We explain what a moral duty is, how it is understood by law, philosophy and examples in different contexts.
What is a moral duty?
In law, is meant by duty moral or moral obligation to those duties or obligations whose fulfillment cannot be demanded by legal means, but rather exist subject to the awareness of each one.
However, there are pressures to comply and different instances of the society monitor the decisions that an individual makes in this regard. In other words, these decisions cannot be brought before a court of law, although they may carry social and moral sanctions on the part of the community.
Put more simply, a moral duty is an obligation of conscience, that is, something to which we are compelled by our own notions of good and evil, of what is just and what is unjust, in short, by our cultural conception of the world. For example, no law forces us to save an abandoned animal, but the opinion of others and the pressures of our own culture about what is noble and what is cruel.
Similarly, moral obligations are not universal, that is, what is considered ethical in one society or by a specific individual may not be so in other societies or by other people.
Thus, every moral duty is necessarily autonomous, is not linked to that of others, although it may occasionally coincide with other religious, legal or cultural issues. Their non-compliance is usually punished with remorse or guilt.
As simple as it may seem, the issue of moral duty is complex and has been the subject of debate among philosophers for centuries, since deep down it depends directly on what is considered "good" or "desirable".
For example, for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), moral duty was constituted from within the person and through the rational recognition of the virtues of the good. That is, people rationally know what is good and what is bad and tend to choose to do good.
Instead, utilitarian thinkers like the British Stuart Mill (1806-1873), moral duty can be true only when it leads to something useful for society, regardless of the reasons that pushed someone to do an action. If it is useful, in the long run, it will be good.
Many religions they promote important moral duties under the logic that their non-compliance will lead to divine punishment, like hell. Whether this is true or not is impossible to know, but in certain societies this imperative can also become a social law or even a law legal, as is the case of fundamentalist societies.
Examples of moral duty
Some hypothetical examples of moral duty may be the following:
- Recognize the merit of others. A person receives indispensable help to complete a project, for which she is congratulated and rewarded. That same person feels a duty to publicly acknowledge the help received and not take all the credit for himself.
- Help the fallen enemy. A soldier is defeated in combat and is badly wounded. His rival, instead of killing him or letting him die alone, assists him and saves his life, despite the fact that they fight at the instruction of rival factions.
- Share food with the hungry. A person is about to have dinner and realizes that next to him an acquaintance does not have dinner and is starving. Moral duty pushes him to share his dinner with that person, without expecting anything in return.
- Privilege children in an emergency. This is something that parents know very well: in times of danger, morality pushes us to privilege the innocent life of children, over that of adults. Hence the traditional cry of “women and children first” when ships sank.
- accompany the dying Even if the dying person is a stranger, the sense of empathy pushes us towards the obligation to accompany him during his final moments, because we will all face death and we will all be afraid to feel it coming.
- To help the needy. Especially when it comes to people who have lost everything in a catastrophe, or victims of some cruel turn of life, whether or not their misfortune is his own responsibility.