When we talk about duty, most people think of responsibilities to family, friends, or maybe even country. But the first lesson of The Commons Guide asks us to look past the present moment, past our individual lives, and out toward the horizon. Our highest duty is not only to those standing beside us but to those who will come after us. Humanity itself is the charge entrusted to us.
This is the moral horizon: a way of orienting our lives so that every choice, every action, points toward the continuation of humanity and the flourishing of the Earth that sustains us.
It is easy to mistake survival for thriving. We live in an age where food arrives through supply chains we can barely trace, where political structures feel abstract and unresponsive, and where our lives are more mediated by screens than rooted in place. We are surviving and surrounded by options, but to what end?
Survival without thriving is a kind of slow decay. People can survive under systems that exploit and alienate them, but thriving requires a vision of a world worth passing on.
Our first duty is to humanity itself. Not humanity as an abstract concept, but as the living continuum of past, present, and future. We inherit not only the world created by those before us, but also their responsibilities. Each generation receives both the fruits and the debts of the one that came before.
To act for humanity is to think intergenerationally. What kind of education prepares children to be not just workers, but whole human beings? What kind of societies foster empathy and justice instead of competition and exploitation? What kind of future are we building with our politics, our technologies, and our culture?
When we shrink our moral horizon to our own lifetime (or worse, to our own individual gain) we abandon the trust handed to us. Humanity becomes fragile when people live only for themselves. Humanity endures when we live for each other and for those to come.
Our second duty flows naturally from the first. Humanity cannot continue without the Earth. Yet the Earth is more than a setting or backdrop for our drama! It is an active participant in our story, the ground of our being. To honor humanity is to honor the environments that sustain us.
These environments are not only natural and physical, not just the soil, air, and water, but also social, political, and cultural. An unhealthy river poisons bodies, but an unhealthy political system poisons communities. A degraded forest erodes the land, but a degraded culture erodes our ability to imagine and to care.
To take our duty seriously means seeing the Earth in its wholeness, with ourselves as a piece of that whole. Protecting a forest matters as much as protecting the trust between neighbors. Preserving a wetland matters as much as preserving the rituals, stories, and civic spaces that allow us to live well together.
Thriving is more than the absence of crisis. Thriving means joy, connection, resilience, and beauty. It means creating a world we would be proud to pass on rather than one we’re ashamed to explain.
Ask yourself: if a child were to inherit the world you helped create, would you meet their eyes with pride or with apology? Would you tell them, “We gave you the tools to flourish,” or would you mutter, “We did what we could, but it was never enough”?
Thriving requires us to reimagine what progress means. It is not GDP growth or shareholder profit. It is the health of our communities, the depth of our cultures, the fertility of our soils, the resilience of our systems, and the wisdom we pass down.
Why call it the moral horizon? Because a horizon is never reached. It always recedes, drawing us forward. To live by the moral horizon is to accept that our duty is not a single task to be checked off, but a direction to follow. We will stumble. We will fall short. But so long as our compass points toward humanity and Earth together, we can walk with purpose.
The moral horizon helps us discern what is worthy of our time, our labor, and our love. Does this action, this policy, this way of living serve only the immediate, or does it help carry humanity further into the future? Does it enrich both people and planet, or does it impoverish them?
Living by this first lesson does not require heroism. It requires intention and attention. It asks us to shift from the question of “What benefits me right now?” to “What sustains humanity and Earth tomorrow?”
When you buy food, think of the soil and the hands that produced it.
When you speak, think of the trust or division your words may leave behind.
When you work, think of whether your labor builds resilience or dependency.
When you rest, think of whether your joy is shared or hoarded.
Every choice ripples outward. Every life is a thread in a much larger fabric. This first lesson is the reminder that our thread matters not because of its individual brilliance, but because of the tapestry it helps weave.
We live at a time when the moral horizon feels obscured by literal and metaphorical smoke: wildfires, wars, the churn of constant crises. But the horizon is still there. It has always been there. Our duty is to raise our eyes to it, to hold humanity and Earth together in our hearts, and to live as though the future depends on us. Because it does.
This first lesson is not a commandment, but an invitation to thrive, to create, and to pass on a world we can be proud of. To measure our lives not only by what we achieve for ourselves, but by what we safeguard and offer to those who come after.
The horizon is calling. Will we walk toward it together?
-Ben