Seven old ideas, in plain words. Each one comes with a line from a philosopher who thought it through, and one thing it asks of us today.
Truth is saying what is so. Not what helps. Not what soothes. What is so.
Telling it costs something. A record that bends to comfort fails the next person who reads it.
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.
Say what you saw. Write it down as it happened. Correct it when you learn more.
Every act lands on someone. The person it lands on is owed an answer: what was done, and why.
An answer is not a favour. It is a debt, and no one else can pay it for us.
Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability.
When someone asks what happened, answer. In full, in writing, in time.
Help works best from whoever is closest. A neighbour on the stairs reaches a person minutes before any service can.
Being near is a kind of power. Power to help is a reason to help.
If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
If you are close and able, go. Do not wait to be the right person. You are the near one.
We judge choices from where we stand. Most choices are made from somewhere else: less time, less money, less help, more fear.
Seeing from another's place means living, for a while, inside their limits.
By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.
Will you live my constraints for a day? You can say no. You can't say no forever.
A question to ask, and to be askedBefore you judge a choice, stand where it was made.
A fair rule is one you accept before you know where you will sit.
Rawls asks us to choose the rules of a society without knowing our own place in it: rich or poor, strong or sick, believed or doubted.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
Make the rule you would accept from the worst seat in the room.
Some things have a price. A person does not. A person has worth that nothing can stand in for.
Dignity holds when it is least convenient: when a person is tired, poor, angry or wrong.
In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity.
Never treat a person as a means. Not a number, not a cost, not a problem to close.
Each person counts once. No title, fortune or office makes one voice count twice.
What people use, people should own, and each owner speaks with the same weight.
Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.
Give each person one voice. Then listen to every one.
These seven shape Omxus, an emergency network owned by the people who use it. Help from the nearest, answers to the affected, one voice each.
Ideals