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A friend sent me a WhatsApp message yesterday.

“Isn’t it sad to be a government servant?”

It was barely a question. Perhaps it was a passing remark, perhaps a criticism, perhaps an idle observation. I do not know what prompted it. But I know what it did to me.

Throughout the night, I found myself interrogating my own existence – my usefulness, my convictions, my choices, even my virtues. I was not searching for an answer to my friend. I was searching for an answer to myself.

The ethical dilemma surrounding duty

The ethical dilemma surrounding duty has occupied philosophers for centuries. Our epics are, in many ways, meditations on this very conflict. Bhishma’s vow, Drona’s loyalties, Karna’s fidelity, Vibhishana’s defiance, each wrestle with the question of what duty demands when moral certainty begins to dissolve. Even the countless unnamed soldiers who populate history must have confronted the same dilemma: what does one owe to authority when authority itself becomes ethically ambiguous?

History asks the same uncomfortable questions. What should an ordinary civil servant in Nazi Germany have done? Or one serving under Stalin? Or in Pol Pot’s Cambodia? At what point does obedience cease to be a virtue? Where does loyalty end and complicity begin? When should one comply, what should one comply with, and how should one comply?

These are not merely historical questions. They are permanent questions that haunt every institution where power and conscience intersect.

Ironically, ethics occupies a central place in the Indian civil services examination. Thousands of aspirants spend months preparing for the General Studies-IV paper on Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude. Unlike papers that reward information or analytical ability, this one examines something deeply personal. Candidates are asked to resolve ethical dilemmas,........

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