In Our Time - Duty

Episode Date: November 13, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of duty. George Bernard Shaw wrote in his play Caesar and Cleopatra, “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty”. But for Horatio Nelson and so many others, duty has provided a purpose for life, and a reason to die – “Thank God I have done my duty” were his final words.The idea that others have a claim over our actions has been at the heart of the history of civilised society, but duty is an unfashionable or difficult notion now - perhaps because it seems to impose an outside authority over self interest. The idea of duty has duped people into doing terrible things and inspired them to wonderful achievements, and it is an idea that has excited philosophers from the time people first came together to live in large groups. But has duty always meant doing what’s best for others rather than oneself? And how did it become such a powerful idea that people readily gave their lives for it? With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Annabel Brett, Fellow of Gonville and Caius and Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge; Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, George Bernard Shaw, that great Upender, wrote in his play Caesar and Cleopatra. When a stupid man is doing something he's ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. But for Horatio Nelson and so many others, duty has provided a purpose for life and a reason to die. Thank God have done my duty. final words. The idea that others have a claim over our actions

has been at the heart of the history of civilised society, but duty is an unfashionable or difficult notion now, perhaps because it seems to impose an outside authority over self-interest, and perhaps we're more interested in rights than duties today. But duty has always meant doing what's best for others rather than on self,

or has it? And how did it become such a powerful idea that people readily gave their lives for it? With me to discuss the concept of duty, are A.C. Grayling, reader in philosophy at Burke Beck-Bek-Lundon University Angie Hobbes lecture in philosophy at the University of Warwick and Annabel Brett, fellow of Gonville and Keyes and lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge.

Angie Hobbes, we have to be careful about talking about duty in the ancient world, as I understand it, because the Greeks had no exact word for our concept of duty, yet their ideas are still the basis for our own. Could you unravel that? Yes, I think if we start by looking at the Homeric poems, we clearly have notions of obligation. whether they translate into duty

or something I'm sure we'll return to. We have a society with clearly marked social strata and clearly defined functions and roles and people have obligations to fulfill according to their particular roles and professions and status and society. We're also dealing with a society in the context of widely held belief in the Greek gods.

So we have this religious backdrop which again is provided a notion of human obligations towards the gods in the form of libations and sacrifices to keep the gods on side. So we do have notions of obligation. The Greek verb Dane translates both aught and O, and these notions are there to provide social cohesion and efficiency and unity and also to try and provide harmony between gods and men. Whether those notions amount to a notion of duty is debatable because what we don't have in a

in Homer or indeed I would argue in any of the ancient Greek writers is any notion of human rights as we would understand it. And if we're going to, if there's a suggestion that the notion of duty requires a reciprocal notion of human rights, then we might be on in murkier waters. The early philosophy, as I understand it, was very much oriented around the nature of the cosmos, quite removed from daily living. What was it that bent Socrates and Plato to turn their minds towards the practical, philosophy of people living together? Yes. Well, we have, after the Homeric period,

we have the growth of the polis, the city-state, which is an urban community with surrounding farmland and political power and debate is centred in the polis. So there's much more of an urgency to think through issues of how humans are to live together and get on together, and again, issues of social cohesion and efficiency. We have Socrates and indeed other early sophisticated writers like Antiphon coming up with embryonic social contract theories.

According to Plato, Socrates says that one of the reasons he doesn't want to flee from Athens and avoid the death penalty even when his friends are giving him the opt-out is because he feels that he has some sort of obligation to Athens in which he's grown up and lived his life and practiced his profession. So we have the seeds of political theory at this time. That would seem to our listeners, I think. Again, you use that obligation, and I didn't challenge you the first time,

because you're using it in a Homeric context. But here I think it seems, from what you said, very near duty, Socrates is sentenced to death. His rich friends say they can get him out of this. They think it's unjust. They can get him out of this. He says, no, I have benefited from the laws of Athens. So you said it is my obligation.

But if I said, it is my duty to stay and follow through these laws. even though they're sentencing me to death. So where's the distinction now between obligation and duty? Well, personally, I don't think there is one. I'm perfectly happy for Socrates's decision to be phrased in terms of duty. I only raise the debate because there is a big scholarly debate about whether the ancient Greeks have a concept of duty, given that though they have a concept of civic rights,

it is debatable whether they have a concept of human rights. The Stoics are going to get a bit closer, but there is a big debate. Annabel Brett, would you take that up? Do you think we're talking about duty here at the time? time of Socrates and Plato? I really feel very much the same as Angie, I think, about that. There just isn't a Greek word. But they seem to be expressing ideas that we would naturally translate out as duty.

I mean, I think that one area that we need to look at, particularly with Plato, if we're looking for equivalence to our idea of duty, is the notion of justice. Because justice is paradigmatically the virtue that's involved in living with other people. Virtue is human excellence in regard to others. So it's the principle of acting well with regard to others. And the question that Plato raises in the Republic is precisely what is justice? What is it to act well in relation to others? And the Republic begins by canvassing various conventional Greek notions of justice,

which are to do with returning what you owe, what is due to another in a very narrow sense. For example, if you've borrowed something, you owe it back. So that's due in that sense. or another version is behaving well to your friends and badly to your enemies because that's what they do to you. So the very kind of narrow self-centered notions of duty as some kind of redressing the balance between ourselves and others.

And what Plato shows in the Republic is that this is completely the wrong way to think about our relations with others. That we're not naturally self-interested individuals in competition with each other's. Naturally, we are of different natures and we need other people in order to achieve any kind of reasonable life for ourselves. It has been suggested that there's a streak of authoritarianism, or Plato's Republic could be read as a totalitarian authoritarian tract in the sense of the philosopher king's rule,

who have no children, they have no material possessions, they are pure in all these so-called senses, well, let's say they're pure, and everybody else is to do what they're told, and that is their obligation or duty. Do you think that comes into the argument? Well, I think that the philosopher kings also have a duty. They, as Plato portrays them, would like to spend all their time philosophising and thinking about the form of the good. But they must, and I here would think that it was their duty, to go back down into the world of human politics, into the cave and do their duty to rule in the city.

Anthony Grayling, when we come to Aristotle, are we talking about a view that rather contradicts that of Plato, that Plato is talking about subordinating yourself to the whole? and Aristotle produces this idea of individual flourishing eudemonia. Are these two, is that in contradiction in opposition to Pelot? I think it certainly marks an important difference and in its way a transition. But the difference, I suppose, introduced by Aristotle's thought is this. As has been implied by what both Angie and Annabelle have said, that there is a concept of duty we use, which is not a general moral notion, but a notion that's relative to a station or an office or a position that you hold in a society or in an organization.

I mean, as a householder, as a father, as a businessman, you have certain kinds of responsibilities that you assume by adopting that office and those duties attached to the office just in virtue of what it is. Whereas very much later on, as we'll see, the concept of duty gets generalized into a moral notion, which is meant to be guiding and justifying of the kinds of actions that you perform. when Aristotle began to think a bit about what Plato had to say and Plato's conclusion was that if you knew what the form of the good, if you had grasped or understood what goodness is, you just couldn't behave otherwise.

You would be bound by your understanding of that to act in a given way. And of course, Aristotle was much more pragmatic chap, recognized that plenty of people see the good but do the worse. you know, they are on a diet but eat the piece of chocolate cake anyway. And so it was much more down to earth and therefore shifted attention away

from this idea that you would simply as a matter of recognition, a matter of knowledge, be bound to act in the ways that that knowledge dictates and said instead, you've got to try to be somebody who thinks in practical terms about the right course of action

in any given situation. There's no code, there's no set of rules or you've got to apply practical wisdom. How did the Stoics pick up this argument, Anthony, and why was it important that they passed it on to Cicero, the Roman Stoic who wrote Day of Iquise in the first century and was once upon a time translated on duty? Can you take us from the Stoics through to Cicero

and show why that join between Greek and Roman? The idea of duty much more defined, I think, you tell me, time I get to Cicero, is an important development. Well, of course, there's something about the Roman character that made them very naturally leap to the conceptions of duty or near conceptions of duty because it fitted very much their outlook. As regards to Stoics, it's very interesting to contrast really their take with the cynics because they shared a certain view which is

that most of the ills that an individual might feel in the course of life come from things over which you have no control. You can't choose whether you're going to pick up a virus or choose whether your neighbouring state is going to invade you and enslave you and so on. So you should cultivate a certain kind of indifference, a certain kind of apathy, they call it. And you should try only to master those things that lie under your control, your own attitudes, your own responses to things. Now the cynics, who were the original hippies, said you succeed in doing this

if you just abandon, you know, all the conventions and just go and live naked in a field somewhere, like their supposed founder, Diogenies. But the Stoics are much, much more responsible characters who thought that, yes, okay, we're going to try to live in this very self-controlled and austere way. But we have our duties, our obligations to our fellow men, to the society to which we belong. And therefore we've got to import this idea of an austere self-control into our practical lives. And that's why this notion of duty seems to, or responsible action or rightful action, seems to belong naturally to their view. And it's that view which is taken up by the Roman exponents of Stoicism. Anna Melbrat, the Christian notions come in, the Christian notion of beauty,

and as Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and Augustine of Hippo's teacher, published a Christianisation of Cicero's work on duty. Does this put a different spin on moral thinking, on one's duty? Christian, obviously, really, please excuse me, being rather blunt here, but Christianity comes in. We have a great thinker, put it mildly in Augusta. and brings ideas of Christianity to bear on classical learning, but the ideas of Christianity are driving this.

Now, what difference has it made to the way those who are reading these things are supposed to behave? Right. Well, just to talk about Augustine. I mean, Augustine held that the relationship between God and man is the central dynamic of human history and also the central dynamic of human relations as well, because it's in virtue of our relations to God, whether we are injustice with regard to God

or whether we've fallen away from him that affects our behaviour towards others. Now, what Augustine did, I think interesting, was to appropriate the classical language of justice and what is owed injustice to characterise the relationships between God and man. And in this sense, he was enabled to criticise the Ciceronian idea of the Commonwealth as a place

where actually no justice and no true moral relations could obtain because it was founded in injustice because it was founded without relation to God. So justice and true notions of justice only obtain in relation to God. But Augustine was insistent that this new order between God and man did not overturn the order of this world. And here Paul's text in Romans 13 was crucial, the powers that be are ordained of God. So that whatever your status with regard to God, suppose you're justified with regard to God, you nevertheless have a duty to obey the powers of this world.

Angie and then, Anthony. Yes, I mean, I agree with that. But to me Augustine is also extremely interesting. because he combines the Judeo-Christian tradition with the emphasis on the Ten Commandments, and you couldn't get a more foundational duty ethics than that, thou shalt and thou shalt not, with, of course, his studies in particularly ancient Greek philosophy. And a point I want to add to our earlier discussion is that though many of the ancient Greek thinkers and political writers talked about notions of obligation, possibly notions of duty,

it was always within a context of virtue and happiness. The key terms for the ancient Greeks were always virtue, Aritaire and happiness, Eudhime and ear. And their notion of duty and obligation flowed from those. So now August... Your duty to yourself, to your own personal happiness and your own flourishing. Absolutely, and part of that would be duties to others, to other humans and the gods would flow from that.

But the notion of duty would be secondary in your ethical framework. Now, when Augustine comes along, he's got the... the Ten Commandments, the absolute foundation of duty ethics, he's also got this Greek tradition. It seems to me that Augustine is perhaps more influenced in the architecture of his thought by the latter, because as I read Augustine and indeed later Aquinas, that his notion of obligation and functions and fulfilling the function of your role very much stems from notions of virtue and which she interprets rather differently from the Greeks in terms of certain forms of love and a love of your fellow man and love of God.

I think the really interesting point here is that the early church fathers had identified a crucial question, which is if you have duties, what imposes them? What is the source of authority for their imposition on an individual? Now in the tradition as a whole, of course there's a great deal of variety of answers to that. One says that your duty to yourself, that's the point you raised a moment ago. others might say, as we see later, that reason just dictates the reason will tell you what your duty is. And in this case, the source, the authority for the imposition of your duties is a divine command, is God. Eternal law.

The eternal law. The first of Aquinas is four laws. And that's the bit of the Judaic input that Angie's just been talking about, really. If you look at something as absolutist, unconditional, categorical as the Ten Commandments, you see that there's, well, there's going to be no argument. here. This is how you behave. It happens that it's mainly a question of imposition of negative duties. There are a couple of positive ones, say love God and have no other idols and so on. But generally speaking, they tell you what not to do. And they're meant to provide a kind of unyielding framework, which if you transcend it, you commit the great sin, which of course is disobedience. Anabel, when we come to the 13th century with Aquinas, some of theologica, where he has these great four laws.

He sort of sets out the duties that men have to each other, men and women have to each other, and to God. Does that bring the Christian and the classical ideas to some kind of settled state? I think he'd like to have thought so. Yes, if we'd say that Augustine said that there were relations of justice between man and God, but that didn't overturn the order of this world, I think what Aquinas is doing with his scheme of the forelaws

is to integrate the order of this world with the divine and the eternal order. And the main connecting idea, which connects human justice and human political order to the order of the universe, is natural law, because natural law is that whereby we participate in God's own reason. And therefore the structures that we set up have a chance, not of being arbitrary structures, but rational structures and just structures in line with the justice of the universe. Would it be fair to say, on Yehob, that be,

that the ideas that come from classical thought that were briefly discussed at the top, and then the infusion or coupling of ideas from Christians were put aside or subsumed in a much more secular notion with Hobbes' idea of the Leviathan. Well, I mean, Hobbes, of course, is taking over after the breakdown of a feudal system in which duties had been very stringently located

within a very rigid hierarchical social stratum, the notion of mutual obligation in a very secular context as well as within a religious framework. Now Hobbes is interesting because he's taking the notion of duty away from the local and particular, as it had been in the feudal societies,

and he's, in a way, going back to Stoic or Roman notions of universality. We have now an embryonic notion of human rights and human duties. Before we've seen duties located in particular functions, particular professions, particular social status. And now we're getting the start

of a notion of a human duty which you as a rational, responsible adult human have to yourself and to your fellow men. You want to Annabel. Yes. I mean one thing that seems to me important to stress about Hobbes is that obligations, and it's in this context he uses the language of

moral ought and moral duty, as something that we take on ourselves in pursuit of our own good, which Hobbes thinks, if you think about it rationally, means a good of society being protected by an absolute sovereign. But Hobbes says very ringingly in Leviathan, there is no obligation upon any man that arise if not from some act of his own. And Michael Oakeshawton his wonderful introduction to Leviathan said that, you know, this is Hobbes' deepest conviction about moral duties. Our obligations are our own because we made them.

And did you want to that or come we move on to lock? Because I'd like to move on to lock if I could. I think we should move on to lock. Right, Anthony. Oh, lock, lock, lock, lock. The great thing about Locke, what one has to remember, of course, is that he wasn't the architect, but so to speak, the reporter, describer and articulator of things that had been happening in the 17th century anyway.

I mean, it's quite a dramatic fact about the 17th century that at the beginning of it, Shakespeare could write in Macbeth that when a king is killed horses eat one another and the ghosts come out of their untenanted graves and squeak and jubri in the streets etc and a generation later The divine rider kings were so powerful that yeah

And the king was divinely ordained And so this was a perversion of the order of nature If you kill a king Regicide, a very very terrible sin as well as a crime And a generation later You have Charles first head being chopped off And the horses don't eat one another in the streets And this is a mark of the fact that there's been a dramatic revolution in thought about how things work and how a society is to be justified in its principles.

And what Locke does in his writings in the treatises on government, and I think also in his letter on toleration because there's a dimension to that which is very important for understanding this, is that there's a whole new arrangement being theorized here about how authority in a society is distributed and how therefore, for our response to that authority, what we are meant to do in responding to its demands, works. And the idea being articulated by him is that we no longer have a divine right of kings, we no longer have an absolute right of authority on the part of the monarch, but instead there are other interests and other groups in society which have claims and a kind of autonomy. Now this conception, of course, is what is quoted,

had length verbatim and in extents so in the documents of the American and French Revolution subsequently. And people have argued, and I think rightly Christopher Hill is one of them, going back a bit before Locke to the new dispensation that Locke was really giving the seal of approval to in the Civil War, a dispensation in which it's no longer possible really to think about duties, obligations, citizenship, authority in the way that had been thought prior to, let's say, 1649. Can we move on to the idea of, which our listeners will be very familiar with, the quotation, the semaphore at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson semaphores the message England expects every man to do his duty. He dies saying, thank God I've done my duty. This is 1805. So the idea is crystallized in that particular way there.

And a national hero who didn't probably then know he was a national hero, was to become one, was saying this to the whole fleet. and he was saying this to his friends beside him when he died. Has that moved on a great deal from Locke, or is that consequent on Locke, and are we in for a long run with that notion as expressed by Nelson? Well, I think what we see in Nelson is this ambivalent notion of duty is both this pure, rational ideal, which we get at the end of the 18th century, but also this romantic ideal.

It's now being used as something which can give meaning and purpose to an individual life, it's something you can die for, it can give your life clarity and focus and a certain strength in times of trouble again. It can also bind a nation together. As I understand it, Nelson originally wrote, Nelson commands that every man will do his duty, and a couple of his officers suggested that was changed to England,

expects, let's all unite as a nation. And then at the same time, we get people, people thinking, well, maybe the great whole of which we could be a part, doesn't just have to be a local community or a nation. It could be the whole human race. So this is where you get the connection between the romantic ideal and the rational ideal of somebody like Kant. If duty is the expression of universal human reason, then allegiance to duty will be both this rational ideal of a philosopher like Kant, but also this romantic ideal which could bind the whole human race together. Annibal, to talk about Kant for a moment, described as the primary philosopher of duty, why is he described as that? Yes, I mean, I think that it's because he has a philosophy of duty, what you morally ought to do,

which is categorically opposed to what you do out of self-interest, so that the imperative of duty, which is a categorical imperative, which is a universal imperative, is opposed to what he calls a hypothetical imperative, an imperative that governs you in the particular situation, the particular pursuits that you, you have. I think the difference is

with the difference between someone like Hobbs is that Hobbs sees obligations and moral duty to something that you are not opposed to your self-interest that you take on as a part of your self-interest. This is the major distinction with Kant that we get this divide between what's your duty and what's in your self-interest

but I think I'm going to pass it on to Anthony too. If you don't do, if you don't join into the body politic and regard yourself as a fingernail or something on the body politic you will be dismembered and life will be nice to be nice but Kant is saying something else Anthony The categorical imperative is the core of it and has been the core of discussion,

the discussion of duty in ethics ever since, isn't it? It has indeed. I mean, Annabel very eloquently and correctly stated at the point, which is that the two points actually. Firstly, that your moral duty is something which is quite independent of your self-interest and also quite independent of the consequences of whatever act you perform while performing your duty.

So he demarcates or effects a demarcation very much between what's called deontological views in ethics. duty-based and those which are broadly speaking called consequentialists, which take into account the outcomes of your actions and how they affect other people. Is Nietzsche more responsible than anyone else for undermining that a notion of duty that was expressed by Nelson, to put it as his simplest? Yes, Nietzsche, he does have notions of duties.

In Beyond Good and Evil, he does talk about duties between equals, But on the whole, he thinks that the notion of duty has been used throughout history as a means of exploitation. So in the genealogy of morals, beyond good and evil, we get this notion that duty more often than not is part of what Nietzsche calls slave morality. It's part of a morality which he links with both Plato and Christianity and Kant, which praises not. which praises notions of duty and justice and equality and meekness and humility, rather than the virtues that Nietzsche wants to praise, the old Homeric virtues as he sees them of the hero strength and courage and force over your neighbours. He also has this very acute analysis of what's going on

and the kind of political rhetoric involved in the way people use the notion of duty to excuse bad behaviour to come. condone their own weaknesses. Annabel, is the notion of public duty today? Is it problematic because partly because philosophical notions of duty are not as emphatic as they used to be? Yes, but also I think because of the culture of modern society

and we don't think of people as having particular stations with particular duties attached. We are much more aspirational and mobile society. People, I think, are in pursuit of their happiness and a good life, whether they're shopping at IKEA or whatever they're doing, they're trying to create a life for themselves where they feel happy, and they tend to think of themselves as equipped with rights to do so. And therefore, duty begins to be seen as a kind of external imposition, something that isn't part of ourselves in our own life that's just

imposed upon us. And I think that it can also, when we tend to think of dutiful as a bit of a pejorative, perhaps in a post-Nitian sense, a dutiful. So I think maybe what we need to do today is to reconnect duties with ourselves and our own pursuits and our own concrete lives and aspirations and it's in that sense that they can be made meaningful again. Finally, Anton Grayan, do you agree with that? Do you think that is the situation? I do very much so. I mean, I think the emphasis in the rhetoric of these matters has shifted from talk about duties to talk about rights and people forget, of course, that there is an argument which says that every duty, well, not every duty, but most duties carry correlative

rights and that if you are going to enjoy and exercise your rights, you have to remember that other people's rights make a claim on you, and those claims take the form of your duties. Thank you very much. If you'd like to continue the debate, we're on an in-hour time website. Next week I'll be discussing the age of the earth, but thank you very much to Anthony Grayling, Annabel Breton, Angie Hobbes, and thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about History, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.