This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

This chapter describes the Tokugawa status order and its change over time by highlighting its constituent groups and their status-mediating functions. The Tokugawa state relied on locally specific status groups to govern the population. These groups were defined by land and occupation and possessed a high degree of autonomy in regulating their own affairs. The chapter characterizes the most common types of groups – retainer bands, villages, block associations (chō), monastic communities, guilds, and outcaste associations – and explains how status was assigned, expressed, and negotiated between the state and these groups, drawing on notions of occupation, privilege, duty, and household as well as on a system of household registration. The chapter surveys the development of the status order in three stages: the formative period of pacification in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; its maturation under Tokugawa rule; and the conditions and process of its dismantling around the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Cicero’s De Officiis offers the most extensive discussion of the Stoic concept of duty (Greek kathēkon). The chapter addresses the way Cicero introduces into his treatise, with the support of relevant examples, the topic of conflict between different duties and their corresponding actions. The first part of the chapter discusses the influence of the Stoic Panaetius’ treatise ‘On Duty’ on Cicero and Cicero’s divergence from Panaetius in his treatment of conflict of duties. The second part of the chapter analyses how duty applies to different social relationships in De Officiis and how these duties are prioritized, in case of conflict, according to the specific circumstances of action. It is thereby shown that the idea of conflict of duties in Cicero excludes ‘tragic dilemmas’, supporting the Stoic view that there is only one dutiful action to be discharged on every occasion. Finally, the third part of the chapter presents the conflict between the ‘expedient’ and ‘honourable’ courses of action in De Officiis and Cicero’s attempt to present, in line with Stoic views, such a conflict as merely apparent.

The chapter provides an analysis of the concept of rights. It clarifies the precise object of inquiry of the book. A particular focus is repesented by claim rights or subjective rights. Mayor elements of the analysis of subjective rights are recalled, including historical contributions from Natural Law thinkers, comments by legal positivists, the Hohfeldian framework and the rules and principles approach. The question as to whether it is conceptually impossible to regard social rights as proper rights is addressed. Central elements of a concept of rights are discussed, including the addressees of rights, the holders of rights and the problem of group rights. The relation of legal and moral rights is a further object of inquiry, as are the basic contents of human rights, the copossibility and limitations of rights, the nature of obligations, the peremptory nature of rights and questions of the interpretation of rights.

Chapter 2 provides a toolbox for managers for developing principles to address moral issues in business. The introductory case describes a student worker observing potentially illegal practices at work. It then examines how classic and contemporary ethical theory can undergird our intuitions and promote reasoned arguments. We start with utilitarianism, or looking to the maximum good for the maximum number, and identify challenges involved in making those calculations. Next, we look at duty-based theories that encourage good for its own sake, with the implication that a firm should benefit all stakeholders, and virtue theory which promotes notions of character and purpose. The chapter also asks whether corporate culture makes a firm sufficiently like a person to be regarded as a moral agent. The ethics of care, often championed by feminist philosophers, is presented as a contrast to classical theory and recent work in standpoint ethics is also discussed. The concluding case deals with EpiPens, potentially life-saving devices which, after a huge increase in price, led to windfall profits to the manufacturer, and invites analysis based on the theories presented.

Care is a fundamental principle that is at the centre of operating department practice. It involves consideration of the patients‘ physical, psychological, and emotional needs whilst respecting their social and cultural beliefs. Perioperative care is not a single event but rather a process that starts with the assessment of patient needs and identification of risks, which are then planned for, implemented, and evaluated as the patient moves through each stage of their journey. The whole process is documented using the framework of a nursing model and perioperative practitioners become experienced in prompt care planning to ensure that the care delivered is safe, effective, and responsive. All perioperative practitioners are responsible for the care they deliver through a duty of care to their employer and the patient. Registered practitioners are also accountable to their regulatory body who set the standards for education and practice. Reflection, as part of continuing professional development, allows practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of the care they provide.

The culmination of the Battle of Balaklava, the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred over fifteen minutes of tragic and action-packed drama during October 1854. In the Crimean moment and beyond, the occasion has epitomized the war’s tragedy and blunder. Its persistence in national memory derives especially from the poem that immortalized it: Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Celebrating the Chargers as the paragons of duty, Tennyson’s verses gave them a corporate identity across their lifetimes, as they sought glory and fended off poverty. Long after the Victorian era, patriotic Britons clung to the Charge, using it as a tool for military recruiting, taking pride in its relics, and finding consolation in its lessons. Its persistence notwithstanding, the Charge had a changing meaning: the duty that it epitomized became an antiquated value in the twentieth century, as antiwar crusades, comic parodies, and even epic films suggest. Moreover, Tennyson’s verses were no static monument: their complexity has allowed, time and again, for the event’s reworking so that it does not anymore suggest glorious duty as much as it symbolizes heroic failure.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”

By closely connecting “free” and “dutiful” action, Kant appeared to some of his contemporaries to have a serious problem with the imputability of immoral actions. K. L. Reinhold attempted to avoid this problem by introducing a sharp distinction between freedom of choice (Willkür) and practical reason (as expressed through Wille), such that any free action must involve a choice between “selfish” and “unselfish” drives. After Kant rejected Reinhold’s proposed distinction, Fichte defended it by introducing a new distinction between the original, purely “formal” freedom of every spontaneously self-positing I and the “material” freedom that every I strives to achieve.Whereas formal freedom concerns the choice of means to predetermined ends, material freedom determines the ends as well as the means of acting.Fichte provides a detailed account of how a formally free individual might acquire material freedom through a series of “reflections” upon formal freedom, at which point freedom of choice is supposed to coincide with the categorical demands of the moral law—and Willkür with Wille.Fichte’s distinction between kinds and degrees of freedom was introduced in order to resolve the conflict between Kant and Reinhold, but it raises new questions concerning how one might “freely” acquire material freedom.

My aim in this chapter is to address what looks like a tension in Fichte’s derivation of ethical content for the moral law in his System of Ethics. In the first place, Fichte seeks to derive the content of our duties from our “natural drive [Naturtrieb],” which he defines in terms of our striving for enjoyment. But later in the book we find a second argument that derives the content of our duties from what Fichte calls the conditions of our “I-hood [Ichheit],” namely, our embodiment, intelligence, and sociality. I argue that a careful re-reading of Fichte’s notion of a natural drive is consistent with this second derivation. The key to this reading lies in Fichte’s effort to reframe the natural drive through the category of “reciprocal interaction [Wechselwirkung],” which allows us to view the natural drive as a “formative drive [Bildungstrieb]” that is both active and passive. For Fichte, the formative drive amounts to a striving for self-organization, and this striving, I argue, prefigures what becomes the ethical drive to engage in reciprocal interaction with other members of the rational community.

Legal duties are derived by decisions that people have made, when obligations are fairly implied by those decisions.

An overview of values-balancing legal reasoning, including the source and scope of obligations, behavior and reasoning, and the normativity of legal and non-legal reasoning.

Using Brian Simpson’s Invitation to Law as an opening, Part I explores that basic idea that law is for lawyers. Law requires study, training, and reflection. Its development cannot rest on intuition alone. The paradigmatic double-sided question for professional growth is,“what is (the) law?” Taking this question as law’s leading query, this part explores the beginnings of Holmes’s jurisprudence and his early efforts to map the common law. It looks closely at Holmes’s understanding of a legal duty and a legal penalty and how he reshaped the Austinian heritage to develop his own notion of a jurisprudential boundary.

Montesquieu assesses Roman politics, philosophy, and religion. He explains in his Dissertation on Roman Politics in Religion (1716) that the Roman republic was designed by Romulus and the early kings of Rome as a theocracy. The goal of Roman paganism was “to inspire fear of the gods in a people who feared nothing, and to make use of that fear to lead them in any way they wished.” In his Discourse on Cicero (1717) Montesquieu expresses unstinting admiration for Cicero both as a statesman and a philosopher, asserting that Cicero’s De Officiis teaches us “what is honorable and beneficial, what we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves, and what we should do as heads of families or as citizens.” In his Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates (1724) he assesses the conduct of the Roman general and dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla, observing that he had shown how deadly heroism can be, even when based on sound principle, such as Sulla’s desire to restore the powers of the Roman senate. “For one man to be above humanity,” Montesquieu concludes, all the others pay too dear a price.” Sulla marked out a path toward tyranny that Caesar would surely follow.

The texts in Part Three of the volume reveal Montesquieu’s moral idealism and life-long concern with ethics. He was clearly a moral theorist as well as a political philosopher. In his In Praise of Sincerity (1717) he stresses the importance of providing moral guidance to one’s friends by speaking to them honestly regarding their shortcomings. In his Treatise on Duties (1725) Montesquieu stresses the need, recognized by the Stoics and by Cicero, to observe human duties and attacks Thomas Hobbes by asserting contra Hobbes that there are absolutes of justice traceable to nature and attacks Baruch Spinoza by proclaiming that the world was created by design, not “blind fate.” In his Consideration and Reputation (1725) he observes that we crave the esteem of our friends even more than we desire birth, wealth, positions, and honors, and yet we neglect “probity, good faith, and modesty,” because these traits are undervalued by our friends. In his Discourse on the Equity that Must Determine Judgments and the Execution of Laws (1725) Montesquieu asserts that the “essential virtue” for a judicial magistrate is “justice, a quality without which he is but a monster in society.”