It seems I never hear anyone talk about duty anymore, outside of the military, and maybe the police/fire rescue community. It used to be much more commonly debated, by nearly everyone. There was duty to country, to family, to God, and to your fellow man, defined by class. Maybe our culture now, with its heavy emphasis on freedom, has mostly discarded the notion of duty.
Have we? Does it matter?
It has been wierd for me. Alot of people still believe everyone has a duty as a human being, while others don’t. I’m not exactly sure if everyone has the belief that they are on the same page with everyone else, or if everyone just accepts that people have a different belief about that kind of stuff.
Personally I hope its gone and never comes back.
They might not call it duty, but there are plenty of people who say you have an obligation to society, to help the needy, to make sure everyone is educated, etc. Kant was a big proponent of duty and I think there are a lot of people who subscribe to his beliefs, that there were a set of Categorial Imperatives that are derived from duty.
Marc
It’s a consequence of the objectivist mindset. They claim that every problem and every need will inevitably be met by individuals acting in their own self-interest. The reality is that not every problem has somebody who will personally benefit from solving it. Some problems can only be addressed by people who are willing to put aside some degree of their own self-interest and do something for the sake of other people.
I see to recall that some author (perhaps Lazaras Long?) called duty “The most important of man’s inventions. It is not worth living in places where it does not exist.”
I for one do not think is out-of-date. The best people I know have a sense of duty.
I think you mean Robert A. Heinlein, as LL is his character, but you have the sentiment of the quotation right.
Robert E. Lee once wisely said, “Duty is the sublimest word in the language. You can never do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less.”
I don’t think it’s an outdated concept, not at all, but I agree with MGibson that its name or definition has changed over time for many. Nowadays it’s most closely associated with the military, police or firefighters, but it has a much broader reach than that. Duty is part of the glue that holds a democratic society together, ideally inspiring the strong to protect the weak, the rich to help the poor, the military to serve the nation, a doctor to cure her patient, etc. It is the laudable and socially-useful belief that we have obligations to others; it is an antidote to selfishness and narcissism.
If Duty is what would drive a man to side with his state in engaging in a bloody civil war to preserve the institution of slavery, then it can go to hell.
Duty is like patriotism. Scratch that, patriotism is really a subset of duty. It’s a blind drive to serve a person or institution, regardless of morality or consequences. I think society can evolve better concepts to drive people to do what’s right.
The tragedy of Lee is that he didn’t understand until after Appomattox that his true duty was to the United States - which had educated him, paid him, given him a career and to which he had sworn an oath - and not to Virginia or the Confederacy. Certainly duty, like any other good idea, can be misinterpreted and badly applied. That’s not a reason to discard it entirely.
On my honor,
I will do my best to do my duty, to God and my country. To obey the scout law. To help other people at all times. To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
My punctuation is lacking, but I did this from memory. I also spent last night teaching it to a bunch of young boys working on earning the first badge in scouting - Tenderfoot.
Sadly, we do NOT teach duty any more. We denigrate those organizations that DO teach duty (in some of the worst examples of throwing out the baby with the bath water). When we add in the “bowling alone” issues in modern society where connection to the community is lost, are we shocked when people no longer feel a duty?
If you have no connection to your community, it gets harder to feel that you have a duty to support it.
Much wrong has been perpetrated in the name of duty, from Lee to Eichmann to Calley to the present day. We have largely given up on absolute, unquestioning trust in leaders and institutions. And yet those who cling to the idea of duty do little or nothing to address what duty means in such a world. Is it any wonder the concept has fallen into some disdain?
“Duty” is uncomfortably close to “responsibility”. Nowadays we have “rights”, not “responsibilities”, hence one of the ugliest phrases of modern society: “I know my rights!” 
Why do I have the feeling this thread is going to dissolve into cant, pieties and sniping, without getting even close to the meat of the question?
I don’t think that duty has much to do with absolute trust in leaders. My understanding of duty is a sense of obligation one feels to do what one ought to do. I was brought up to believe that I have a duty to make a living, to pay my debts, to pay taxes, to minimize the inconvenience that I cause others, to help the poor, to do something with what I have to better my community, and lots more.
I think that the prevalence of this sense of duty has diminished in my lifetime. I think that it does matter, that a sense of duty improves society.
I’d tend to agree. But why has that sense of duty diminished? Could it have had anything to do with less trust in authority and institutions? I strongly suspect so.
I don’t believe in duty as an objective truth - I don’t think anyone has any inherent duty to others. OTOH, if you take upon yourself a duty to a person or organisation or whatever then it can be worth something.
I think my problem with duty is the mindless aspect of it. There’s a sense that in certain ambiguous situations, you must do your duty regardless. Some people suggest (and have done in this thread) that really when you have a duty to an authority, for example, it’s really a duty to help them, rather than just follow orders. Thus refusing an order or not actively helping can actually be doing one’s duty. I have no problem with that, but I think that once you get to that level of defining duty based on each situation, you end up with essentially a series of too different actions to be able to sum them up in just “duty”. And that’s a good thing.
You could well be right. My sense is that the sense of duty began to diminish during the coming of age years for the baby boomers (I was born in 1954). The Viet Nam connection supports your idea; trust in authority definitely eroded during that time. There was also an increase in a belief in the value of personal freedom over conformity at that time.
I agree fully.
If you don’t feel at least some duty to the family, and society you live in, why live in it?
Would those who see a decline in the concept of duty take a stab at defining what they mean by “duty”?
If it just means “the obligation to pay debts”, financial or otherwise, I don’t see the decline. Nor do I see such a decline in the future. Too many of us perceive ourselves to be owed by others. We have a vested interest in keeping the force of the sense of obligation strong. For the concept of duty to disappear, masses of people would have to forget what they think they are owed. Each of us would have to think that others didn’t owe us. That seems rather contrary to human nature. Maybe it will happen when technology allows each of us to be self-sufficient to our own satisfaction, but, till then, our self-interest will lead us to keep duty in the forefront of our debtors’ consciousness.
I confess I’m tempted to psychologize those who see a decline in duty. Given what I just said, I would expect such sentiments to be expressed perpetually because doing so helps to keep the respect for duty high. Because we perceive others to owe debts us, we are by nature inclined to see threats to these debts even when those threats don’t exist. So we pre-emptively start worrying that respect for duty is on the decline, even when there is no objective evidence that this is the case.
Tyrrell McAllister - I thought I had taken a stab at defining what I mean by duty in my post above.
That includes the idea that when Habitat For Humanity is building or rehabbing a house in my town, I need to grab my tools and go build or rehab a house, not every time they call, but at least some of the time. It means that when I get called for jury duty, I show up. I could get out of it, but I feel that I shouldn’t, so I don’t. It means that when Red Cross volunteers call me and ask for a blood donation, I go do it. It means that because I make more money than I need to live and save for retirement, that I give some of it away. It means that when there is an election, I vote. There’s a lot more, but I’ll end up sounding like someone I don’t want to sound like.