Stoicism
Zeno of Citium, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca · c. 300 BCE
Happiness is a mastered mind: virtue, clear judgment and a practiced acceptance of what is outside your control.
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Find a school, a thinker, a lesson or a fallacy
24 matches for “duty”
Schools of thought
Kantianism
Immanuel Kant · 1781 onward
A bridge between reason and experience: the mind shapes and structures everything we can know.
Mimamsa
Jaimini · c. 3rd c. BCE to 2nd c. CE
The school that interprets the Veda’s ritual commands.
Lessons
The View from Above
Week 2 · Calm in a busy day · School: Stoicism · Read it and try its questions now
Zoom out until a slight is the size it really is, then return to your duty.
Three Lenses on One Dilemma
Week 30 · Thinking under pressure · Read it and try its questions now
Look at a hard choice through virtue, duty and results, and see what each one shows.
The Published Standard
Week 21 · Governing well · School: Legalism · Read it and try its questions now
Publish the duty and the consequence so no one guesses at a mood.
Act Without Clinging
Week 23 · Action, practice and devotion · School: Vedanta · Read it and try its questions now
The Gita teaches Arjuna to do his duty fully while letting go of attachment to the results.
What a Right Is
Week 40 · Justice and power · School: The social contract · Read it and try its questions now
A claim right puts a duty on someone else; a liberty right means no one may stop you; most quarrels about rights mix the two.
The Rules We Uphold
Week 40 · Justice and power · School: The social contract · Read it and try its questions now
Singer says help the distant poor; Pogge adds that the rich uphold rules that harm them, so the duty is also to stop the harm.
The Examined Life
Week 1 · Questions worth asking · Read it and try its questions now
Socrates treated that habit as a duty to his god and his city: a life that never questions itself collects opinions the way a pocket collects lint.
Lived Truth
Week 15 · Freedom and choice · School: Existentialism · Read it and try its questions now
You can explain a promise, a duty, or a way of treating someone with perfect accuracy and still leave it outside your week.
Freedom Together
Week 15 · Freedom and choice · School: The ethics of ambiguity · Read it and try its questions now
This is not a duty added from outside.
Forgiveness
Week 11 · Mending what breaks · School: Ubuntu · Read it and try its questions now
Forgiving frees the forgiver, but there is no duty to hurry.
Care Without Favorites
Week 16 · Doing right by others · School: Mohism · Read it and try its questions now
The Mohists replied that an account of duty should be judged by what it does for the many, and that favoritism tends to cause quarrels and wars.
Ritual Without Belief
Week 23 · Action, practice and devotion · School: Mimamsa · Read it and try its questions now
Mimamsa holds that ritual action is a duty set by instruction, to be done because it is prescribed, not because of a private story about it.
Who Answers for the Machine?
Week 38 · Minds and machines · Read it and try its questions now
It says that using a tool does not remove the duty to answer for how it is used.
The Feather and the Heart
Week 25 · Other voices: Egypt, India and North Africa · Read it and try its questions now
The pharaoh’s first duty was to uphold Maat against isfet, the chaos and wrongdoing that always threatened to return.
The River Is a Person
Week 31 · Our shared world · School: Indigenous philosophies · Read it and try its questions now
From kinship comes duty.
The Murderer at the Door
Week 39 · Hard cases · School: Kantianism · Read it and try its questions now
Truthfulness, he argued, is a duty to everyone, and a lie damages the trust that all speech depends on.
Is Any State Legitimate?
Week 40 · Justice and power · School: The social contract · Read it and try its questions now
Each person has a duty to act on their own judgment.
Is and Ought
Week 27 · The Enlightenment asks · School: Empiricism · Read it and try its questions now
He would also ask for the seal that was pressed on afterward: the principle that turned those facts into a duty.
People Who Do Not Yet Exist
Week 31 · Our shared world · Read it and try its questions now
They agree that being able to complain is not the test, and the council votes for the safe site, citing a duty to the town’s future inhabitants.
Ought Without a Lawgiver
Week 43 · Love, grief and meaning · Read it and try its questions now
Pick a strong word you use, such as “duty” or “should”, and write what stands behind it.
Quieting the Will
Week 50 · Will and value · School: Nihilism · Read it and try its questions now
In his essay On the Basis of Morality, from 1840, he argued that compassion, not duty, is the true root of moral action, against the Kantian ethics of his day.