s most frustrating about them is that it doesn’t matter how intelligent we are, it doesn’t matter how sincere we are, it doesn’t matter how rigorously we research and look for answers—it seems that there’s really no solution. And so it just goes on haunting us. And we try to talk ourselves out of it and say, “Well, look, obviously I can’t find an answer, so God knows that I tried.” But still, that answer doesn’t give us peace. It still gnaws at us. And we just live in this limbo of uncertainty.
And when we’ve got to make decisions and do work, it can become debilitating. Solomon says, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” And in order to be successful in our work, in our studies, in anything we do, we’ve got to be able to dig into it and get to work. And we want to be in a situation where we know what to do, and we know that it’s right, and we can just give it our all. And when we have these dilemmas, we feel paralyzed. And it causes us to struggle, and we don’t enjoy the success that we should or could. And so even if we resolve that we can’t figure out the solution, trying to move forward doesn’t allow us to do so with any zeal or enthusiasm. We can’t do it with all our might. And so either way, it’s a problem.
A pattern: inferiors and superiors
So I was thinking about this this afternoon, and as I thought about it, I continued thinking about examples. And as I thought about the examples, I started to notice a pattern in each of them. Think about the examples that I mentioned: a soldier, an employee, an investor—or someone just trying to manage his money. And in each of these situations, there are relationships of inferiors and superiors. And I think that the problem we’re sensing relates to these relationships—that there’s an essential cause of the trouble there. This is my own meditation on this, and what I’m sensing might be the cause of the problem.
The soldier is dressed in his military uniform, armed by the state, and sent in the service of his country. We know that there’s nothing immoral or illegal about military service. Romans chapter 13 tells us that every authority in this world is appointed by God. And those who bear the sword—that is, those who legally wield the sword—do so with God’s authority. And the modern soldier, equipped with all of his high-tech gear and weaponry, bears the sword. He’s an agent, or extension, of the state. He’s a subordinate.
And the military illustrates this very well, because it’s a whole hierarchy of inferiors and superiors, from the lowest levels of privates all the way up through generals to the president or the king himself. There’s this massive hierarchy of authority. And each subordinate is expected to follow the commands of his superior. When he’s told what to do, his answer is, “Yes, sir.” That’s his duty. His duty is to obey his superior.
The superior has privileges that the inferior lacks. The superior has access to information that the inferior lacks. The inferior is stuck speculating, trying to guess what that information might be. His sources are hearsay, educated guesses, conspiracies, and so on. He doesn’t have access to the information from any quality source. He’s left with all of these inferior sources of information, and that’s one of the reasons why he can’t know. He doesn’t have all the information. He can’t know. And so what he’s trying to determine is something that’s beyond him. He’s trying to act not out of obedience, but out of understanding and consent. He is seeking a kind of action and a kind of knowledge that isn’t proper to his place.
The deeper problem: spiritual individualism
So we can see that that appears to be a problem. But I think it reveals to us another problem. As we sort of peel away the layers of this problem, I think we come to a deeper, more fundamental problem. And that is that the inferior doesn’t think that his relationship—this hierarchy—is real. He thinks that it’s just convenient. He thinks it’s artificial. He doesn’t think that he really is a private in the military. He thinks that that title, that station, is just artificial. It’s not real.
And so when he considers his role and responsibility—if someone were to say to him, “What is appropriate for a private?”—he would say, “Oh, come on, that’s not real. I’m an individual. I’m a human being. I’m accountable to God for my actions.” And listen to that language: “I am accountable to God for my actions.” And I think this reveals what the real cause of this uncertainty of conscience is. I think that the spirit of religious or spiritual individualism is the cause of this dilemma.
This individualism, I would argue, really developed in Western civilization in the Renaissance and the periods following. And we’ve all imbibed it. We’ve all absorbed this idea. We’ve all been raised under the influence of this idea. And we all have this individualistic sense that religion is about me and God. It’s me and God. We think, “Well, on Judgment Day I’m going to stand before God. It’s going to be me and God. My decisions in this life are between me and God.” It’s me and God—this spiritual individualism.
And so the individual who thinks like this faces a decision, and he dismisses any effects of social relations on his decision. He dismisses any effects of social relations on his responsibilities, on his duties, on his moral liability, and so on. And he imagines that he is responsible to make a decision based on some kind of absolute morality that transcends any social relations. He thinks that he is accountable to God for the absolute morality of every decision he makes.
And this is what torments him. Because while he denies the reality of his social relations, those social relations are effectively controlling his ability to make this decision. So he is really affected by his social relations, yet he considers them to be artificial and not real. And so there’s a contradiction in him: he is saying, “This is not real,” and yet it really constrains him. And I think this is the cause of this conscientious uncertainty. He’s trying to make a decision as if he is this independent individual—because he has free will—completely free from all social relations, and he needs to make this decision as an individual, and God is going to hold him accountable for this decision as an individual. I think that’s the problem.
When social relations are treated as real
Think about what happens when we change this disposition. Think about what happens when we say, “My social relations are real. My social place, my social status, my place in the hierarchy—in whatever sphere of life it may be—that place really is who I am. That’s really me. I am not some independent individual living without any social relations. My place in society, my title in society, is who and what I actually am. I’m a private in the military. I bear the sword as an agent of the state.”
God says in Romans 13 that those in authority do not bear the sword in vain, but that every authority that exists is established by God. In other words, it’s real. And so my moral responsibility is to obey my authority. My moral responsibility—because my military position is my reality—is to obey my superior. And so the right thing to do, the good thing to do, is to obey. The evil thing to do would be to undermine my superior, to defy my superior, to betray my superior, and so on. My moral duty as a subordinate soldier is to do what my superior commands.
And when God looks at me, He doesn’t look at me as an individual floating around in the universe. He looks at me and He calls me a soldier. He looks at me and calls me a son. He looks at me and calls me a citizen. And these social relations are real. And my moral obligation is defined by my social relations.
Now, when we allow that into our thinking, the situation becomes much simpler. That conscientious uncertainty largely goes away, because most of it is based on low-quality information. The things that we’re thinking, the questions we’re asking—we’re not even sure if they’re good sources or good questions. We don’t have the information. We really don’t know what’s going on. There’s classified information. We can’t know as citizens; we can’t know as soldiers what really is going on. No soldier can. No subject can. And because that’s a reality, our moral obligation is not some kind of unlimited, completely independent, individualistic accountability to some absolute moral standard. It’s relative. It’s relative to who we are and what we are.
“To whom much is given”
Jesus teaches this concept, I think, when He says, “To whom much is given, much is expected; and to whom less is given, less is expected.” A man who is given less information is not held accountable for moral decisions as though they were made with access to all information. And a man who is given access to more information is accountable morally for the decisions that he makes with that information.
As I was saying that, I thought of a passage of Scripture—I think it’s in St. James—where he warns, “Let not many of you desire to be teachers, for teachers will bear stricter judgment.” Teachers have special privileges, access to information others don’t have. And when you force yourself into the place of a teacher when you’re not really qualified to be such, you bring upon yourself the judgment of a teacher rather than of a learner. You’re accountable to a different moral standard.
And we see that all through our society. If you become a police officer, you’re held to a different standard. For one who bears that place of trust, with access to information and resources and so on, the moral standards are higher.
So I think that individualism—moral individualism, spiritual individualism—puts us in these positions where we ask, “What is the absolute moral good in this situation?” And we simply can’t know that. We don’t have access to that information. We can try to find it. We can study. We can say, “Okay, I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to learn about what’s going on in Iran. I’m going to learn the exact history of this nuclear development program that they’ve got there. I’m going to sit up all night trying to figure out what the generals know, what the war cabinet knows, what the president knows, what the rulers of Iran know. I’m going to try to figure this out, because God is going to judge me as if I know this—because I’m an independent individual who’s judged according to moral absolutes.” And I think that’s the problem.
The employee’s dilemma
So, getting back to some examples: we have the example of the soldier. We can also think of the example of the employee. The employee is told by an employer to do something. The employee, with uncertainty, wonders whether it’s immoral—and what does that actually mean? The employer says, “It’s fine. It’s lawful. There’s nothing wrong in doing this.” The employee says, “Well, I don’t know.” And that’s exactly true: the employee doesn’t know. The government says to the employee, “This is lawful.” The employee hesitates.
And this is a dilemma for the employee that has serious implications, not only for himself but for others—for his dependents. The negative implications for his dependents would be certain. The moral evil of the action is uncertain. If it were certain, he wouldn’t be struggling with it. The reason why it’s uncertain is because he really doesn’t have the information to know that it is in fact immoral. He just has a hunch. And so he’s considering bringing certain evil—and by “evil” I just mean bad conditions—on his family in order to avoid an uncertain moral evil, which he’s not even sure is moral. So again, we see one in an inferior position meddling, as it were, in the business of superiors, and pretending to have some kind of moral objection that he can’t actually articulate.
Disobedience in the last times
I’d like to comment on this a little bit to illustrate the problem. When St. Paul talks about the end of the world, as we move on into the end times, he says that things are going to get progressively worse. He says that men will be lovers of themselves—and you can hear the individualism in that. Men will be lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God. And he lists these vices that will be increasing over time, and one of them is “disobedient to parents.” And we see that the end times are spoken of as a time of disobedience—disregard for authority, disregard for parents, disregard for law. And we see this on every side today.
And I think the reason for this is that the modern mind—this modern, individualistic mind—sees social relations as fake, artificial, false, not realistic, arbitrary, and so on. And so while they’re putting up this image of moral reserve, they’re actually acting immorally. Because an inferior in a social relationship is resisting the command or the will of a superior in that social relation, which is itself immoral, and can only be justified if the superior is actually commanding a known evil—a certain evil. So what’s actually happening is that the inferior is resisting the superior on the grounds of a possible evil, which is in fact an immoral position. And so this conscientious uncertainty, this moral sensitivity, is really a deception. It’s really an immoral disposition. The relations are real.
And if you think about it, this is the dilemma in modern society. You’ve got people in inferior positions who think that they’re smarter and better than their superiors. So they spend all of their time second-guessing, doubting, criticizing their superiors, as if the whole world is unjust and everything is upside down. “And how do I know that? Because I’m not in first place. That’s how I know that the world is corrupt and everything’s upside down. I’m not honored by it; therefore it’s unreasonable, corrupt, evil,” and so on. That’s an arrogant worldview. And it’s very common among Christians today. It’s common among everyone today. There’s no regard for moral or social order—no regard for political order, no regard for domestic order, no regard for ecclesiastical order. We dismiss all of these structures as artificial, man-made, and so on. And we argue that whatever is man-made is fake and not real.
And so you can see that’s not a Catholic mind. That’s a Protestant mind. That’s a Renaissance mind.
The example of Christ
That’s not the mind of Christ, who obeyed His earthly parents, who submitted to the baptism of John, who paid taxes. The King of the universe treated earthly social relations as if they were real.
Think about the mystery of Christ in the Temple as a child. He was twelve years old, and it says that He was questioning and discussing theological matters with the elders—the old men. And they marveled at His answers. But He was discussing theology with His elders. He was a child; they were His elders. He was before them seeking wisdom. And you could say, “Well, what can Jesus possibly not know, if He’s God?” What He lacks is human experience. And what He does is go to the elders and question them on their experience.
In every area of Jesus’ life we see Him—
[Recording paused.]
Sorry, I had to pause the talk there, because as I was talking about Jesus obeying His parents, my parents pulled up, and I had to go and honor my father and mother.
My point, though, was that in the life of Christ we see that He honors all social relations as real. And that explains a lot of things that appear to be mysterious, like His baptism. He subjects Himself to all of those human institutions and says to John the Baptist, “Let all righteousness be fulfilled.” That’s what it means to be righteous. These social relations are real, and our moral decisions are determined—or limited, I should say—by those relations.
So, to get to the point: when we look at situations in our lives where we feel our conscience is uncomfortable, what I think we need to ask is, “Am I trying to solve a moral dilemma that’s actually not appropriate for who I am, for my state? Am I trying to make a decision that can only be made by someone with greater information, greater resources, greater experience, greater connections, and so on? And is this the reason why it feels like I can’t make this decision?” And I think we’ll find that that’s actually the issue.
Henry V on the eve of Agincourt
There was one example from literature that came to mind. In Shakespeare’s play Henry V, Henry is leading his men. It’s the night before the Battle of Agincourt against the French. And Henry, the king—the Catholic king, by the way—decides to disguise himself. He throws on a dirty old cloak and disguises himself in the dark, and the soldiers are sitting around campfires on the night before what they know is going to be a terrifying battle against the French, who greatly outnumber them. The English soldiers are sick. They’ve been marching for a long time. They’re weakened, and they’re about to go to war with a powerful French army at full strength. King Henry goes out to walk among his men in disguise, just to sort of see what morale looks like.
And he hears them talking. A few of his soldiers are sitting around a fire, and they’re discussing this very issue. They’re wondering what their moral responsibility is for the next day’s battle. If they go to war fighting for land ownership, and their king’s cause is unjust, are they all guilty of the king’s injustice, and do they all die in sin? That’s the dilemma: how can we go into battle if we don’t even know whether our cause is just? And another soldier says, “That’s none of our business. That’s none of our business, because the king is responsible for his decisions as king, and he’s also responsible for whatever evil his subjects suffer. Our duty is to serve the king, and that’s all we need to worry about. Whatever happens to us, the king will be accountable for all.”
And they’re having this very discussion—and of course, none of them have the information they need to make any such decision or judgment. And Henry, in disguise, speaks to them. And he says this famous line: “Every subject is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.” Every subject is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.
And what he means by that, in the context of that discussion, is that if the subject obeys the king as he should and goes into battle, that decision—that moral act, going into battle in obedience to one’s king—is a moral act. And the king is responsible for the morality of his command. His subjects are responsible to obey his command. So it’s true that each subject is the king’s.
But when men go into battle, they go into battle in one sense as the king’s subjects, and morally they’re judged according to their obedience to their king. But they go into battle facing death in another sense as individuals. And whether they live or die, they bring with them into battle their own spiritual state—their own sins, whether they’re in a state of grace or whether they’re living separated from God. And so if the death of a soldier sends him to hell, his condemnation is not the king’s fault. His condemnation is his own fault, for dying in a state of sin. And if a man goes into battle in a state of grace and dies in battle, his obedience to the king is righteousness for him, and his entrance into heaven—or at least into purgatory—is the reward for his own righteousness. Each subject is the king’s, but each subject’s soul is his own.
And so we see these layers—layers of moral duty relative to the social order. And even though that’s coming from literature, I think it helps us to see the truth of the matter, to see the justice of the matter. The complexity is that there are different moral decisions, different moral issues, going on at the same time. And so there are a number of different questions that require different answers, and those answers are actually, in themselves, simple. But when the social order—when these different senses or layers of moral obligation—are all just mixed together and ignored, then there is an unnatural and self-inflicted confusion caused by a bad worldview, caused by bad philosophy, caused by this spirit of individualism that has no regard for the reality of social order.
Analyzing the dilemma into its parts
So when we face these dilemmas, I think that’s what we need to learn to do. We need to learn to ask ourselves how this complex situation can be analyzed into its constituent parts, and then ask what moral duty we have with reference to each of those parts.
So for example, a man who’s working and facing what appears to be a moral dilemma at work knows that he has a moral obligation to provide for his family. So if he makes a decision for the sake of his family, he makes a morally good decision. If he makes a decision to disobey his boss because of an uncertain moral issue, he acts immorally with respect to his role as an employee. That immoral action in the sphere of employment can put him in a position where he fails to provide for his family. And so now he’s in a state of immorality with respect to both issues—and it was caused by an uncertain moral reservation.
The soldier who doubts with respect to his superior acts immorally by not obeying his command; with respect to his fellow soldiers, he acts immorally with respect to their safety; and he does so in the name of his concern for his own spiritual good, which is not even certain to him.
And so you can see that in the name of this individualistic moral sensitivity, or this individualistic spirituality, one is actually trampling on real moral obligations. He’s trampling on real moral obligations in the name of moral sensitivity. And so we see that there’s a contradiction—and we can see that that’s a deception.
So I think we’re getting to the real crux of this issue. We can be deceived into acting immorally by telling ourselves that we’re very moral—that we’re more moral than the Church, more moral than our confessor, more moral than the laws of our state. In the name of that imagined superior morality, we can be trampling on concrete, real moral obligations in our earthly relations. And I think that’s the issue.
So this complexity, I would argue, is the consequence of a deception. The actual moral dilemma is complex and needs to be analyzed—broken into its parts—and then the moral decisions with respect to those different parts are actually simple. But when false thinking, false religion, false philosophy disposes us to this deception, we can’t make that analysis. We can’t make the true and simple moral decisions. We can’t follow the concrete moral obligations. And we then twist and turn in this moral dilemma, this moral uncertainty, which we imagine is some kind of consequence of our great virtue, when in fact we’re ignoring the concrete moral obligations in front of us. That’s what I would propose as the solution to this issue.
The question of usury
So we talked about banking before as an example. We’re reading questions about usury from the Middle Ages—from a completely different economic system, in a completely different period of human history, where the governments are completely different than they are now. The use of money is completely different than it is now. The organization and structure of society is completely different than it is now. We’re pulling quotes out of sources from that period condemning what’s called usury. We’re then importing those lines, those quotes, into a modern, democratic, capitalistic, cash-based, high-tech, computerized society, and we’re reading them without any respect for the context. And that is a form of equivocation. And so we have an anachronism—something that is being read and applied contrary to its time.
And I am pretty certain that this would be the Church’s response: that what interest and banking are doing in the modern world is not the same thing as what usurers were doing in the ancient and medieval world. So just because you have a practice that agrees with a past practice in appearance, the essence of the practice is not the same, because the circumstances outside of that practice are not the same. And so the moral dilemma is not a real one. The moral dilemma is not a reasonable one.
And we can look at this complex problem and say, “Okay, let’s analyze this complex problem, rather than pretend that this moral uncertainty is real.” I am obligated to provide for my family. I go to work and I earn an income, and the income that I earn is greater than my present cost of living. The prudent thing to do is to put that surplus to good use, because it is itself an asset. And in this capitalistic society that I live in, I don’t know if my income is going to continue. So my surplus may be only a surplus today, and it may be necessary tomorrow. So I need to make use of this surplus money as an asset, as if someone gave me a piece of land. I need to make good use of this asset.
And when I look at our modern society, I see that if I take this money and put it into this account in this institution, it will be safe there. And the institution, because it’s going to actually use that money, will reward me by paying a certain percentage of interest that covers the cost of inflation, hopefully, and also adds to my savings. So that’s a good use of this asset.
And there’s no reason to think that money in modern society is any different than land. If someone gave me ten acres of land and I had no present use for it, I could lease it out to someone else to farm. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to leave it completely neglected and cause its value to decrease because I had some moral qualm about making profitable use of it. And money, again, in modern society, is an asset. So the circumstances are different. The time is different. The economy is different. The actual activity, and the intention of the activity, is different. And therefore the condemnations from different circumstances don’t necessarily apply to our circumstances.
With respect to my family, I have an obligation to provide—not just today, but for the next thirty, forty, fifty years. And therefore, if there is surplus today, I need to take care of it, because there may be a deficit in the future. That’s how the society works. So I need to thank God for the surplus and protect it. I need to keep it. And the mechanism for doing so, with respect to the state, is one of obedience. I am obeying the laws. I am not disobeying the laws. I am not stealing. In my relationship as a subject to the state, I am practicing obedience.
So when I analyze this behavior—when I analyze this complex moral dilemma in its parts—there’s no dilemma. And that, I think, is how these issues of uncertainty of conscience need to be solved.
Closing
I’ve rambled too far at this point. I’m actually walking in the dark right now—you can probably hear the crickets behind me—so I’m going to wrap it up. I think we’ve addressed the issue, though. I could go on, because I’m thinking of more examples and passages from Scripture or literature. But I think that we’ve addressed the issue, and we’ve either solved this dilemma or we’ve identified some new questions that need to be investigated. And that’s really the point of these talks.
So I hope that’s helpful. I’d love to continue this with follow-up questions, or any other related topics you’d like to get into next. So please send me an email, or comment on the talk if it’s posted on YouTube. Send me any questions you have, and we’ll continue the discussion, either with future talks or just in private discussion. If you’d like to write to me, you can send it to mail@classicalliberalarts.com, and that’ll get to me privately.
I hope that’s helpful. Let’s continue thinking through these things, because I know these issues are important. I’ve struggled with these issues myself, but I do think there’s a solution for that uncertainty that we need to find our way out of. God bless.
Mr. William C. Michael, OP
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy