On Duty and Morality
In continuing our examination of Ridgeview’s character pillars, we come now to responsibility. Our description of it reads: “I recognize that I am, in my relation with others, accountable for my actions and utterances; that circumstances will not sway me nor excuses vindicate me in conduct that is unbecoming of a person of good character.”
In essence, all of us, by virtue of being here, have pledged to one another, either explicitly or tacitly, to abide by certain rules that will, from time to time, run counter to our desires. This compact applies no more to students than it does to teachers, volunteers, and all others who form a part of our community. Three questions occur in response to this assertion: How unswervingly committed to this are we? What compels us to be a part of such an agreement? And, how can this conception of duty be supported by a classical education?
The philosopher John Locke, a name familiar to Ridgeview students from middle school on, examined duty as the question of “why a man must keep his word.” He asserted that there were three philosophical ways of understanding what creates an “ought obligation.” The Christian, he contended, did so because God required it. The Hobbesian did so because the public required it, and because to not do so invited the wrath of the Sovereign. The Ancients, by which he had in mind primarily Plato and Aristotle, did so because it was beneath the dignity of man and contrary to virtue to do otherwise.
While not terms employed by Locke, an implication of this reasoning is that men are divisible into superior and inferior types based not on their birth or native intellect, but on what it is that creates an ought obligation for them. Inferior men obey out of fear of divine or civil punishment alone, and act not from duty, but from expediency. They calculate risks and consequences and behave accordingly. To the extent that they can be said to have a moral obligation to duty, they are bound to it by coercive force rather than conscience. They are regarded as inferior because they make less of their free will, their intellect, and their reasoning and are thus baser. Their freedom is relevant and integral because virtuous words or actions, if compelled or poisoned by ulteriority, cannot be regarded as such. Where virtue is absent in men, society nonetheless desires a simulation of it in order to provide for civil peace and economic productivity, and where men cannot be trusted with their freedom, a version of virtue in which it is the act rather than the actor is replicated through a fetish for innumerable laws and various coercive measures. C.S. Lewis touches on this in The Abolition of Man, a text read by every senior, when he writes that, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Alternatively, the superior type, what other philosophers have described as the noble, the magnanimous, the select, etc., come to this ought obligation from reason. For example, Aristotle contended that one does one’s duty to satisfy the demands of justice. The Stoics regarded it as an obedience to “the law of reason,” Aquinas called it “the natural law,” and Immanuel Kant “the moral law within.” If we have faculties competent to satisfy a “duty to inquire,” Socrates maintained we have an obligation to use them in pursuit of justice.
Even among those who reason their way to doing their duty, a question remains as to whether the superior type serves justice itself or merely a more indirect version of expedience and utilitarianism. Kant was more absolutist than many of the other philosophers previously mentioned in that he asserted that whether the ultimate aim was eudaimonistic (Aristotle’s summum bonum) or hedonistic (arguably, J.S. Mill’s), that each philosophy had desire “as a moral criterion of good and evil. Both are utilitarian in that they are concerned with consequences [happiness or utility], with means and ends. Both measure the moral act by reference to the end it serves.” The transactionalism that has become so ubiquitous as to be invisible makes Kant’s claim both harder to answer and more challenging to recognize. For Kant, there is a sort of animalistic baseness to the utilitarian because pragmatic judgments cannot be moral judgments.
Mortimer Adler wrote that, “The tension between duty and desire—between obedience to rules of conduct and unrestrained indulgence—is one of the burdens which no other animal except man must bear.” We will either come to do our duty under our own power or under someone else’s. The contention of a classical education is that if one is fortunate enough to have their freedom and the capacity for thought, they bear a responsibility for determining their obligations to their fellows and holding fast to them. As Longfellow wrote in Hyperion (1839), “Men should soon make up their minds to be forgotten, and look about them, or within them, for some higher motive in what they do than the approbation of men, which is fame, namely their duty; that they should be constantly and quietly at work, each in his sphere, regardless of effects, and leaving their fame to take care of itself.”
Man is both temporal and egotistical. It is hard for him to let go of a regard for what good will comes to him by sacrificing the satiation of a desire to the honoring of a duty, and it is harder still for him to do so knowing that he shall hardly be recognized for it and that his time is limited. To quote from Cicero, “Quoniam diu vixisse denegatur, aliquid faciamus quo possimus ostendere nos vixisse”—As length of life is denied to us, we should at least do something to shew that we have lived.
We are accountable for the people we become, and for the ways in which we interact with those we are in community with—that we should choose and want to be by aspiring to virtue rather than bending to compulsion is what gives nobility to our dutifulness. Without an education, and arguably a classical one, it is difficult to ascertain how one comes to find magnanimity in duty.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
Ridgeview Classical Schools