The Human Shields Excuse: Why Goodness Dies When We Stop Taking Responsibility | (#039) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Imagine this scenario: a gunman storms into a daycare and hides behind a toddler. He starts shooting out the window at police. They shout for him to surrender, but he doesn’t. One of the officers raises his gun, aims through the window and fires, and the first child drops, then another child, and then another, and when questioned later, the police officer says, “It wasn’t my fault. He made me do it. He was using them as shields.” [00:43.0]

Now, unless your soul has calcified, something in you probably recoils at his logic. You don’t need a PhD in ethical theory to know that something is deeply off, and yet this excuse, this line of reasoning, gets trotted out on the world stage by governments, militaries, ideologues, politicians all the time, and worse, it often gets accepted, especially in the United States, not just politically, but internally, personally, that same mental move to justify a harmful action by blaming someone else. It’s something we all do every day.

Today, I want to dismantle the human shields excuse piece by piece, not just on the level of global injustice, but in the way this pattern, this moral cowardice, shows up in our own personal lives, in our relationships, in how we lead, in how we succeed.

If you stick with me in this episode, you’ll get more than just moral clarity. You’ll gain the kind of integrity that makes good people trust you, the kind that makes you trust yourself. You’ll stop rationalizing the compromises that eat away at your self-respect, and you’ll lead with the kind of quiet confidence that doesn’t need to shout or explain or spin. [01:56.3]

But if you don’t, if you keep letting yourself make excuses when things get really hard, blaming your boss, your partner, your parents or the economy, then success, even if you grab it, will taste like ash. You’ll build something on a foundation that you know deep down is rotten, and that knowledge, that gnawing self-betrayal, that’s what turns high achievers into burned-out shells. That’s what leads to the midlife unraveling that I see over and over again in men and women who thought they’d already won.

So, this isn’t just about war or headlines. This is about the part of you that wants to do the right thing, but only when it’s easy, the part that tells you, “It’s not my fault,” while your integrity quietly packs its bags. Let’s not do that anymore.

I’m David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find success, meaning and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives.

This is going to be a kind of different episode structure from what I’ve been doing in the past, and I’ve been meaning to devote more episodes to philosophical or psychological analyses of current global affairs, but I wasn’t sure if my audience would be ready for that. But just this morning, as of this recording, the White House press secretary yet again trotted out this human shields excuse. Seeing that this is still timely got me motivated enough to do this. [03:17.0]

Okay, let’s start by defining this excuse more clearly. It goes something like this: “The enemy was hiding among civilians, so if some innocents died, that’s on them. We had to take the shot.” Sometimes it gets twisted into something even colder, like, “That’s just the cost of winning,” and the logic here is simple but completely broken, because what it’s really saying is, “If someone else puts me in a morally difficult position, then I am no longer responsible for what I do.”

But that’s not how morality works. If it were, then anyone could justify anything by pointing at someone worse, which is what abusers do. It’s what narcissists do. It’s what authoritarian, tyrannical regimes do. The moment you give up moral responsibility because the situation is messy, then you’re no longer operating from values. You’re operating from fear, from rage, from ego. [04:11.7]

Here’s a simpler analogy. Say there’s a murderer hiding inside a hospital behind rows of newborn babies and you know he’s there. Does that justify bombing the entire hospital? Would you accept that logic from a police officer? Would you accept it from your own government? Would you accept it from your brother if he were the one holding the trigger?

Now, some people try to wiggle out of this by saying, “But the world isn’t that simple.” No shit, Sherlock, that’s exactly why moral clarity matters more, not less. Moral agency doesn’t disappear when the stakes go up. It gets tested. When the consequences are heavy, when it’s difficult, when the pressure is on, that’s when responsibility matters most. That’s what separates decent people from cowards with guns. [05:01.4]

Here’s where ancient Asian philosophy comes in really strong—2,300 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Mencius, or Mengzi, gave a famous example. He said, imagine seeing a small child about to fall into a well. You don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons. You don’t stop to ask if it’s in your political interest. You just automatically feel an instinct to move, to leap, to help. Why? Because you’re human, he says. Because compassion hits you before calculation. You feel that tug in your chest, that punch in your gut. That’s your conscience. That’s moral intuition. That’s the core of you that still knows right from wrong, before your rationalization mind tries to talk you out of it.

Let me put it more bluntly. The presence of the innocent doesn’t lower your responsibility. It expands it. That’s what Mencius is saying, and that’s also what C. S. Lewis meant when he wrote that the presence of innocent bystanders heightens, not reduces, our moral responsibility. [06:04.2]

He had no patience for cheap moral escape routes. He wrote that evil often comes with a guilty conscience, reaching for any excuse it can find, blaming circumstances, blaming other people, blaming the enemy. Lewis makes it clear, the evil of another does not justify our own. Let me repeat that—C. S. Lewis makes it clear that the evil of another does not justify our own.

Real morality means we don’t get to say, “They made me do it.” That’s the oldest excuse in the book—literally, the Book. That’s Adam in the garden blaming Eve. That’s Cain blaming God. Moral responsibility grows precisely when it’s hardest to uphold. If you only act with integrity when it’s easy, you’re not actually acting from integrity. You’re just being convenient. [06:56.8]

Now we go beyond the realm of theory and into actual international law. Under the Geneva Conventions, specifically Protocol 1: Article 51, even if one side illegally uses civilians to shield military targets, the opposing force is still legally obligated to take every feasible precaution to avoid harming any civilians. This is not a suggestion. This is binding law, international humanitarian law. It has been codified for many decades, and for good reason. Hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, civilian shelters, refugee tents, these are protected under international humanitarian law, even if enemy fighters are nearby.

The obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians isn’t a luxury. It’s foundational. Without it, war turns into total moral collapse. When military forces ignore that line, when they justify civilian deaths by saying, “Our enemy was in the area,” they’re not just bending the rules. They are committing war crimes, and when I say “war crimes,” I’m not being dramatic. That is the actual term. [08:11.0]

It’s defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8: “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities” is a war crime. Let that land. We’re not talking about moral ambiguity here. This is black letter law.

Deliberately bombing a school just because someone fired from the alley behind it is not just unfortunate. It is illegal, and worse, it’s corrupting, because once you justify killing the innocent in order to get the guilty, you have already crossed a line. That step changes you. It rewires how you think about right and wrong. You become the kind of person who treats moral lines like suggestions, who lets fear or expedience decide what’s right. You become the bad guys, too, and the damage isn’t just to them. It’s to you, to your own sense of who you are, what you stand for, what you’re willing to live with. [09:18.8]

Now, some will say, “That’s how wars have always been fought. That’s how the Allies beat the Nazis, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,” but here’s the truth: those would be war crimes today, and rightly so. That is not hypocrisy. That’s moral progress. The fact that we now have laws banning indiscriminate bombing, no matter who does it, is a sign that humanity has grown, that we have seen the horror of total war and said, “Never again.” Never again for anyone.

To invoke past atrocities as justification now is to admit that we have learned nothing. It’s to drag us backwards to earlier moral Dark Ages, and if we do that, we’ve not only lost the war. We have lost what it means to be human. [10:10.7]

Now let’s take their argument a step further. Let’s help out the other side. Some people try to make this all sound more nuanced by saying, “Those civilians ‘chose’ to be human shields. They knew the risks. They stood there anyway, and that makes them fair game. They voted for those guys.’ Okay, let’s unpack this.

Imagine a man is about to be shot by a firing squad, and suddenly, five civilians rush forward and stand in front of him, arms out, shouting for mercy. Are they being naive? Yeah, probably. Are they risking their lives? Yes, absolutely, depends on the police force, but in most cases, yes. But does their presence now give the shooters the moral green light to just mow them down along with the target? No, obviously it doesn’t. Their misguided choice doesn’t cancel your responsibility. Choice, especially someone else’s, never erases your moral duty. [11:08.3]

Now, this is where a lot of people get squirmy, because if you accept that responsibility still rests on your shoulders, then you can’t just offload it onto someone else’s mistake. You have to carry it. You have to hold that moral weight, and that’s uncomfortable. It means fewer excuses. It means you’re still responsible for protecting innocent people, even if they don’t protect themselves, even if they’re manipulated, even if they bought into a belief system you find disgusting. They’re still human, and your duty to distinguish them from the guilty remains. That’s not idealism. That’s literally the foundation of International Humanitarian Law.

The Geneva Conventions make this crystal clear. Even if civilians are being used voluntarily or involuntarily as shields, they remain protected persons under the law. You cannot target them just because they’re physically in the way. Voluntary human shields do not make an area a free fire zone. [12:11.0]

The laws of war and the core of any moral system worth a damn are built precisely to prevent that logic from taking over, because once you start saying, “They were on the wrong side,” you are on a fast track to hell, moral, spiritual and psychological. That logic is how people justify bombing hospitals. That’s how they excuse dead little children. That’s how they sleep at night after ordering a strike that wipes out an entire apartment block of civilians because maybe one fighter was on the roof. Or maybe not—doesn’t matter, they were close enough.

That’s the death of moral responsibility, not because the situation was confusing, but because it was hard and someone decided they didn’t want to carry that burden—but that burden, that is the price of moral leadership, and when you drop it, when you look away or pretend it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t just disappear. It gets heavier. [13:13.0]

It sinks into your chest, and long after the bombs have stopped falling, you will still carry that weight, because here’s the truth that most people don’t want to hear—moral law matters most when it’s hardest to follow. It’s easy to be righteous when there’s no cost. It’s easy to have principles when they don’t get in your way, but the moment they do get in your way, when they make your job harder, when they slow you down, when maybe you make less money, when they threaten to cost you the win, that’s the moment your character is revealed.

In the presence of innocent human life, even if that life is misguided or flawed, or on the other side, still demands respect, not rationalized violence, not cold calculations dressed up as strategy, but reverence. [14:04.4]

If you want to live like you’re on the side of justice and goodness, if you want to win without losing your soul, then you don’t get to look at a crowd of civilians and say, “They stood in the wrong place. Just mow them down.” That’s not moral reasoning. That’s moral laziness. That’s moral cowardice hiding behind a rationalization mask, because no matter what they chose, you still have a choice, too, and what you do with your choice says more about you than anything they did. [14:36.6]

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Let’s bring this closer to home. It’s easy to look at war crimes and think, That’s not me, I would never. But here’s the uncomfortable part, the same moral shortcut this move to offload responsibility onto someone else is something that we all have done, just in smaller, more socially acceptable ways. [15:50.6]

The human shields excuse is just the high-stakes version of a much more common habit, blaming circumstances when we make compromises that we’re not proud of. We say, “I had to lie. I needed the job,” or “I couldn’t be honest with her. She would have lost it,” or “I wouldn’t have acted that way if they hadn’t provoked me.” It’s the same structure. “They put me in a tight spot. They backed me into a corner. They made me do it.”

No, actually, they didn’t. You still had a choice, and somewhere in your gut you knew what the right choice was, but it would have cost you something, so instead of paying that price, you told yourself a story. You made it make sense. You found a mental escape route that lets you pretend you were still the good guy. But here’s what happens when you keep doing that over and over. You start to lose trust in yourself. [16:53.6]

It starts small. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a big deal at first, but after enough moral shortcuts, your confidence gets hollow. Your victories start to feel weirdly empty. Yeah, maybe you achieve stuff, but none of it lands. Maybe you win, but it doesn’t satisfy, not for long. Maybe you get some respect or recognition, or the raise or the relationship, but deep down, it feels like you cheated your way there, like something inside you knows you didn’t earn it clean—and that voice never really shuts up, does it? That’s the voice of your conscience reminding you what you gave up to get what you wanted.

Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’re not some sociopath who enjoys screwing people over. You probably think you have high moral standards, and maybe you do. You probably work hard and you want to be a good person, but life is messy, isn’t it? And when success starts to feel out of reach or like it’s never enough, then it’s really easy to cut corners in ways that feel justifiable or are rationalizable. [18:06.7]

You blame the system or the market or the client, or your childhood or your parents or your ex, and maybe they really did make things harder for you. I’m not denying that they had a major role, but harder isn’t the same as impossible, just like in war, complexity does not erase responsibility. It deepens it. That’s where leadership comes in.

When we think of leaders, we usually think of charisma, strategy, vision—these are all fine, but real leadership at its core is moral courage, the willingness to do what’s right, even when it hurts, or especially when it hurts. Real leaders take responsibility when it would be easier to point fingers. They tell the hard truth when it would be easier to spin. They protect the vulnerable, even when doing so slows down the mission, not because they enjoy the struggle, but because they know that every shortcut taken at someone else’s expense is a crack in the foundation, and eventually, those cracks catch up to you. [19:18.3]

I’ve coached high-performing entrepreneurs, executives, even military officers. Many of them had really impressive accomplishments. On paper, they had won, but when they came to me, they were hollowed out. They had the money, the power, the access, and none of it was bringing peace, because deep down they knew there were moments when they didn’t show up as the person they wanted to be. They didn’t truly lead. They reacted. They justified, and now they were paying the emotional price. [19:50.8]

Here’s the hard truth: integrity doesn’t always make you successful in the short term. Sometimes it costs you deals or promotions, or followers or money, but in the long run, integrity is the only thing that makes success worth having. It’s your compass. It’s the core of you that can look in the mirror and not flinch, and once that’s gone, once you’ve convinced yourself that the ends always justify the means, you may still be admired by others, you may even be envied, but you will never feel fulfilled, because you’ll always know that your wins weren’t clean, and your soul doesn’t forget that.

Here’s the challenge: the next time you’re tempted to blame someone else for why you had to—you “had to”—cross the line, pause. Take a breath, a deep breath, or many deep breaths, and ask yourself, “What’s the cost of keeping your integrity here and what’s the cost of losing it?” because what you choose in that moment won’t just define your results. It’ll define who you become. [21:01.8]

Now, here’s where all of this cuts deep into the modern achievement trap. The mindset behind the human shields excuse, the idea that it’s okay to sacrifice others to reach your goal, shows up all the time in everyday success culture. It’s just wearing a more dressed-up, cleaner outfit. But how often do we treat people like tools, like check boxes, like obstacles?

You’ve seen it, maybe you’ve done it, using relationships to get access, faking charm to close deals, playing nice only when it benefits you, stepping over coworkers to climb, using your own health or sanity or relationships like poker chips just to stay in the game a little longer. That’s the same logic, sacrifice whoever or whatever it takes, as long as the mission gets accomplished, and the scary part is that it works in the short term. You can win like that. But when you win the battle that way, there’s always something missing, something very important. [22:06.4]

Yeah, maybe you get to the finish line, and then you look around and then you wonder, “Why do I feel so tired? Why do I feel so alone and lonely?” It’s because you didn’t just give up time or energy. You gave up something much harder to get back, your own conscience. Instrumentalizing people, using other people as a means to an end, or instrumentalizing yourself, might get you short term results, but it won’t give you peace. It won’t give you joy. It won’t give you any kind of lasting fulfillment that goes beyond the adrenaline of the next goal.

Real success, the kind that sustains you, that keeps you grounded, that helps you sleep at night with your soul intact, that kind of success only happens when your values line up with your actions, when who you are isn’t being sold off piece by piece just to look good on paper. [23:03.4]

If you’re chasing something and telling yourself the ends justify the means, stop now. Ask yourself what it’s really costing you, not just out there, but in here, in your chest, in your gut, in that quiet voice you drown out with busywork or scrolling, or numbing out. That voice isn’t your enemy. It’s the core of you that still remembers who you really are.

Here’s the last piece I want to leave you with. You are never just a victim of your circumstances. No matter how messy things have gotten, no matter how many bad hands you’ve been dealt, you are still responsible, not for what happened to you, but for who you become next—and when I say “responsible,” I don’t mean to blame you. I mean to empower you, because responsibility is power. It’s agency. It’s freedom. It’s your ability to respond, to steer and to choose. [24:01.8]

When you stop pointing fingers at your boss, at your parents, at your industry, at your government, at your culture, then you start reclaiming your freedom, your power. It’s the kind of power that leads to peace, not the fake kind that looks like chaos with better lighting. When you own your choices, even the hard ones, you start to feel something that most achievers haven’t felt in a very long time—dignity, integrity, the relief of being whole again, and that’s the payoff.

Not perfection, not sainthood, but the steady, quiet confidence that comes from knowing you didn’t take the easy way out, that you didn’t sell out your conscience for comfort, that you led yourself and maybe others with truth—that’s where fulfillment lives, not in the results, but in the way you got there, and that’s a success that you don’t have to apologize for. [25:02.7]

So, here’s what I want to leave you with—never justify harming the innocent, not in war, not in your personal life, not in the way you speak to your team or to your family, and not in how you treat yourself. That instinct to blame the other person, to say, “They made me act this way,” that’s the first step toward losing your integrity, and most people don’t even notice it because it’s subtle. It wears a suit. It sounds rational, but inside it’s hollow, empty.

Ask yourself right now, where in your life are you hiding behind a morally bankrupt excuse? Where have you started to let the pressure justify your decisions, and where have you told yourself, “I had no choice,” when deep down, you knew that wasn’t true, because that moment right there, that’s the turning point. That’s your breakthrough. [26:00.0]

You don’t need a therapist or a coach to tell you what’s right. You already know. You just need the moral courage to do it, and yes, it’s going to cost you something, it always does, but what you get in return is something nobody else can give you, a relationship with yourself that you can actually truly respect.

Here’s what I suggest you do this week. Pick one area of your life where you’ve been justifying something maybe kind of shady, something misaligned, something you’d rather not say out loud. It could be at work, could be in a relationship, could be the way you treat your body. Name it to yourself. Don’t flinch, name it, and then, just for this week, try rejecting the rationalization. Try doing instead the harder thing, the cleaner thing, and notice what happens to your energy, your clarity, your confidence, your self-respect, because real success isn’t about winning at all costs. It’s not about domination or conquest, or having the last word. It’s about who you become on the journey to honoring your moral center. [27:11.3]

That’s what lasts. That’s what frees you. That’s what makes the struggle worth it. When enough people live from that place, not perfectly, but courageously, the world starts to change. It becomes a far better place. So, start with you. That’s how you lead. That’s how you love. That’s how you find peace. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to show up with integrity, especially when it’s hardest. Start there and see what kind of person you become.

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Oh, by the way, if you have any comments or any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment or send me a message.I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [28:09.0]