Not to avoid sin—that still required repentance—but to soften the consequences. Indulgences offered a way, however imperfect, to manage what came after death. The system became so entrenched that it helped provoke the Reformation. When Martin Luther pushed back, he wasn’t denying judgment—he was insisting it couldn’t be bought, outsourced, or reduced to a transaction.
Judgment, in other words, was personal. That is precisely what has changed.
Jersey’s Quiet Shift: From Responsibility to Process
In modern Jersey, no one sells indulgences.
But something more sophisticated has taken their place.
When serious administrative failures occur—whether in planning decisions, safeguarding breakdowns, or the long shadow of historic abuse cases—the public is often told that:
- procedures were followed
- systems were under pressure
- lessons will be learned
And yet, again and again, no individual appears to carry meaningful responsibility.
Consider the legacy of the Haut de la Garenne investigation. It exposed not just allegations of wrongdoing, but deep institutional failures—failures of oversight, of protection, of response. Reports were written. Structures were reviewed. The language of accountability was everywhere.
But accountability itself?
Much harder to find.
Or look at the findings of the Jersey Care Inquiry. It documented systemic failings over decades—failings that could not plausibly exist without decisions being made, warnings being missed, and responsibilities being neglected.
Yet the outcome followed a familiar pattern: institutional acknowledgment without proportionate individual consequence.
The New Indulgence: Diffused Responsibility
In the medieval world, people tried to manage judgment.
In Jersey’s modern administrative culture, judgment is often neutralised in a different way:
- Responsibility is spread so widely that it disappears
- Decisions are framed as collective, not personal
- Failures become “systemic,” and therefore—conveniently—no one’s fault
This is not accidental. It is structural.
The system protects itself by ensuring that no single point of moral accountability can be easily identified.
Where once a person stood before judgment, now a process absorbs it.
Public Law Without Consequence
On paper, public law offers safeguards:
- procedural fairness
- rationality
- legitimate expectation
In theory, these principles allow individuals to challenge unjust decisions.
In practice, they often do something more limited.
A decision may be quashed. A process may be criticised. A public body may be told to try again.
But the individual decision-maker?
Rarely touched.
The law corrects outcomes, but it seldom confronts the moral agency behind them.
And so a strange inversion occurs:
The system acknowledges error—but avoids blame.
Strategy One: Delay the Reckoning
At the same time, modern culture offers another escape route.
If judgment is tied to mortality, then perhaps mortality itself can be postponed. Longevity science, bioengineering, and the dream of radically extended life all suggest the same possibility: that death is not inevitable, merely unsolved.
It’s an old instinct in a new form.
If you cannot resolve the question of judgment—delay the moment when it must be faced.
Strategy Two: Deny the Standard
The more profound shift, however, is philosophical.
If there is no ultimate standard—no God, no final judge—then the entire concept of ultimate accountability dissolves. What remains is procedure, policy, and consensus.
But something doesn’t quite cooperate with this worldview.
People still feel outrage.
They still recognise injustice.
They still believe, instinctively, that some actions are not just unfortunate—but wrong.
The Problem of Conscience
This is where the system runs into difficulty.
Because conscience does what institutions increasingly avoid:
It assigns responsibility.
Not to a department. Not to a framework. But to a person.
And that only really makes sense if moral accountability is real—if it reflects something deeper than policy. Historically, that “something” was grounded in the idea of a creator, and a corresponding moral order.
Remove that foundation, and conscience becomes harder to explain—but no less persistent.
What Jersey Reveals
Jersey, in its smallness, makes this dynamic unusually visible.
- Institutions are close-knit
- Roles overlap
- Decisions have identifiable authors
And yet, even here, accountability can dissolve into structure.
If it can happen in a place where everyone is, in theory, visible—it can happen anywhere.
The Question We Are Avoiding
Medieval people feared judgment and tried to manage it.
Modern systems, including our own, often attempt something more ambitious:
- to diffuse it
- to delay it
- or to deny the framework in which it makes sense
But conscience remains.
And with it, an uncomfortable possibility:That accountability cannot ultimately be designed away.
So the question is no longer whether we believe in judgment.
It is whether our systems—legal, political, and cultural—are built to face it…or to ensure that, as far as possible, no one ever has to.
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