The situation is not abstract. Someone hurt you. Maybe they lied, broke a trust, left you with damage you did not ask to carry. And now they are back, and they need something from you. Something real. You did not choose this timing, and you did not invite this moment.
The instinct is to ask what they deserve. That may not be the right starting point, or at least not the only one. The harder question is what obligation, if any, survives the wrong they did to you. Whether the injury cancels the claim. Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would each approach that question from a different direction, and none of them would make this easy.
Confucius: relationships carry obligations regardless of history
Confucius would start with the relationship itself, not the wrong. In his framework, ethical obligations are not abstract duties owed to humanity in general. They arise from specific relationships, and those relationships carry different weights. What you owe a parent is different from what you owe a colleague, and the history between two people shapes what the relationship requires, but does not simply dissolve it. He would ask: what kind of relationship is this? The answer to that question partly determines what you owe. He would also say that ren, human-heartedness, is expressed precisely in the hard cases. It is easy to be decent to people who have treated you well. The question of who you are shows up when it costs something.
To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
Dostoevsky: suffering creates its own claim on you
Dostoevsky would not let you solve this with a calculation about what they deserve. His characters are constantly caught in exactly this situation: bound to people who have wronged them, unable to simply walk away from what they share. His position is that suffering has a claim on the people nearby that operates outside the logic of desert. The person in front of you is in pain. That fact matters independently of what they did to arrive there. He would not call this sentimentality. He would say that the capacity to respond to a human being in pain, even one who has hurt you, is part of what it means to be human. The healing he returned to, again and again, was relational. Found in connection, even imperfect and unresolved connection.
The soul is healed by being with children.
Lorde: your survival is not negotiable
Audre Lorde would ask a question the other two do not: what will this cost you? Not in a minor way. She was direct about the pattern she saw, which is that the expectation of continued giving falls on people who are already depleted, already carrying weight that was never distributed fairly. Being wronged is itself a drain. Being asked to help the person who wronged you is a second one. Self-care, in her framework, is not a personal indulgence. It is the precondition for everything else you do. The question she would put to you is not whether you owe this person something in the abstract. It is whether you have enough left to give it without destroying something in yourself that matters more.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Where they disagree
Confucius would say: the wrong happened inside a relationship with a history, and that history does not disappear because of one event. What you owe depends on what kind of relationship this has been and what it still is. The question is relational, not transactional.
Dostoevsky would say: the logic of deserving is too thin a frame for this. Suffering in front of you creates a claim, and the question of what they deserve is one you ask after you have already decided what kind of person you intend to be.
Lorde would say: start with yourself. What do you have left? What will this take? Your capacity to survive and continue matters. Any framework that ignores that is leaving something important out of the accounting.
None of them agree on where to begin. Confucius starts with the relationship. Dostoevsky starts with the suffering. Lorde starts with you. Where you start changes what answer you reach.
The question you came here to avoid
The three thinkers do not resolve this, because it cannot be resolved from the outside. What they do is locate the real pressure points. The question is not only whether to help. It is what you are willing to let this cost you, and whether you are honest about why you are making the choice you are making.
So here is the question underneath the one you came in with: when you imagine declining, what is the feeling that arrives first? If it is relief, pay attention to what that tells you. If it is guilt, ask whether the guilt is about them or about the version of yourself you want to be. Those are two very different reasons to help someone, and only one of them is actually about them.