Yes and No
In the twelfth century, Peter Abelard wrote a strange little book called Sic et Non, Yes and No. It did not tell readers what to believe. Instead, it placed authoritative Christian texts side by side that flatly contradicted each other. One Church Father said yes. Another said no. Both were respected. Both were orthodox. Abelard offered no resolution. His point was not to solve the contradiction but to force the reader to think.
What made this radical was not disagreement itself. Disagreement had always existed. What shocked people was the refusal to harmonize it. Abelard quietly implied that moral and theological certainty was not handed down fully formed. It had to be worked out in the mind and conscience of the individual. That was dangerous. It shifted responsibility away from authority and onto the person reading.
We live surrounded by moral advice. Not timid advice, but confident, well-argued, well-marketed advice. Eat this, do not eat that. Speak up, stay silent. Obey the rules, resist the system. Care deeply, detach for your own mental health. Be authentic, be strategic. For almost every moral claim, there is an equally serious thinker arguing the opposite with the same calm authority.
This is not confusion caused by ignorance. It is confusion produced by abundance.
Take responsibility: One moral tradition tells you that maturity means taking responsibility even for outcomes you did not directly cause. Another argues that responsibility without agency is moral coercion. Both positions have evidence. Both sound humane. You must still choose.
Take truth-telling: Some philosophers treat truth as sacred, insisting that lies corrode both the speaker and society. Others remind you that unfiltered honesty can become cruelty, that truth without timing can destroy more than it heals. Again, yes and no.
Even violence fractures under scrutiny. Pacifists argue that violence always multiplies suffering. Realists point out that refusing violence can enable greater evil. History supports both. Philosophy supports both. Reality does not wait for consensus.
What Abelard exposed in theology confronts us now in everyday ethics. Authorities contradict one another not because they are foolish or corrupt, but because reality itself is layered. Moral life is not a system of equations. It is terrain.
Modern culture pretends otherwise. It wants ethics to function like traffic signs. Clear, universal, enforceable. This feels safe, but it is false. Ethics works more like navigation in fog. You move slowly, attentively, knowing that the same rule that saves you in one moment may ruin you in the next.
The mistake of our time is not disagreement. It is the attempt to eliminate it. When institutions insist on moral certainty, they stop teaching judgment and start enforcing alignment. When individuals demand perfect consistency, they become brittle. Life breaks them.
A serious ethics for the present would look less like commandments and more like case files. Here is a situation. Here are the arguments for yes. Here are the arguments for no. Here is what happens if you choose either. Now choose, and accept that you will carry the cost.
That final step is what we try hardest to avoid.
We want moral purity without consequence. We want to say the right thing without hurting anyone. We want to do good without becoming responsible for the fallout. But ethics without cost is not ethics. It is posture.
The uncomfortable truth is that maturity does not resolve contradictions. It learns to live inside them without outsourcing responsibility to slogans, tribes, or systems. You cannot hide behind Kant, nor behind Nietzsche, nor behind compassion, nor behind realism. At some point, it is your call.
Yes and no remain unresolved, not because we lack better theories, but because human life itself is unresolved. Ethics is not about finding the correct answer once and for all. It is about staying awake while choosing.
That may be less comforting than certainty. But it is more honest.