What We Owe Each Other
To a casual observer, I’m a fairly typical middle-aged, Xennial, middle-class, cis, hetero, gender-conforming white guy living in the middle of suburbia. I work in a large corporate structure as a digital project manager. My hobbies include running, listening to podcasts while I run, and going to trivia night at the local brewery where I start anecdotes with, “I was listening to a podcast…”
See me out on a run in a sleeveless shirt, however, and you might notice the tattoo that reads “Angel 1979-1998”. Walk through my home and you might be aware that among the photos of my siblings, my wife’s family, and our pets, you won’t find any of my parents. And if that trivia night conversation turns to a common childhood experience, I’ll either not be able to relate or share some twisted version from my own past that no one quite knows how to respond to.
And that’s when the real questions begin. Not just who I am, but what gives a person with that kind of history the right to talk about building a moral life?
I had to live it. I had to earn it.
And my ledger? It’s got debts. But here’s the thing. No one accrues debts in isolation. After all, if you owe nothing if there is no one to owe.
I started out being owed. Bog standard bad childhood. Parents had a bad divorce. Dad got me and my twin sister. Told us that mom “left you”.
Cue the rest. Poverty, instability, domestic violence. Trauma. My father, committing active harms. A world that didn’t intervene, committing the evil of indifference.
Nineteen years of that. But along the way there were those that were not indifferent. Those earning their credits, making investments with no idea what the return would be. Neighbors. coaches. Mentors. People who chose to witness.
But the only thing I chose to witness were those harms done to me. By nineteen I was angry. Angry at the now dead father who left so many scars. Angry at the mother who left. Angry at the systems that prevented me from taking the future I knew I had. The future I was owed for the cost of my childhood, my innocence, my happiness, my wholeness, I was owed a debt.
And then there was the greatest harm of all of them. My twin sister died when we were nineteen. That was hard. It’s still hard. But that wasn’t the harm. Her brain aneurysm wasn’t anyone’s fault.
The harm was committed by me.
My twin sister… her name was Angel. Her name is Angel. A bit on the nose, I know. She suffered all of those harms I suffered as a kid. All those, and a few more. But she wasn’t meeting the world with anger, with a sense of what she was owed. She met it with joy, and strength, and a joie de vivre that makes people smile today, decades later. And she paid that forward to no one more than me.
She never stopped investing in me her love. I took her for granted. After all, what was more important than me? What else was there to witness?
The day after she died, our stepmother pulled me aside. “When I talked to Angel this week,” she said, “she was upset because you never asked her about what was happening in her life, you never gave her time to tell you anything. She said that she was worried you didn’t love her.”
I have been told for years that what my stepmother said wasn’t true, that my twin did not die wondering if I truly loved her. But that idea didn’t come from thin air. Of course I loved her. I had the intent covered. But actions matter, and words matter. And I gave her neither of those.
Even if there was only a fleeting moment when she thought that I didn’t love her, it was a result of my actions and words, harms I could no longer seek to atone for. The guilt I felt in that moment, the harm I had to then with for the rest of my life, that was the moment where my search for how to live a good life began.
Born from that search were questions.
“If there is an all-powerful, all seeing, all knowing god, how does evil exist?”
“What even are good and evil?”
“What do we owe each other in a world filled with harm?”
None of these popped fully formed into my head in that moment. But they began to take shape.
And for those of you picking up on the particular question, “What do we owe each other?” good. I am getting to that.
But first, let’s consider the idea that we do owe each other, or anyone, anything. Do we? I know plenty of people who would argue that they don’t. You know, they pulled their All-American Bootstraps™ and got everything on their own and nobody gave ‘em nuthin’.
Now you might be smirking at the strawman I’ve built here wearing red, white, and blue. But the truth of the American experience in 2025 is that there are things that a society could do for one another that we deny based on things like a “they don’t deserve it” and “I didn’t get anything, why should they.” The “they” here in question being some “other” that seems to not rise to the level of being human.
A closer to steelman argument I’ve been presented is not that we don’t owe anyone anything, but that what is owed is conditional. “Immediate Family” is the condition some draw. Others, “American Citizen”, or “Public Servant”. After all, one person cannot owe everybody everything. Limitations need to be set, reasonable limitations, but limitations nonetheless, on a single person’s capacity to care.
This is not unreasonable. No one can care about the eight billion people in the world in a meaningful way and concrete way. But we do live amongst one another and are deeply intertwined whether we choose to accept that fact or not.
Even if you have chosen to live as solitary a life as possible, have no family, and exist “off the grid” somewhere without another human for miles, you have been impacted by the decisions of other people. The location of isolation could only be chosen from the areas that other’s have chosen not to develop, or more actively have chosen to preserve. Every crumb of survivalist knowhow was derived from at least one source, be it a book or another human, and that knowledge was developed through the efforts of countless people. In a cost that was paid for in blood for many.
Using a generator for your electricity? It was built in a factory, designed to meet commercial specifications and minimum regulatory requirements, and unless it is powered by wood you chopped it is fueled by resources no single individual could acquire on their own from extraction to refinement to distribution.
Hunting for your food? Even if you made the bow yourself you did so based on a design that was iterated on for millennia before the first crop was planted. If you are growing your food it is more likely than not that every seed has come from a long line of human intervention to produce better and more resilient yields.
Ok, ok, point made. No man is an island. You may respond that can all be true, but none of it was asked for, none of it was done for you specifically, you didn’t choose to be in this world, and you can choose to take no more than what is required to exist. Your decisions impact no one.
But they do. In ways large and small, intentional and unintentional, every action we take, nay every thought we have, creates a ripple, no matter how small. And given a long enough time scale, even a ripple can become a tsunami.
Even if you live and die in absolute isolation, the resources you depend on for your life impact the world around you. Changing a local ecosystem, increasing carbon in the atmosphere. Your decisions, the story of yourself that you author, may be discovered by others and affect the way they interact with the world. We cannot extract ourselves until we draw our last and exist within the memory of others or the physical memory of the world we touch.
And since our actions, words, choices, and thoughts all have consequences, they carry with them responsibility. Whether we accept that or not, everything we do affects something. Or someone.
Building on that, we can then take a concept from a reasonably famous moral philosopher. He may have been known as Yeshua bar Yosef in his day (or not, we don’t have firsthand written records), but we know him in the as Jesus Christ. While he did have a more expansive message, his dictum for living in a world with others is encapsulated by the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
So here is what we have so far. A painstakingly pedantic examination of the possibility of an isolated life, and Jesus. But also, Buddha. And countless others, the golden rule is a consistent human maxim. Taking from these precepts, we have:
· No one lives in isolation
· What we do affects others, therefore,
· What other do affects us
· The golden rule, or law of reciprocity informs how we can live in this situation
o In the same way we would not want what others do to us things we don’t want
o In reciprocity it follows that we should not do to them what we wouldn’t want done for us.
o And we can hold the positive application as well, we should do for others what we would want done for us
· Coming all the way back to the question, at a minimum we owe each other not committing harms we wouldn’t want done to us, and it would be nice if people did things for us that we want, so maybe we should do things that they want, “Don’tcha know,” like a Midwestern mom might say.
Phew. Seems basic, but I think it needed to be addressed. We owe each other. So what do we owe?
This question has been tackled by philosophers for centuries. I’m not tilling new dirt here. T. M. Scanlon famously (well, famously for a moral philosopher) addressed this very question in his landmark essay titled,
Feel free to shout it from the back,
“What We Owe Each Other.”
He tackled this idea through a rigorous and academic framework, trying to establish the moral obligations we recognize as binding between people. And thus, Scanlonian contractualism.
What did he come up with? I’m going to preface this by saying you should read What We Owe Each Other, or at least watch all four seasons of The Good Place, a sitcom in which his ideas feature. Also, I make no claim to be any authority on contractualism. That said, I think it can summed up as the following.
· Core Thesis: An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement. This defines moral wrongness not by outcomes, but by whether the action can be justified to others based on principles they could not reasonably* reject. (*stick a pin in reasonably)
· A rejection is typically considered 'unreasonable' if the principle in question places an excessive or unfair burden on someone for the sake of a minor benefit to others. The entire system hinges on finding this balance.
Not pithy, but pithiness isn’t a virtue when dealing with morality. How about
· Morality is about living with others in ways that no one could reasonably reject, grounded in respect, justifiability, and the recognition of each person as a separate center of value.
Ok… better. Not a t-shirt slogan, but at least it could fit on the back. Digging a little bit deeper, I am fully in agreement with him on certain principles. Grounding morality in respect and the recognition of all people as valuable because they are valuable, spot on.
He also rejects utilitarianism, or “the ends justify the means” when attempting to maximize net good. Agreed. You cannot justify harming one person a lot just because it benefits many others a little.
Scanlon also clarifies what this moral framework is not. It is not what is legal. It is not what is best for you in isolation. It is not what is mandated by religion. It is only the principles cannot be reasonably rejected.
To sum up, Scanlon tells us that what we owe each other is what cannot be reasonably rejected. Again, it’s far more complex than that, but that is one sentence executive summary.
Awesome, Scanlon answered the question, he’s defined what we owe each other, and I seem to be in alignment with him. Why do I even need to find anything else? Just print it up on a business card for reference when I need to determine the moral principle that governs any ethically unclear interaction. Easy peasy.
Let’s test this. It’s early, I’ve stopped by Starbucks to pick up a coffee and breakfast sandwich on the way to work. I see a homeless man sitting outside. I have $100 in cash available in my pocket. Should I give it all to him?
He hasn’t asked me for money. He hasn’t engaged me at all. But I’ve seen him there before and sleeping in the park across the street. Let’s tackle this from Scanlon’s perspective.
The man has asked me for nothing. There is no personal interaction between us unless I initiate it. Can I justify walking by him and going about my day?
Let’s define this as a moral principle. I can pass a person in without offering him the money in my pocket and keep going about my day, I am not obligated to give this man anything. I don’t think a reasonable person would disagree.
But the question is, what do we owe each other? Or to put a finer point on it, what do I owe this man?
I can do nothing. No one would say that I am required, morally, to follow a principle of “Give the man all the money in your pocket”.
But looking at it from the perspective of my moral ledger, walking past the man does cause a harm. It is a harm of indifference. I see him. I cannot pretend that I don’t, even if I am the only who witnesses my indifference.
But I’m not the only one. He too is a witness. He witnesses me, pretending not to see him. He sees me, ignoring his dilemma. He doesn’t know what I could do. But he knows what I did do. Nothing.
But I know what I could do. I know I could easily part with the $100 in my pocket. I have a secure, well-paying job. I'll earn that $100 back in less than 2 hours of “work” that is just as likely to be me playing on my phone as it is doing what is listed in my job description. In even the tiniest of ways, by ignoring this man and his plight, I have eroded a small, but not inconsequential, amount of his dignity as a person. And I know that.
What do I owe this man?
The ledger records my indifference. I may have felt uncomfortable walking by. But choosing indifference this time makes it easier to ignore my discomfort next time. And there will be a next time.
Another person may be going into the Starbucks, like me, stopping on their way into the office for a quick bite and coffee. We don’t acknowledge each other either. But my act of kindness could have provoked that person. Prompted them to ask what they could do. Nudged them in a small way to a different path.
“That’s overwhelming!” I hear you saying. “No one is going to consider all of that, all of the time. People have enough on their plates just trying to live their lives! Scanlon has it right, I have no obligation, I can keep walking so I don’t miss the 9:00am all hands. This is ridiculous.”
When I was 19, I was in the army. I graduated from basic training a few months before Angel passed. I called her every week from my new duty station. In a twenty-minute conversation I would tell her all of the things I was doing.
I bought a car. I made new friends. I shot guns and threw grenades. I marched and I ran. And I talked on and on about everything. Everything I was doing. And never asked about what was happening in Angel’s life.
I think a rational person could reasonably reject a moral principle of, “you must ask your sibling about their life when you speak with them.” They might say that I should do so, but it is not a moral obligation. After all, I had so many new things happening in my life. And I was calling her every week. I could have been better about asking about her, but that’s a not a moral flaw.
What she wasn’t telling me, because I wasn’t asking, was that she was experiencing headaches. And blackouts. And had gone to have an MRI.
And in the final week of her life, as she anxiously awaited the results, she questioned if I even cared. She questioned if she was loved by the one person she’d been with from birth. From before birth. And before she died, I’d done nothing to remove her uncertainty. And after she died… I could never change it.
What does keeping a moral ledger require of us? How does it answer the question, “What do we owe each other?”
We owe each other witnessing. To see each other as people, to see how what we do, and what we don’t, affects one another. To remember, and to learn.
Ok, remember. Every little thing? Every slight, real or perceived? Exhausting. How does the ledger tell us how to do that? And what does it matter to the homeless guy at Starbucks?
In every choice we make, we make ripples. The ledger asks that we witness the ripples. And when those choices come, we apply what we’ve learned. We understand what we can do. But importantly we also know what we can’t.
We use empathy to understand how our choices impact others. We use reason to understand what we can and can’t do.
What have I witnessed? To the good, I’ve witnessed others, well, witnessing me. In my need as a teenager dealing with trauma and anger. There were those who helped. Who went out of their way to do so. Who opened their wallets, and homes, and lives to me. Unprompted. And even the smallest acts had then, and continue to have now, tremendous impact.
For the man at Starbucks, Scanlon’s contractualism tells me someone could reasonably reject a principle that requires that I give him the money in my pocket. The ledger agrees that I am not obligated to do anything either, but logs that a harm has been committed.
Using empathy, I know what a random act of kindness can do. I know that I can confer on him human dignity. I can tell him he is seen. That he is not forgotten.
Using reason, I know that the $100 means little to me but could mean a disproportionate amount to him. I know that I have no obligation, but I also know the potential good I could do far outweighs the small harm I would record.
What does he owe me? Nothing. Not gratitude. Not an obligation to spend the money wisely. He doesn’t even need accept it.
What do I owe this man? I owe him everything.
This is not atonement for Angel. This is not sainthood, or virtue signaling. This is a lifetime of learning, of choosing to understand how my ripples affect the world. And building a moral framework. Not by studying the canon, but by having to answer these questions every day, in the world at large. Not by dealing with a world how I think it should be but by taking the world as it is. This is reckoning with the only thing I can control. Myself. This is Architectural Humanism.
I walk by the man, towards the door to the Starbucks. It’s quiet, there’s no one else around but the workers inside, and they are busy doing their jobs, I don’t attract their interest before I cross the threshold.
The bell on the Starbucks door is just a few feet away. But the ledger is open in my mind, the harm of my indifference already recorded. I stop.
A dozen rationalizations offer themselves up. The risks are obvious, he might spend it in ways that harm him. Local business owners would call it enabling. Scanlon's framework assures me I have no binding obligation.
But the ledger demands a different accounting. I know the profound impact of an unexpected kindness. I know that this man is a person, not a problem. And I know that for me, this money is trivial, while for him, it might be transformative. The potential good vastly outweighs the certain harm of my indifference.
I turn back. He watches me, and I pull out my wallet, the soft bills feeling insignificant in my hand. I hold them out. I give him the money. $100. I smile and walk away.
He looks at it, counts it, jumps to his feet, his eyes widening as he understands. He scrambles to his feet, protesting, "No, man, I can't take this."
"It's yours," I say.
He's stammering his thanks, already asking what he can do for me in return.
"You don’t need to worry about it. You don’t need to do anything," I tell him. "But if you can, remember this and do a kindness for someone else when he can.”
There is no debt. Only a credit to good. The ledger witnesses and records.
If you find this compelling, if you’ve ever walked past someone and wondered what it meant to see them, or if you've asked what your grief and guilt are supposed to build, I hope you’ll stay with me.
This is part of a series on Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism, a moral philosophy grounded in presence, witnessing, and the responsibility we carry for our impact.
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Next up: “You owe me nothing. I owe you everything.”