Do you have any sense of Duty?

[ahundredtimes]

Does a sense of duty exist anymore?

Do you think it's an outmoded concept or not?

is motherhood a duty?

Is it our duty to be good citizens?

I've written that word four times now - and it still look weird and wrong.

Duty free.

That looks okay.

I was thinking about it today - everyone talks about their rights but never duty.

[sighs, stares out window, adjusts corset]

No.

I have a sense of responsibility towards many people, and the common good. Of duty - no.

I believe I have a duty to ensure I never cause harm or suffering to others in the course of my life. That is a minefield when you think about sweatshops etc.

I believe as I have chosen to have children it is my duty to raise them and give them a well rounded world perspective.

Okay.

So duty is different to responsibility?

It sort of suggests lack of pleasure doesn't it? An obligation.

Yes, I do. I really, really wish I didn't right now, but I do.

I think it's a good thing in it's place. I just don't know what that is.

It is both, I feel a responsicbility towards my DC but also a duty . When they ae puking all over me it is my duty to sort it out for hem and clean uop and reassure them,.

shite spelling sorry

Yes. To me duty doesn't encompass reciprocity in the way responsibility does.

But I'm not certain I'm right.

And I am too busy supervising the painting of a glittery multi-coloured cardboard castle to look at a dictionary definition

We're not brought up to be dutiful though are we. It's very servile somehow.

Duty to ones country.
To God
To the Queen.

I bet the armed forces have a strong sense of duty. And perhaps Vicars.

I sort of wish I did have a sense of duty. It's stuffed with moral fibre isn't it? If I was a philanthropist, I'd have a sense of duty.

I think it might be a very Victorian thing.

I think I would change that to we are no longer brought up to have a sense of duty. Thank goodness.

I like the concept of mutual responsibility. We don't talk about mutual duty, do we?

No, but we do talk about mutual pleasure.

Which is probably a good thing, all that pleasure-seeking, but I wonder whether a sense of duty is an attractive thing.

Nobody believes politicians - or very few - have a sense of duty do they any more?

Actually, I think the concept of duty is completely misguided

I like the concepts of responsibility, pleasure, cooperation, consensus, harmony, win-win.

I don't like the concepts of duty, self-sacrifice, conflict, win-lose.

Yes. I think it's an old-fashioned idea. I wonder if anybody does still have it though.

Probably not much.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Elderly, retired people living in the rural home counties probably still (think they) have it.

They are probably full of class, racial and sexist prejudice, too...

'Dutiful wife'...there's a Victorian phrase for you. Sounds most odd in this day and age.

I think it must mean something other that 'responsibility' because 'responsible wife' sounds even odder..

This isn't helping is it

No it is actually!

I think it is an old thing. I reckon it went out when the Beatles arrived or national service stopped or everyone stopped doffing their caps and all that crap.

Though if you care for elderly parents - I can see that might be a duty? Especially if you don't like them much.

"Dutiful wife" makes me think of a wife who silently resigned herself to a life of rural poverty for the sake of her husband's vocation as a curate; or a wife of a diplomat who never complained about living in Lagos followed by Bogotà followed by Mogadishu and having to send her tiny children to England to boarding school and not seeing them for 10 months of the year...

You couldn't replace "dutiful" by "responsible" in those examples. They are not synonymous.

duty = self-sacrifice?

duty = sense of moral obligation without thought of pleasure or self perhaps?

Yes.

This is not the first time that I have thought that I wish that at school we had had better discussions on the meaning of abstract nouns.

I think responsiblity is very different from duty.

Responsible is self-determining, being accountable. It implies control over one's life and decisions etc

Duty is more of a moral imperative, where your own self, your wants/needs etc are secondary.

Duty feels more passive where responsibility is very active. As Anna8888 says, duty seems to be linked with self-sacrifice in a way which would not be appropriate for responsibility.

... which is all very compatible with modern ideas of self-determination and personal autonomy, as opposed to older concepts of adherence to an established external (moral) order - Church etc.

Yes. Right, we have duty sorted now.

But nobody who has a sense of duty, except one person down below who didn't want it.

Do religious folk have a sense of duty perhaps? Because of the adhering to the external whatsit?

I think I have a sense of 'karma' - what goes around comes around.

No, no, that won't get the board schools set up or the industrial revolution underway MadameP

That's much too reflective.