DUTY. A course of conduct is a duty if abstention from it is evil. This definition would seem to make duty logically dependent on good and evil, but it is possible to define the good as that which it is one's duty to secure, so that the logical order of the notion of duty and of that of good and evil is not clear. The ques tion as to which of the two definitions repre sents the real order of priority between duty and good or evil has played a considerable part in ethical discussions. The question may be formulated as follows: are ethical values in herent in things and courses of conduct, with out reference to any moral agent — in which case good and evil are prior to duty—or do they consist essentially in the obligations of some individual? Greek philosophy, always realistic in the scholastic sense, displayed its hypostatic tendency in ethics as well as in meta physics, and made good and evil more or less of the nature of independent entities. Thus for Plato, the basis of morality— the Idea of the Good—is not merely a real entity but the most real of all entities. An objective good of this sort must be free from all dependence on an individual. The Greek ethics, Therefore, was an ethics of duty rather than ethics of good. The ethics of the Stoics first brought into any prominence at all the notion of duty: the Stoic good, though not dependent on its relation to an agent, was a course of conduct to be pursued by an agent, so that it was at the same time a duty.
The Greek systems of ethics, as has been said, laid the greatest emphasis on the actual results intended and attained by conduct in making their evaluations. Christianity, on the other hand, made the motive of a deed the most significant factor in the determination of its worth. The good deed, according to Christianity, is that which is done in obedience to God. This obedience constitutes duty, which is thus prior to the good. The original priority of duty has exhibited a continual tendency to lapse and disappear, and moralists of the type of Paley have attempted to point out various objective goods, the attainment of which fur nishes an excuse for duty. However, with the philosophy of Kant, duty came into its own again. Kant based his entire ethics on the categorical imperative. The categorical im perative is the injunction act only on the maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.' This is a principle of duty, and good and evil are merely adjectives applied to conduct that conforms or does not conform to the maxim.
The problem whether duty is prior to good and evil, or vice-versa, is in many respects parallel to the dispute between realism and idealism in epistemology. Just as realism claims the existence of reals apart from their relation to a percipient, the ethics of good and evil claim the existence of goods apart from their relation to an agent. Idealism and the ethics of duty correspond in a similar manner. It is a familiar fact that the difficulty of realism lies in the demonstration of unperceived reals, with out involving the absurdity of a being that per ceives them. In the same way, as it is difficult
to pass moral judgments without putting oneself in the position of at least a hypothetical agent, the issue between the two types of ethics is not easy of decision. However, owing to this fact that we can scarcely pass a moral judg ment without feeling ourselves as one of the actors in the situation concerned, we shall miss very little of importance by adopting for pur poses of argument the view that duty is prior to the good, and we shall be able to give full consideration to any possible way in which the agent is actually involved in the fundamental questions of ethics. Duty thus gains at least a pragmatic priority.
In accordance with the evolutionistic trend of modern ethics, Herbert Spencer traced duty to fear of revenge, etc. There is no doubt that the experiences of one who acts from duty have a certain measure of resemblance to those of one who acts from fear. However, the two experiences, notwithstanding their qualita tive similarity, occupy different places in the life of the individual. Kant expresses this difference by contrasting the universality of the claims of duty with the manyness and partiality of the inclinations, which manifestly include such aversions as fear. Whether we go as far as Kant does, and regard duty as that motive to conduct which impels us to act in accordance with laws which we consider and will as universal, we shall undoubtedly be right if we insist that the obedience of duty leads us into, not a chaotic assemblage of dif ferent deeds, but a more or less unified course of behavior.
The manifoldness of the experiences of those who act from duty is familiar to all. One man does his duty gladly, another reluctantly. On the battle-field, one may act as a soldier though in utter fear of his tasks, while his comrade is inspired by religious emotions, and still a third is enraged at the misdeeds of the enemy. In short, it is hard to find any common factor in the consciousness of duty at different times, except in the mere fact that these consciousnesses lead to a definite course of conduct. All that can he said so far of duty, then, is that it con sists of a group of experiences impelling to action, and ingeneral having fruition in acting — for even the worst scoundrel neglects a thousand opportunities to do an evil deed for every one he uses—which tend toward a unified scheme of conduct. This alone, however, is enough to show that the consciousness of duty is a harmonization an& as it were, a codifica tion, of our various impelling, approving ex, periences into a workable form. Whether it is anything more, and whether duty itself is prior to the consciousness of it, are issues too wide to be discussed here, but it may be said that this psychological definition of duty and of the consciousness of it is alone sufficient to furnish duty with most of the properties usually re garded as its associates. See EntIcs, and con sult the bibliography of that article.