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To set aside the matter of consent, consider the responsibility of children to their parents. Suppose two aging parents are in need of care; one is my mother, and the other is somebody else’s mother. Most people would agree that, while it might be admirable if I could care for both, I have a special responsibility to look after my mother. In this case, it’s not clear that consent can explain why this is so. I didn’t choose my parents; I didn’t even choose to have parents.

It might be argued that the moral responsibility to care for my mother derives from the fact that she looked after me when I was young. Because she raised me and cared for me, I have an obligation to repay the benefit. By accepting the benefits she conferred on me, I implicitly consented to pay her back when she was in need. Some may find this calculus of consent and reciprocal benefit too cold to account for familial obligations. But suppose you accept it. What would you say of a person whose parent was neglectful or indifferent? Would you say that the quality of the child-rearing determines the degree to which the son or daughter is responsible to help the parent in his or her time of need? Insofar as children are obligated to help even bad parents, the moral claim may exceed the liberal ethic of reciprocity and consent.

French resistance

Let’s move from the family to communal obligations. During World War II, members of the French resistance piloted bombing runs over Nazi-occupied France. Although they aimed at factories and other military targets, they were not able to avoid civilian casualties. One day, a bomber pilot receives his orders and finds that his target is his home village. (The story may be apocryphal, but it raises an intriguing moral question.) He asks to be excused from the mission. He agrees that bombing this village is as necessary to the goal of liberating France as was the mission he carried out yesterday, and he knows that if he doesn’t do it, someone else will. But he demurs on the grounds that he can’t be the one to bomb and possibly kill some of his people, his fellow villagers. Even in a just cause, for him to carry out the bombing, he thinks, would be a special moral wrong.

What do you make of the pilot’s stance? Do you admire it or consider it a form of weakness? Put aside the broader question of how many civilian casualties are justified in the cause of liberating France. The pilot was not questioning the necessity of the mission or the number of lives that would be lost. His point was that he could not be the one to take these particular lives. Is the pilot’s reluctance mere squeamishness, or does it reflect something of moral importance? If we admire the pilot, it must be because we see in his stance a recognition of his encumbered identity as a member of his village, and we admire the character his reluctance reflects.

Rescuing Ethiopian Jews

In the early 1980s, a famine in Ethiopia drove some four hundred thousand refugees into neighboring Sudan, where they languished in refugee camps. In 1984, the Israeli government undertook a covert airlift called Operation Moses to rescue Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas, and bring them to Israel.45 Some seven thousand Ethiopian Jews were rescued before the plan was halted, after Arab governments pressured Sudan not to cooperate with Israel in the evacuation. Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister at the time, said, “We shall not rest until all our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia come safely back home.”46 In 1991, when civil war and famine threatened the remaining Ethiopian Jews, Israel carried out an even bigger airlift, which brought fourteen thousand Falashas to Israel.47

Did Israel do the right thing to rescue the Ethiopian Jews? It is hard to see the airlift as other than heroic. The Falashas were in desperate circumstances, and they wanted to come to Israel. And Israel, as a Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust, was created to provide a homeland for Jews. But suppose someone posed the following