Once, the chief cook of a Chinese Zen temple was busy preparing lunch. As he was working, there appeared floating above the rice pot the revered Bodhisattva, Manjushri. ‘Get away from here!’ said the cook, later a noted Zen master. ‘I’m making lunch!’ To drive him away, the cook finally hit Manjushri on the head with his stirring spoon. He said that even if the Buddha himself had appeared floating above the rice pot he would have hit him too!
During World War II in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a group of French Protestants harboured Jewish refugees. In Philip Hallie’s book about those events, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the Italian wife of the pastor leading the resistance has a central role. Magda Trocmé is described as a quick, forceful person. In the winter of 1940–41 when the first refugee from the Nazis, a German Jewish woman, knocked at the door of the presbytery asking if she could enter, Magda ‘gave an abrupt, ungrudging, raucous command issued through a wide-open door: “Naturally, come in, and come in.’”
These two stories may appear antithetical: one about driving someone away, the other about bidding someone to enter. Yet both speak to a particular type of goodness: one that it based on simply doing what needs to be done.
Discussion on the nature of this kind of spontaneous moral action is difficult. When asked about the rationale for her actions many years after the war Magda answered: ‘I try not to hunt around to find things to do. I do not hunt around to find people to help. But I never close my door, never refuse to help somebody who comes to me and asks for something. This, I think, is my kind of religion. You see, it is a way of handling myself. When things happen, not things that I plan, but things sent by God or by chance, when people come to my door, I feel responsible.’
For moral philosophers these statements pose a problem. How did Magda choose where her responsibilities lay? Were they to the unknown German Jew knocking on her door or to her own four children endangered by the refugee’s presence? What general principles, philosophers ask, allow us to perceive what is right in a particular situation? When Hallie tried to ask Magda such questions she would become impatient and turn back to her cooking or sewing or cleaning.Perhaps the