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Often appears with: duty, conscience, and obligation · justice as a virtue · will, choice, and freedom · reason and the intellect · will autonomy · valuation and exchange · universal form of maxims · trade, markets, and merchants · tension in conversation · spiritual religion · rewards and punishments · respect and constraint
Usually: argument (5) · detachment (4) · reflection (3) · crisis of belief (2) · the test or trial (2) · indignation (2) · narrative (1) · censure (1) · curiosity (1) · exhortation (1)
“The notion of duty, therefore, requires in the action, objectively, agreement with the law, and, subjectively in its maxim, that respect for the law shall be the sole mode in which the will is determined thereby.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason · precept
“Love, therefore, is not paid away in the same manner as money; for, whereas money is diminished, love is increased by paying it away.” St. Augustine (ed. Philip Schaff), NPNF1-01. The Confessions and Letters of St. Augusti · insight
“I’m sorry to offend you, Mr. Markham,” said she, “but unless I pay for the book, I cannot take it.” And she laid it on the table.” Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall · precept
“Then you won’t take the book?” I asked, more mildly than I had yet spoken.” Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall · observation
He reaches a crisis of reason: seeking “formal proof” in everything destroys conviction, leaving him despairing of moral obligation and the enforcement of good and evil.
demanding formal *proof*, And seeking it in every thing, I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. 305 This was the crisis of that strong disease, This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped, Deeming our blessed reason of least use Where wanted most: "The lordly attributes Of will and choice," I bitterly exclaimed, …
Augustine greets Caelestine and reflects on love as an ongoing debt that increases when given and repaid, arguing that true love seeks the friend’s good even when dealing with enemies.
( a.d. 418.) To My Venerable Lord and Highly Esteemed and Holy Brother, Cælestine , Augustin Sends Greeting in the Lord. 1. I was at a considerable distance from home when the letter of your Holiness addressed to me at Hippo arrived by the hands of the clerk Projectus. When I had returned home, and, having read your letter, felt myself to be owing you a reply, I was still waiting for some means of communicating wit…
Mrs. Graham refuses the narrator’s insistence that it’s “nonsense,” maintaining she is already obliged only for her son and must not be bound by further unrepayable favors; the scene ends with the narrator pressing her again.
I inquired after the picture she was painting from the sketch taken on the cliff, and was admitted into the studio, and asked my opinion or advice respecting its progress. My last visit had been to return the book she had lent me; and then it was that, in casually discussing the poetry of Sir Walter Scott, she had expressed a wish to see “Marmion,” and I had conceived the presumptuous idea of making her a present of…
Cicero concludes a discussion of moral duty by saying duties form a ranked sequence—gods first, then country, then parents—and that distinguishing the better duty is usually possible.
[And this is the natural sequence; for discreet action will presuppose learning and practical wisdom; it follows, therefore, that discreet action is of more value than wise (but inactive) speculation.] So much must suffice for this topic. For, in its essence, it has been made so clear, that in determining a question of duty it is not difficult to see which duty is to be preferred to any other. Moreover, even in the …
Kant states that the will’s autonomy is the only source of moral laws and duties, while heteronomy—being determined by objects or inclinations—cannot ground obligation and undermines morality even if actions seem lawful.
{BOOK*1|CHAPTER*1 ^paragraph 85} In fact the sole principle of morality consists in the independence on all matter of the law (namely, a desired object), and in the determination of the elective will by the mere universal legislative form of which its maxim must be capable. Now this independence is freedom in the negative sense, and this self-legislation of the pure, and therefore practical, reason is freedom in the…
He explains moral respect as a practical feeling arising from conscious free submission under constraint, distinguishes legality from morality as acting from duty, and insists created rational beings must treat duty as constraint.
practical reason; they suppose that the being requires to be impelled to action by something, because an internal obstacle opposes itself. Therefore they cannot be applied to the Divine will. There is something so singular in the unbounded esteem for the pure moral law, apart from all advantage, as it is presented for our obedience by practical reason, the voice of which makes even the boldest sinner tremble and com…
Returning to his inquiry, Nietzsche traces “ought” and obligation to buyer-seller, creditor-debtor relations, claiming exchange and valuation trained the earliest human pride in measuring values and equating everything.
9. Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this antiquity, moreover, is present or again possible at all periods), the community stands to its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to his "owers." Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of a community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them nowadays), man lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure …
Coleridge claims the cause-and-effect law in Locke-like systems governs moral and spiritual life, pre-determining free-will through motives, so the natural/spiritual divide and moral obligation become rationally unstable.
between that which is *natural*, and that which is *spiritual*, but we cannot even find rational grounds for the feeling of *moral obligation*, and the distinction between *regret* and *remorse*. According to the system of these authors, as nearly and distinctly as my limits will permit me to state it, the same law of cause and effect is the law of the universe. It extends to the moral and spiritual--if in courtesy …
Coleridge argues that people experience difficulties reconciling being under nature’s law with feeling moral obligation, and that some resolve the conflict by sacrificing spiritual religion to accepted metaphysics.
fully explained in the course of the Work. My present object is merely to show the necessity of some system in relation to these subjects different from the received one. It may perhaps be thought, that the language used above is too strong and too positive. But I venture to ask every candid man, at least every one who has not committed himself by writing and publishing on the subject, whether in considering the gre…