Moral Debt: Examples from Life and Literature

What is a moral duty, in principle, is known to each of us. However, not everyone thinks about what exactly carries the concept of moral duty. First of all, this is not just a commitment to someone, but a duty to oneself - the ability to do things by sacrificing one's own good. In fact, a moral duty is a manifestation of strength and character. A person lacking in moral qualities is not able to regret, empathize, compassion.

Moral debt

If we consider this concept extensively, then it can be divided into two parts - a debt to the environment in which a person is located, and a debt to the community. However, these two components can also be divided into parts. The duty to relatives includes also such concept, as own, or personal, benefit. Debt before society is usually seen as an obligation to a certain part of the social group. In life, there are often situations where you have to choose between duty and conscience, sometimes these concepts are fundamentally contrary to the current situation. It is easy to identify the moral duty - examples from life are numerous: when a person is attacked and faced with a choice - to kill for the sake of protection or not to cross the moral line "Do not kill", obeying current circumstances. It is not easy to make the right choice when the instinct of self-preservation drowns out all other feelings.

The mistake is ... life?

Unfortunately, life often makes its own adjustments, forcing a person to struggle with conflicting feelings. Often, the situation develops in this way, when you have to choose between law and conscience. Most often, politicians and the military have to make this choice. By adopting a new law that will bring limited benefits to ordinary people, but the effectiveness of a particular caste, or by shooting at a person, because it is so necessary-such was the order-in both cases a person fulfills his moral duty, forgetting for a time about the promises of a conscience disturbing the soul. And this despite the fact that, as in the basis of the social order, and in the legislative framework, the main message remains the call "Do no harm". So it turns out that one can judge just how correctly a person acted in a particular situation after a certain time has elapsed.

How it happens

Examples of moral duty are numerous. Among the usual television news, a call was made to help a person who got into a traffic accident and died in a hospital due to lack of blood for transfusion. How many times a week do we hear about such things? Do we see them on the pages of newspapers? It has become habitual for a long time already. But in just half an hour more than three hundred people visited the hospital, who, without knowing the injured person, came to give the person a chance to survive. But the most interesting is that most of them, if not everyone, when communicating with the press or other interested people will not boast of their actions, but, embarrassed and stumbling, will assure that they have not done anything unusual or heroic. This is an unselfish moral duty from life, where there is absolutely no place for personal gain.

How is he an internal human controller?

Analyzing various situations, one can come to the conclusion that the main internal human controllers are conscience and moral duty. Examples of fulfilling a moral duty from life are endless. You can remember how hopelessly sick people agreed to give healthy organs to other patients, how people threw themselves in winter in ice water to save the fallen under the ice, and it does not matter whether it's a man or an animal.

As during the terrorist acts, teachers hid children, themselves dying from bullets of invaders. Beslan (school seizure), Volgograd (an explosion at a railway station), explosions in trains and the seizure of aircraft, military soldiers falling on a grenade to save their colleagues - in each of these real situations there were people who fulfilled their moral duty. Unfortunately, in modern society there are enough people to whom moral principles are not only unknown, but also alien.

Sung by poets

Poets of different generations have been praised for fulfilling a moral duty. From literature, you can give many examples, starting with works written centuries ago. The seventeenth century - J. Racine, "Phaedra and Hippolytus". The stepmother in love with her stepson is trying with all her might to win his favor, but is refused. The offended woman watered the young man with mud, leading him to suicide, since the young man's moral duty did not allow him to enter into a relationship with his father's wife. The nineteenth century - N. Leskov, "The Man on the Clock." The protagonist is torn between two desires - to help a person drowning in an ice hole, or to remain on duty, as required by his military duty. As a result, the moral side of the soldier outweighs, for which he is subsequently punished with cruel flogging.

How did the moral postulates change?

Over time, the notion of morality has changed dramatically. Examples of moral duty can be considered from ancient times, when the talion law operated. It consisted in the fact that people could take revenge for the crime as cruelly as it was powerful. However, such a right could only be applied to people from another community.

Then the golden rule of morality came into use - to behave with people as you want, so that they acted with you in return. Today, we increasingly come to the fact that morality is a reluctance to bring pain to other people, this is opposition to any evil, this is a complete renunciation of depravity and omnipresent virtue. Each of us must be sure that he is doing the right thing (not as comfortable with himself, but correctly with respect to others) and completely unselfishly.

People and morality

Fulfillment of moral duty (from the literature we cited the examples above) often seems a little cloudy, imbued with heroism and patriotism. However, this is not the case. The fact is that people who are able to develop this quality, often prefer to stay in the shadows, not PR themselves in the pages of newspapers and not flickering in television and television programs. We can live for years with a person who once saved the life of another, and not know about it.

This is another indispensable quality - modesty. After all, being proud of having helped another, a person, in fact, revives a sense of pride, and in morality of such parties should not be. And morality should live in your own heart, and not be dictated by someone from outside. It is very easy to fall under the conviction of an interested person in this, afterwards having committed many fatal errors. It is important to know that morality is a whole system of mutual relations, built on sincere feelings and disinterested impulses.