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1 results

  • Chapter 9 - A Sense of Duty

  • from Part IV - Virtues of Indirect Caring
  • Robert C. Roberts, Baylor University, Texas
  • Book:
    Attention to Virtues
    Published online:
    25 July 2025
    Print publication:
    14 August 2025, pp 216-237

  • Summary

    The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.