Wonderful essay.

Personally I confess to quite serious disobedience to conscience and this is a great wake up call.

The author reminds me of CS Lewis "Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind". We cede real liberty for disintegrating license when we ignore the 'still small voice' of our all wise and loving Creator.

In our personal lives we know it leads to the slavery to vice and collectively to some or other dictatorship. Today it is the 'Tyranny of Liberalism' [James Kalb]

Recent C20th regimes resorted to brutal violence when threatened with the question "why should they rule?", today Power is careful to make no martyrs but the end is the same.

For those walking around today, the stuff of history tomorrow, outlawing truth is by bureaucratic enforcement - speech codes, media enquiries, and human rights heresy trials. Our inherited hard won human rights to conscience, religion, and free speech are threats to those who claim for themselves the authority to rule, which is why the political class find the undermining of those rights, like media enquiries so bewitchingly in the national interest.

Freedom to our rulers really does substantively mean we should be free only to want what the regime wants. All else is labelled divisive and a threat to civil peace. Michael Smith the radio presenter is another recent example - hounded out of public life for speaking the truth.

Just as God is hidden in plain sight in conscience, in the Eucharist, in the Word proclaimed in churches on our street corners. So is the same banal, mechanical and inexorable evil hidden in plain sight. We have only two choices.

Something wicked is making itself known in the silent bureaucratic and 'lawful' spilling of the blood of innocent babies by the 50 million world wide every year.

The author gives us the terrible warning - allow the divine spark of conscience to dim, the very power to tell truth from falsehood - our essential humanity - and we have strategically already lost.

Mishka Góra,

Welcome to our peace zone.

I don't find the switch from the general to the particular in this article at all convincing.

To describe war as putting "a spotlight on the things that fundamentally matter" seems to ignore the vital aspect that war itself is inherently unjustifiable.

Once you have cleared that mental hurdle, of course any "moral" decisions will become acutely simplified. In fact, the absence of moral judgments - in particular the licence to take the lives of others with impunity - is the very foundation stone of war itself. It is therefore mere wordplay to parallel the absence of "philosophical abstraction, equivocation, or neutrality" under war conditions, with the far more complex issues faced by a society that does not have a metaphorical gun at its head.

The irony of Ms Gora's position arrives with a rush. Alluding to the individual decisions that upset her, she concludes:

"Such failure to think things through and evaluate right and wrong is a fertile ground for totalitarianism."

Newsflash, Ms Gora. War is also fertile ground for totalitarianism. Holding it up as a prism through which to view the clarity of moral positions adopted under its influence is a nonsense.

While it is always very comforting to think in terms of absolutes, comparing the decisions made by citizens within a peacetime society unfavourably against atrocities committed under the moral "umbrella" of war, seems to me just a step too far.

Thank you Mishka for a thoughtful and challenging article. Pericles, I think your reading of the article may have been too literal and you have therefore missed the nuances of Mishka's comparison of her responses to her experience of wartime compared to her responses to the individual issues that offend her conscience.

The article should be read by our political representatives, their apparatchiki and the members of political parties as it provides a timely reminder of the fate that awaits people when group thinking is allowed to override personal conscience.

"The official line, as far as I can tell, is that these veterans weren't exposed to sufficient radiation."

That sounds quite reasonable to me. In order to show entitlement to special treatment it should be necessary to show that you have special needs. If the Maralinga veterans can't do that, then there's no need to treat them differently to anybody else.

It's a shame that your new conscience-driven world order doesn't have room for evidence and logic, but that seems to be a problem with all ideologically-driven manifestos, whether they come from religion or politics.

Martin Ibn Warriq's comment about the "still small voice" concerns me.

Conscience is developed through the granting and witholding of love in childhood and can be a very poor guide to adult behaviour. Conscience is induced by emotional stress much the same way most religions use fear and promise.

Instead ethical behaviour, or rather an ethicaal platform to guide future behaviour, will grow out of clear thinking applied to each particular issue an individual has to confront.

That is the beauty of the ethics classes now operating in NSW for those young students who have been opted out of religious instruction (dogma). These students now give thought to situations which are created and designed to make them think about issues. Thoy have to consider one another's opinion and, if they ar able, defend their own position or change their view.

The ability to think and discern once developed over about 5o hours or so of such discussion will be an advantage to them, their future partners and offspring virtually for ever. Socrates had the right approach, live an examined life.