The Moral Compass: Finding Balance and Purpose in an Imperfect World

By Hardayal Singh

When Life Brings Us to Crossroads ...

Now and then, life brings us to a critical juncture where we must make tough decisions. However, the stakes are sometimes so high that our values and ethics take a back seat over convenience and instant benefit. Most decisions of convenience often lead to future regret and failure.

The Moral Compass delves deep into why humans behave in a certain manner under specific situations. It then goes into situations that hold a mirror to our lives, empathizing with the protagonists and laying bare their deepest fears, insecurities and motivations as they navigate the curveballs that life throws at them.

Drawing heavily from spirituality, philosophy, psychology and four decades of Hardayal Singh's experience at the helm of critical decision-making, the book will help you design your own moral compass and find balance and purpose in an imperfect world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9789354894534

Hardayal Singh

Hardayal Singh is the former chief commissioner of Income-tax, New Delhi. He has also served as ombudsman to the Income-tax department, Mumbai where he established an effective grievance redressal mechanism for taxpayers. Currently, he writes columns for Financial Express, Hindu Business Line and Economic Times.

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Introduction

TRY AND IMAGINE THE LOOK OF SHOCKED incomprehension on Yudhishthir’s face after he loses everything—his kingdom, his family and himself—in a rigged game of dice in the Mahabharata. It’s a man face to face with his karma, his world gone awry, symbolizing the quixotic human condition. In a more mundane, contemporary setting, many of the middle-class characters in Hardayal Singh’s book have a similar perplexed expression when they are up against a wall, wrestling with moral confusion, having to make difficult choices in their day-to-day lives. Not unlike the epic’s heroes, they try to do the right, the dharmic, thing but it isn’t easy. Whatever choice they make entails a terrible loss; yet, they must decide even when they don’t know what is the right choice; and even after making the ‘right’ decision, they realize they could have made a better one. The epic’s dice game is a metaphor for the fragile, lonely human life in an uncertain world.

Karma means both ‘action’ and the ‘consequences’ of that action. You can do the right thing, act according to dharma, in which case you might sleep well at night and reap the positive fruit of the action. Or do the wrong thing, act according to adharma, and reap its negative effects. The moral compass is dharma. The question that this book poses is: can one depend on dharma to protect one in this world? Can one trust it to give balance and purpose in a hazy imperfect world?

These Stories Hold a Mirror to Our Life

Hardayal Singh offers us seventeen absorbing stories, sketches based on real life, addressing the central problem of how to live our life in an examined way. Each deals with a moral situation or a moral emotion or a moral dilemma. The first two chapters offer a straightforward alternative between the paths of integrity and corruption. Chapter Six deals with a corrupt practice but its theme is more about ‘means’ versus ‘ends.’ Four of the chapters are set inside organizations, forcing its employees to confront the morality of hierarchy—what is right may or may not be what the boss wants. Two chapters tackle moral emotions—Chapter Four is about grief at the loss of a loved one; Chapter Five is about fear of an exam. The elusive virtue of humility is the subject of Chapters Eight and Nine.

The next two chapters go to the heart of the ethical life—Chapter Ten is a powerful story, offering a choice of revenge versus forgiveness, reminding us how Yudhishthir tries unsuccessfully to teach forgiveness to his queen, Draupadi, who insists on taking revenge on the Kauravas in the epic. Chapter Eleven is an inspiring character sketch of a benevolent life devoted to altruism and compassion; it hints at the moral ideal of reciprocal altruism, which evolutionary biologists believe is the origin of the human desire to do good—‘smile at the world and it will smile back at you.’ The last few chapters teach us some of the responsibilities of being human. Chapter Fourteen reminds us of the value of authenticity—be yourself and do not pay excessive attention to others. The penultimate chapter confronts the classic dilemma of a person who has to choose between doing the right thing versus the compassionate thing.

Taken together, the stories hold a mirror to our life, forcing us to confront the many ways in which we deceive ourselves. Yes, ours is an enigmatic, deficient world of imperfect human beings; yes, ours is a lonely and opaque situation. But that doesn’t mean we can cop out. The issues raised by the author draw upon religion, philosophy, psychology and, above all, his own life devoted to decision-making over four decades, of which one decade was at the top of an organization. He has chosen the right method by employing stories to illustrate life lessons—it is the best way to discover ethical behaviour. For centuries, Indians have been learning how to live their lives from stories in the epics, the Puranas and the kathas, making India one of the world’s richest storytelling cultures.

Inspired by the author’s method, I shall supplement, in this Introduction, Hardayal’s stories with some of my own and a few from the Mahabharata to illustrate the principles of this book. To do that, I shall ground the stories in the classical questions that have engaged moral philosophers over thousands of years. I shall explore questions such as, how did human beings acquire moral intuitions? Do we judge the moral worth of an action based on its consequences or on the intention of the actor? Are means more important than ends? How early in life do we acquire a sense of right and wrong? I shall end with a longish morality tale that says something about the hazy ethical life of modern-day India.

What Happens When Duties Conflict?

The second last story in the book is about a Central Vigilance Commissioner in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the Harshad Mehta scam. He confronts ethical uncertainty arising from conflicting obligations. A classic example of his conflict can be found in a tale from the Mahabharata, about Kaushik, an innocent, simple-minded ascetic, who prides himself for always telling the truth. One day, sitting in the town square, he is accosted by a group of thieving cut-throats, who ask if has seen a man run past. They are looking for him, he knows, because he has witnessed their crime. Kaushik’s dilemma is to choose between the duty of satya, telling the truth, or of ahimsa, not harming another and saving a life in this case. Since he is in the habit of telling the truth, never having told a lie, Kaushik chooses satya and delivers a death sentence to the witness.

The robbers catch and kill their prey and the pious ascetic is sent to hell at the end of his life. Kaushik is confused: why, he asks, after living such a virtuous life of honesty, is he in hell? He’s then reminded that he failed that day in the town square. His higher duty was to remain silent or tell a white lie and save the poor witness’s life. The Central Vigilance Commissioner in Chapter Sixteen of the book similarly had to make a very difficult decision when he chose to prosecute an outstanding officer and otherwise good human being, who appears to have done wrong under pressure from his powerful boss, the chief minister. What was the higher dharma here for the Central Vigilance Commissioner—compassion towards a good human being, or ensuring that he set a strong precedent for punishing wrongdoers?

Do Ends Justify the Means?

Another common ethical problem arises from our perspective. Chapter Two introduces us to the dilemma of means and ends: whether to judge an action from a person’s intentions or its consequences. A doctor uses the wrong means to bring about a good ending. My favourite example is of a true story that appeared in the newspapers some years ago. It’s about a young hero who jumped into the sea in Goa and saved a child from drowning. The reporter asks him, why did he do it? He replies sheepishly that he was trying to impress a girl who was part of his holiday group from a college in Delhi. The reporter retorts, ‘Then you’re not a hero.’ But wait: the child was saved. The moral deed was done. Why worry about the young man’s motives or bring his girlfriend into the picture?

It is true that Dr Chand in Chapter Two also did a heroic deed by giving life to the knees of his friend, mentor and guide. But in doing so, he broke government rules and colluded with a medical supplier by making a fraudulent bill. It is especially important to have the right perspective when judging actions in public life. Chapter Nine tells the charming story of two engineers—the arrogant, domineering Mr Sidhu versus the kind, humble Mr Sandhu. The latter is the hero of this story but there was another outcome possible in the story of these two characters.

To examine it, we need to play a thought game. Imagine the same two rivals were asked to build on a tight schedule two roads through the impossible terrain of the Himalayas in the Kargil district of Kashmir in the late 1990s. The dreadful Sidhu succeeds in building a magnificent road, not for patriotic reasons but because it will win him a promotion and make him some cash on the side. He ensures that the road contractor he selects is a high performer who’s pliable to sharing some of the spoils. Both Sidhu and his contractor are driven to complete the road on time by a handsome financial incentive that they will share at the end. The good Sandhu, more patriotic, more honest, follows rules meticulously and in the end red tape slows down his road and he fails to complete it on time. Soon, the Kargil War breaks out between India and Pakistan in the summer of 1999. Sidhu’s road is invaluable in moving troops to the Line of Control while Sandhu’s is still incomplete.

In all three examples—a doctor who’s trying to do good, an unlikely hero on a Goa beach and a corrupt but efficient engineer on a Kargil road—it appears that the ends seem to justify the means, a troubled and uneasy conclusion. The real issue is: on what basis do we judge if an act is moral or immoral? The good Vidur says in the Mahabharata that in judging a public act, the ruler must only look at the results. If it benefits the people, it is an act of dharma; if it harms them, then it is adharma. Hence, Vidur says he would sacrifice an individual for the sake of a village and a village for a nation. The half-brother and royal counsellor to the king of Hastinapur, Vidur speaks from his experience of managing a state. In agreeing to sacrifice a person in order to save many, he has drawn a distinction between public and private dharma. The English thinker Jeremy Bentham went on to make this criterion famous in the nineteenth century via his utilitarian slogan—‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

The moral Yudhishthir, on the other hand, is more concerned with means rather than ends. Having given his word to King Dhritarashtra after losing the dice game, he refuses to give in to his wife Draupadi’s insistent demand to raise an army and win back the kingdom stolen from them in a rigged game of dice. Yudhishthir would have jumped into the sea and saved the child in Goa even if no one was looking. He would have also built the Kargil road honestly and risked leaving it incomplete even if it meant losing the Kargil War. Yudhishthir wouldn’t have abandoned an individual for the sake of the village or sacrificed a village for the sake of the nation. His sense of duty to ahimsa (non-violence) wouldn’t have allowed him to sacrifice even a single human life. He is one with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who looks upon all sentient beings as ends in themselves. When one sacrifices an individual for a village, one treats that individual as a means rather than an end.

It is moral dilemmas such as these and similar ones in Hardayal Singh’s book that make ethical decisions infuriatingly difficult. The most challenging dharma-sankat, moral dilemma, of such a trade-off between ends and means is in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan, one of the brothers, asks whether it is justified to torture a child in order to bring incalculable happiness to the rest of humanity. Alyosha, his brother, doesn’t have an answer; Dostoevsky, too, seems to feel that this question is unsolvable. Sometimes, there is no right answer.

Western philosophers are divided between those who judge an act based on its consequences versus those who judge it based on intentions or a sense of duty of the actor. It is obviously easier to observe the results of an action; what is more difficult is to know the motivations of the actor. Moreover, in a democracy, politicians should care about ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. Otherwise, they won’t be re-elected. Vidur is right in insisting that rajdharma ought to concern itself with how a policy affects the majority of the citizens. However, the problem in following this sensible principle is that the welfare of the minority often gets ignored. The weak and the poor will sometimes lose out in the distribution of goods and services when you are maximizing the welfare of society as a whole.

How Do We Acquire Our Sense of Right and Wrong?

Human beings are self-interested and our struggle to survive has made us basically selfish. So, how did we acquire a moral sense, of doing good to others? How did we learn to be impartial and fair and benevolent like Captain Devaiah in Chapter Eleven? Charles Darwin speculates in The Descent of Man that in the course of evolution, if a person helped another, he would probably receive help in return. ‘From this low motive,’ Darwin wrote, ‘he might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows; and the habit of performing benevolent actions.’¹ This thought of Darwin’s has led biologists to hypothesize that those individuals who maximize friendships and minimize