Duty

Duty, that which a person is required or obligated to do. What a duty is can be said to be dependent on its foundations or grounds. Thus, duties can be moral, legal, familial, or derived from one's station. A duty can have several grounds—it can be, for instance, both moral and legal. There are many types of duty. Natural duties, for example, are said to be those duties people incur in virtue of being people, that is, simply in virtue of their nature. There are also prima facie duties; that is, duties to perform certain acts if and only if there are appropriate reasons for performing such acts. This latter class of duties invites a comparison with “all-things-considered duties”, which one incurs if the grounds or reasons which support these duties significantly outweigh any grounds or reasons that count against them. Further to this, there are negative and positive duties. Negative duties are duties not to perform certain acts, such as killing or causing harm, while positive duties are duties to act in certain ways, such as to relieve suffering or to give alms.

While the concept of duty has been the object of philosophical reflection since the time of the ancient Greeks, it is only in modern times that the concept has come into its own. Modern discussion of duty can be traced back to the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. For Kant, all moral requirements expressed themselves as duties. Kant contrasted duties to self with duties to others and under these headings distinguished perfect duties from imperfect duties. Perfect duties are complete: they hold unconditionally for all moral agents and require the performance of a determinate act. Examples of perfect duties are refraining from coercion and violence. Imperfect duties, however, are those that do not require a determinate act but exhibit sufficient “latitude” between an aim and the business of bringing about that aim. To explain, the moral requirements that surround the aims of helping others or developing one's talents are imperfect duties, for we cannot help everyone, nor can we develop every talent.

Since Kant, philosophical discussion of the place and importance of duty has mostly taken place in the context of a debate between “deontological” and “consequentialist” theories of morality. A deontological theory is a moral theory that advocates that certain acts can be judged to be right or wrong in themselves. Kant's own views provide an example of such a theory. In contrast, a consequentialist theory holds that the rightness or wrongness of an act is to be judged in terms of the consequences it produces. An example of a consequentialist theory would be the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill, which argues that every action ought to maximize happiness and minimize bad states of affairs. Thus, contemporary deontologists such as the American philosophers John Rawls and Charles Fried argue that the concepts of right and duty ought to be central to any moral theory, while later utilitarians, such as R. M. Hare and other consequentialists, argue that duties are important only in so far as they indicate those acts which promote good states of affairs.

More recently, however, philosophers in Britain and the United States, influenced by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams, have argued that moral philosophy ought to concern itself more with a description of the conditions of human life, and less with traditional concepts of duty and obligation. This has led to a re-evaluation of the place of duty within contemporary moral philosophy, with the consequence that the concept no longer enjoys the pre-eminence and sustained attention it once had.

See also Categorical Imperative; Ethics.