justin-welbyBeing "in the world but not of it" looks different to different people. For the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, this reality includes the "enormous" complexity of investing in immorally aligned businesses.

Recently, the Church of England has come under scrutiny for its financial policies, which permit investment in groups that derive up to 25% of their profits from pornography, gambling, and pay-day lending. The funds are controlled by a group of managers, and the Archbishop is (he emphatically notes) not really in charge of where the money ends up.

Despite the fact that investing really is an increasingly complicated endeavor, the intimation that it's too complicated to do well is, I think, pretty weak. There's a difference between scientific certainty about the nature of one's holdings—i.e., knowing with total accuracy that they are ethically derived—and moral certainty, or a probable likelihood based on the best information possible. The very idea of setting up thresholds for ethical tolerance is contrary to the idea of morally responsible investing, since it displaces the role of moral certainty from its proper function to a mere arbiter of an already corrupted standard.

If Archbishop Welby really believes that ethical investing is complex because one must constantly be reassessing and negotiating one's own moral risks and limits, all potential outcomes seem dim. On the other hand, if complexity is taken as part and parcel of establishing sound moral judgment in the first place, prospects will brighten.

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.