May 26 Tue
Do I have “obligations” in my life?
Before becoming Pope, John Paul II wrote about one’s personal experience of obligation. We all feel “obliged” at some point in life to someone or something. What significance, what meaning, does that experience have?
We all realize that there are things we should do and things we should not. Additionally, some of the things we should do, we don't, while those we shouldn't do, we do.
This is so because man is not the author of moral norms. If that were true, Wojtyła argues, man could dismiss his self-imposed rules.
But we also have the experience that our sense of OBLIGATION endures even when we engage in (vain) self-dispensation. That suggests we are not the source of those moral norms or the sense of obligation flowing from them.
The sense of obligation, he observes, is not a time- and culture-conditioned phenomenon unique to some people. Any honest person must admit that all human beings at some point realize “I ought to do that,” even when they really don’t want to, even when they confess that they cannot avoid it.
The sense of an obligation not created by me challenges all claims of “rights” to “define meaning, the universe, and human life.” It therefore calls into question every assumption of self-made morality, “autonomous ethics,” or subjective “self-definition.”
A deeper reckoning of this would save us from the laws and cultural expectations that flow from those slogans. It is a matter of examining a basic and common experience: “I ought.”
The nagging persistence of the sense of “obligation,” despite our attempts to talk ourselves out of it, leads to another experience: RESPONSIBILITY. If, in good faith, I find I really can’t rationalize that obligation away, and I still feel accountable to its demands, it means I have a responsibility towards it.
It's a responsibility not of my making because—like the obligation—if it really were just my own doing, I could get rid of it. But I can't.
I sense that responsibility comes not from me but from the obligation, and that it keeps me accountable.
Responsibility, then, is not just a self-assumed yoke, the mark of the morally “mature” person. Even when I don’t accept them, I realize there are “obligations” that hold me accountable. Responsibility, then, is not just a matter of my choice.
But what is the value of guilt? Contrary to current assumptions, “guilt can be good.” That’s not to say it’s good if it’s paralyzing or obsessive, but not every manifestation of guilt is bad.
Failing my responsibility by betraying my obligation reveals an accountability I have to the good, independent of my preferences.
In traditional Catholic terms, it is the CONSCIENCE, a source of moral guidance before we act and of judgment after we act. Conscience is a healthy sense of recognition of failings for which I bear an obligation. It is healthy because it acknowledges that first principles lie outside my sovereign will: “good is to be done, and evil avoided.”