Duty

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DUTY

In practical reasoning of an informal sort, the concept of duty plays a limited, relatively unproblematic role. In thinking about what to do, reasonable people try to see their wants in relation to their interests and to the interests of others; they evaluate alternatives in the light of their previous commitments and bear in mind their obligations and responsibilities. Duty is one among other factors to be taken into account. The reason is obvious: A person's duties are the things he or she is expected to do by virtue of having taken on a job or assumed some definite office. One could say (although it sounds somewhat redundant) that believing that one's duties entail doing something or other is a reason, though not a conclusive one, for doing that thing, and believing that a possible line of action would count as a neglect of duty is a reason against adopting that line of action. How much weight such considerations have depends on what duties are in question and on the agent's obligations as they affect the particular situation. Duties, then, are counted as one of the considerations that guide and constrain rational choice.

The concept of duty in theoretical ethics is quite a different matter. Some moral philosophers (F. H. Bradley would be one example, Cicero another) have concerned themselves with duties of the everyday sort, those that go with being a parent, voter, teacher, or whatever. But many philosophers use "duty" quite indiscriminately to refer to particular obligations, moral principles, or indeed to anything that is held to be a requirement of conscience. "Duty" is a technical term in ethics and the rules for its use vary from one writer to another. For the most part, these differences are of no theoretical interest, but there is one important exception, the doctrine of Immanuel Kant. His views, set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason and in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, mark a radical break with traditional ethics, and since what he takes to be the central concept of morals he calls "duty," it is worthwhile finding out what he means by it.

Ordinary Duties

As noted above, ordinary duties are tasks or assignments for which a man becomes responsible as a result of holding a particular job or office. When the tasks are intricate and have to be done just right, for example, the duties of an airplane pilot, then they are spelled out in detail; thus also for tasks that are relatively simple but for which applicants are unlikely to be highly motivated or imaginative, for example, the duties of a night watchman. In contrast, the duties that go with being a parent or with the practice of a profession are not codified, and responsibility for deciding what should be done is assigned to the individual.

Someone who neglects his duties deserves blame. Censure, if reasonable, is graduated to accord with the degree of neglect and with the importance of the task. A host who fails in his duties to his guests is inconsiderate but does not deserve to be pilloried. Negligence on the part of a pharmacist or a bus driver is a more serious matter. A characteristic of duties, as distinct from other constraints on conduct, is that a man who is delinquent loses, at some point, his title to the office that his duties define. He is court-martialed, unfrocked, disbarred, or fired (compare the euphemism "relieved of his duties"). Ceremonial dismissals are appropriate, of course, only when the duties in question are, in a broad sense, institutional and have been formulated explicitly. Not all duties fit this pattern; a man may become unfit for an office without being declared to be so, without his dereliction being so much as noticed by anyone, including himself. Someone who fails in the duties of friendship is simply no longer a friend, no matter what he or anyone else may think.

Legal penalties attach to neglect of duties where such neglect is held to be seriously detrimental to human welfare. Where a verdict has to be reached, an offense must be clearly defined. Parents, physicians, and legislators are among those to whom the greatest measure of discretion is granted in discharging their duties. It is an odd consequence that in matters of the greatest human importance only gross and flagrant derelictions of duty are punishable by law. Of course there are extralegal sanctions, and the threat of contempt and blame, of ostracism from one's group, may be a strong incentive to duty. The penalties of social disapproval, however, are distributed in a capricious and often unreasonable way, and a man may neglect all sorts of duties and yet, given discretion and a certain amount of luck, escape criticism altogether. Appreciation of this fact is what leads those concerned with moral education to try to instill in their charges a sense of duty. The attempt succeeds to the extent that the subject becomes habitually conscientious and carries out his duties without thinking about whether he might neglect them with impunity. A more primitive stratagem is to introduce the fiction of an all-seeing Providence in the hope of making the subject believe that no lapses go unnoticed and that all who neglect their duties will, on some unspecified future date, be punished.

Since duties are required minimal performances, no special merit accrues to someone who does his duty. A hero, one who does something that is both worthwhile and hazardous, acts "beyond the call of duty." A modest hero disclaims credit by saying that he did no more than his duty required. A man may be praised for carrying out some particular duty under difficult conditions. Such praise is sometimes justified and sometimes not; the claims of any duty may on occasion be outweighed by the claims of obligation or moral principle.

Although being conscientious is a virtue, it is not the only one, and unless it is mediated by intelligence and moral sensitivity, it may do more harm than good. A man must learn, for example, how to deal with conflicting duties. If he is a jobholder, a parent, and a citizen, then he holds three offices concurrently. Even if his life is well organized, situations are likely to arise in which he has to determine which of two duties takes precedence. Such questions have to be worked out in particular cases; there is no formula or principle of ranking that can be applied. Moreover, as noted earlier, questions about duties are not independent of broad moral issues: if, as seems likely, there are offices one ought not, as a matter of moral principle, to hold, then there are duties no one ought to perform, even when called upon to do so.

Kant's Doctrine

The idea of taking duty (die Pflicht ) as the central moral concept originates with Kant. There are earlier doctrines that appear, especially when paraphrased, to be analogous, but the similarities are inconsequential in contrast with the differences. Kant himself maintained that his basic thesis is neither original nor esoteric and that, on the contrary, it is self-evident to the plain man. Everyone, he held, recognizes the difference between doing something because one wants to do it and doing something because one feels that one is morally obligated to do it. Moreover, it is universally acknowledged that only what is done from a sense of moral obligation is meritorious. Kant's theory is an exposition of what he took to be the consequences of these premises. He did not claim that the theory is easy and familiar. (In fact, he is often obscure and difficult to follow.) He did claim that his theory is the one philosophers must eventually accept if they are consistent and if they take seriously the intimations of the plain man.

The views Kant ascribed to common sense appear to be correct: people do not deserve credit unless they act from reasons of conscience, and we do believe that such reasons are, somehow or other, distinctive. Kant used the word duty (and here he diverged, at least from ordinary English usage) to refer very generally to features he took to be distinctive of conscientious conduct. At times this practice leads to rhetorical vagueness, and "duty" becomes synonymous with "whatever ought to be done." However, he also gave it a more precise sense, one that appears in the set of interdependent definitions which, taken together, provide the framework of his theory. In brief, he held that the only unqualified good is the "good will" and that to have a good will is always to act from a sense of duty.

Duty involves recognition of and submission to the "moral law" that is the "supreme principle" of morality. Since what the moral law prescribes goes (more or less) against the grain, that is, runs counter to inclinations, the law is expressed as an imperative. The imperative is described as being "categorical" and "unconditioned," and Kant meant these modifiers to reinforce the distinction mentioned earlier: objects of desire are variable and evanescent, and thus strategies for achieving such objects are applicable under some conditions and not under others. The moral law, however, applies to everyone and is unrestricted with respect to times, places, and particular situations.

The "categorical imperative" is formulated in three ways that Kant seems to have regarded as equivalent. They are as follows: "So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law"; "Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only"; "Act according to the maxims of a universally legislative member of a merely potential kingdom of ends." Apart from the question of how to collate these formulas, difficult problems of interpretation arise for each of them taken separately. Nonetheless, one can see in a general way what Kant had in mind: A man is dutiful to the extent that he is seriously concerned with being equitable and fair, with treating other people like human beings and not like machines, and with trying to govern his own behavior by standards that could be adopted by everyone.

Kant believed that the concepts of duty, the good will, and the moral law are all such as can be apprehended a priori. Part of what he meant (and what is certainly true) is that no conclusions about what ought to be done can be derived directly from compilations of facts about what people do or have done. Although Kant was much concerned with distinguishing actual laws that depend on external sanctions from the moral law that the individual imposes on himself, he characterized the moral life by means of a set of juristic metaphors. The righteous man, for example, is said to "accuse himself before the bar of his conscience." This device suggests that Kant believed the "kingdom of ends" invoked in the third version of the categorical imperative to be an ideal beyond the hope of achievement. Human inclinations are apt to be anarchic, and as duty is a kind of inner law, so conscience is prefigured as a stern magistrate.

Pre-Kantian Doctrines

It is customary to cite the Stoics as the earliest philosophers to elevate duty to the status of a first principle. As far as one can tell from their writings, however, which tend to vagueness, and from sketchy accounts of what they were reputed to believe, their views were quite different from Kant's. In fact, their word kathēkon, usually translated as "duty," appears to mean "what it would be suitable or fitting to do." At any rate, the supreme duty is to live "in accord with nature," but it is not clear what that entails or how, if at all, one could avoid living in accord with nature. Particular maxims have to do with ways of avoiding anxiety and frustration, a goal that Kant would have regarded as morally unworthy. The one genuine point of contact, and also the most interesting contribution of Stoic thought, is the idea that morality transcends national boundaries and class distinctions. The cosmopolitanism of the Stoics marks an advance over the views of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom thought that the demands of morality can be satisfied without taking any account of the claims of barbarians, slaves, or foreigners. On the other hand, the Stoic one-world concept ought, perhaps, to be seen not so much as a moral ideal than as an implicit recognition of the changes brought about by the conquests of Alexander and, in later writings, as an aspect of the ideology of Roman imperialism.

Theological ethics attaches importance to the concept of duty, and, in this context, what is meant is, unlike Kantian or Stoic duty, something parallel to the ordinary notion. To be a believer or a member of a congregation is to hold a particular office, often one that is defined by clearly formulated rules of conduct and ritual observance. In some religions the faithful are told that they are in some sense children of God, and to the extent that this belief is taken seriously, a set of quasi-filial duties with respect to the deity will come to seem important. Kant, despite his Pietistic background, was clearly opposed to such a view. It is crucial to his doctrine that men should regard themselves and others as adults rather than as hapless children.

Anticipations of particular Kantian theses can be made out in a number of earlier writers: Richard Cumberland, Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and Richard Price maintained (in opposition to Thomas Hobbes) that moral duty is based on self-evident axioms and that the requirements of duty are universally binding. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had much to say about conscience, which he regarded as a sort of inner voice—one that speaks with unique authority on questions of duty. David Hume explicitly remarked on the logical gap between the concept of what is done and the concept of what ought to be done. Nonetheless, it is not clear that anyone before Kant succeeded in holding in focus the idea of a morality that is not, in some indirect way, dependent on considerations of prudence.

In his paper "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912), H. A. Prichard argued that traditional ethics (for example, the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill) goes astray in trying to work out some general answer to the question of why it is reasonable or worthwhile to do one's duty. Prichard's point is that the question itself is the result of a confusion. That something is a duty is (or may be) a sufficient reason for doing that thing, and if it is, then no further reason is called for. If Prichard's historical thesis is right, and it seems quite plausible, then there is a sense in which Kantian doctrine and common sense agree and are jointly opposed to traditional ethics. Ordinary duties are not hierarchically ordered under a supreme moral principle; nor do the claims of duty (individually or collectively) provide a unique determination of morally right action. Nonetheless, and despite their untidy array, ordinary duties are "unconditioned" in that they provide us with reasons for acting such that if the reasons are accepted, there is no need for, indeed no room for, further justification.

Bibliography

For the Stoic conception of duty, see Cicero's De Oficiis, which has been translated by H. M. Poteat as On Duties (Chicago, 1950), and W. J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York, 1940).

See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, translated by L. W. Beck (Chicago, 1949), which contains Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals ; H. A. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" in Mind 21 (1912): 121–152, also included in his Moral Obligations (Oxford, 1949), pp. 1–17; G. E. Moore, Ethics (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), Ch. IV; G. E. Hughes, "Motive and Duty," in Mind 53 (1944): 314–331; W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1947), pp. 14–27; and W. K. Frankena, "Obligation and Ability," in Philosophical Analysis, edited by Max Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950).