43
3
What Are My Core
Obligations?
If the police are about to take you to the operating room,
there is something you can say, clearly and simply, that should
change their minds and save your life. Tell them bluntly,
“Killing me would be wrong. I am a human being, and you
can’t do this to me.” That statement should stop the police in
their tracks.
But what makes it so compelling? The answer is that it
points to a fundamental principle—that it is wrong to directly
take the life of an innocent human being—and it tells the
police they have a duty to follow this principle. You are saying
that, simply because you are a human being, the police have
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Managing in the Gray
44
duties to you. And, because they are human beings, they can’t
violate these duties.
Notice that this statement doesn’t say anything about cal-
culating the net, net consequences. While it doesn’t explic-
itly reject the first question, it does start fresh, and gives us
an entirely new perspective on making hard decisions. This
perspective is the second important voice in the great con-
versation, and the question it highlights is the second crucial
question. The basic idea is that, to get really hard decisions
right, you have to understand your basic duties as a human
being. Hence, when you are trying to resolve a gray area
problem, you have to develop an answer—for yourself—to
the question of what your core human obligations require
you to do and not do in the situation you face.
The organ transplant situation was a thought experiment, so
consider for a moment what the perspective of basic human obli-
gations shows us about one of the most important decisions in
modern history. The United States fought the first nuclear war
when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945. Two hundred thousand people died, some instantly and
some after suffering burns, trauma, and radiation. Several days
after the second bomb was dropped, President Truman told his
secretary of war that he was having terrible headaches. When
the secretary asked if the president was speaking literally or fig-
uratively, Truman replied, “Both.” He said he couldn’t stand
the thought of “killing all those children.”
1
Then the president
gave an order that no more atomic bombs could be used in the
Pacific without his explicit approval.
Why did President Truman give this order and why was
he having terrible headaches? Truman had fought in the
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What Are My Core Obligations?
45
trenches of Europe during World War I. He knew what the
Allied soldiers and their families were suffering as the war in
Asia ground on. He badly wanted to bring the long, devastat-
ing war to an end. But Truman also knew that thousands of
children—utterly innocent infants and toddlers—had died
in the atomic devastation. And he knew that this was wrong.
These children were innocent, and killing innocent people
for larger geopolitical agendas is wrong. In fact, we now view
some versions of this logic as terrorism.
When President Truman said he couldn’t stand the thought
of killing children, he wasn’t reporting his assessment of net,
net consequences. He was thinking about a basic human
duty and reacting, not just as president, but as a human
being. Truman knew that killing innocent children was
wrong, pure and simple, and didn’t want to violate this basic
human duty. But why did he think and feel this way? Why
did Truman believe that adhering to this duty was the right
way to make a momentous wartime decision—a decision
that would be central to his legacy, as a president and as a
person? And what does this way of thinking show us about
the best way to make gray area decisions?
Our Core Human Obligations
Like all of the five questions, the second question works
like a laser. It takes a wide range of complex, long- standing,
fundamental ideas—about what counts as a good life, a
good community, and a good decision—and concentrates
them intensely and powerfully. The question distills and
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Managing in the Gray
46
compresses religious insights, basic tenets of political philos-
ophy, important ideas in evolutionary theory, as well as our
everyday, instinctive reactions to pain, suffering, and death.
The short question—What are my core obligations?—
focus es on a single, crucial humanist theme: that we have basic
duties to each other simply because we are human beings. In
other words, there is something profoundly important about our
common human nature that creates, immediately and directly,
certain fundamental obligations that we all owe to each other.
2
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant expressed this
idea beautifully. “Two things awe me most,” he wrote, “the
starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”
3
The second
voice in the great conversation says, in effect, that we have basic
moral obligations that are as real as the sky above us. Meeting
these obligations is the best way to make a good decision and
live a good life. That is, of course, a strong and controversial
claim, and it is easy to think of reasons to dispute it. So why
have some of the most brilliant minds and most compassionate
hearts believed that this way of thinking was a profound truth?
The clearest and oldest answer to this question appears in
the great religious traditions. Islam, Judaism, Christianity,
and Hinduism all teach that human beings are creatures of
a special kind.
4
Some religions say we have souls or divine
sparks; others teach that we are partly flesh and partly eternal
spirit or the handiwork of a creator. Human beings, in other
words, aren’t just another rung on the ladder of evolution.
For example, a basic principle of Catholic social teaching
over the centuries is, “Being in the image of God, the human
individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just
something, but someone.”
5
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What Are My Core Obligations?
47
It is only a short step from these religious views to thinking
that we have strong, binding duties to each other— regardless
of who we are, where we live, or the political system of our
society. The Eastern traditions are very explicit about this.
*
For example, according to Confucius, all human beings have
compelling duties to their families, their communities, and
their governments. In the Western tradition, the ancient
Greeks and Romans held similar views. In Cicero’s classic
essay “On Duties,” he argues that each of us is bound by duties
that originate in our human nature and the communities
that surround us.
6
Seneca, another important Roman states-
man and philosopher, wrote succinctly, “Man is a sacred
thing for man.”
7
Even today, in the contemporary Western world, with
its strong emphasis on individual rights, we continue to live
in a world of duties. Many of these come with our roles in
society: we have duties as parents, as children, as citizens, as
employees, and as professionals. Even the people who are pre-
occupied with asserting their rights cannot escape the world
*This book, at several points, makes a rough distinction between
Western and Eastern ways of thinking and social practices. This is
intended only to highlight broadly divergent tendencies. In reality, of
course, neither the “West” nor the “East” was monolithic. Moreover, they
had important elements in common, and the boundaries between them
were blurred by extensive cross-fertilization of ideas. For example, the
revival of interest in Aristotle during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
resulted from the extensive commentaries on his work by the Muslim
philosopher Ibn Rushd, known also as Averroes. See Roger Arnaldez,
Averroes: a Rationalist in Islam (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2000).
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