You go to the park, you see a kid littering, you tell them to pick up their trash. They tell you to mind your own business, and make YOU feel bad about talking to a child who isn't your own.

The problem with the duty system you mentioned is it needs a lot of buy-in. It's like it's metastable, it works when there's buy-in, but generally it doesn't work. As soon as someone is willing to question it, it falls down. "Who are you to point your finger" is surprisingly effective at reflecting shame.

In the mid-20th century we were still at the height of nationalism. People thought to be English meant you had to do certain things, believe certain authorities. During that century, people started to notice the cracks and it all went.

The collapse of authority and the establishment, yes. But Duty wasn't imposed by an authority. There's a quote that I can't find at the moment with the effect of "no-one can tell you your duty, it's something you must discover for yourself".

totally agree that it's metastable. Which is why I found it fascinating with the Shame connection - shame appears to be metastable too

It seems to me that duty has more to do with collectivist feeling in general than nationalist feeling specifically (which is just one subtype of collectivist feeling). You have duty if you belong to and care about something larger than yourself. I think what's weakened people's sense of duty is the wave after wave of increasing individualism that probably accelerated some time after WWII, and has been going on for as long as I've been alive. A big part of duty is sacrificing your individual interests for another, which has always been hard but is even harder if social attitudes don't give it much support.

I can imagine that having a tangible cultural impact, particularly around our sense of collective ownership and duty.

For example, you shouldn't litter, and if you see someone else doing it, you have to overcome your shyness and point out to the kids their duty. And if you get busted littering, you should feel bad.

The thing that happens when authority breaks down is everything else is questioned too, whether or not that authority had anything to do with creating the pre-existing norms.

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/samuel-moyn-rights-dutie...

I'm curious to know if this is really true, or if that aspect of history was written and romanticised by the people with the power to do so, who benefited from that.

It strikes me that there was also a spirit of rebelliousness in the mid-20th century: unionisation and industrial action was also at its peak.

We stopped demanding and respecting it as a society. Started to look at those adhering to such things as stupid and old fashioned, while seeing those who gamed the system as smart and clever.

I've been trying to describe this for quite some time now. I watched the below scenario with my own two eyes happen to two "friends" in about 2001.

Just look at two defendants arrested and in court for a misdemeanor bar fight. One defendant lowers his head, apologizes, pleads guilty, gets time served, anger management, and a permanent violent assault record. The other defendant lawyers up, refuses to take any responsibility, and gets away with community service with no admission of guilt.

The first guy just had his (professional) life ended before it even really began. The second guy got a slap on the wrist. The second guy will be seen as smart and savvy, and the first guy will get made fun of for being a stupid idealist.

Society has taught me that owning up to one's mistakes - and by extension sacrificing to do one's duty - isn't even respected these days, it's actively derided.

I've generally experienced outsized rewards from being selfless. But then I have struggled with defining my ambition, so all rewards seem awesome. I have friends who are laser-focused on an outcome, and for them my "do random good stuff and the universe will give you good stuff back" approach is insane. They're all "fuck everyone else, I need this" and it seems to work for them. But that comes with zero sense of social obligation. And I can't see how society is supposed to work if everyone behaves likes this.

The lack of a (British) sense of Duty in the US is one of the most striking differences I noticed when arriving here. I suspect it’s in part a result of the frontier mentality: “I got mine you go get yours”. This went obsolete almost as soon as the West was Won, yet remains as a somewhat pathological vestige.

In addition, less cosmopolitan areas were less affected by all of the above, which allowed Duty to persist there longer. That was, ironically, the final nail in the coffin for Duty because Duty became déclassé and the mark of a rube.

Many military people do feel a sense of duty, and that's why they serve or served. In a civilian sense, duty would be things like acknowledging that a park is a shared space. If you walk past a piece of garbage and don't pick it up, you have failed in your duty to maintain the shared space even if you aren't the one that dropped it. A contemporary one would be cutting down on CO2 emissions. It's everyone's duty to cut back on that; someone who bought a Hummer would be shamed, as would people who keep their thermostats super high or low. Gossip spreads that you're a clod who's damaging the environment we all share, and you get shamed.

People used to patch potholes in public roads near their house because they felt a duty to keep the neighborhood nice.

These things don't happen anymore. I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing, since there were certainly downsides to duty. I don't even know if it's legal to patch potholes in public roads anymore.

Following the rules (when there is no hard penalty for breaking them) and being community-oriented (beyond your own family/church/social circle) are a necessary but not sufficient part of duty.

As another Canadian in the US, I have noticed this difference as well. I have also regrettably noticed Canada becoming more like the US in this regard as time goes on.

Most dog owners follow the rules but there is a small cadre of regulars who don’t. These people are aware of the rules (I know because I’ve sometimes reminded them of their existence) but choose to ignore them.

Now, who cares, right? What does it matter if some people choose not to follow this nanny-state rule?

Well, here’s what: once or twice a month we’re forced to end our walk early when someone has an unruly dog off leash in the direction that we’re walking. We’ve spoken to others who have had the same experience.

The park has a children’s playground and multiple sports fields. Many of the regular users are elderly and they choose this park because the path is paved and level. Not everyone appreciates being approached by an off leash dog.

So the off leash dog owners either don’t care about or don’t comprehend the effect of their actions on the rest of the community. This is a minor example of a lack of duty contributing to a “tragedy of the commons”

waits for American to suggest shooting the shopping trolley to solve the problem

You should not be ashamed to get rid of an animal that threatenes people.

Not only are you asking someone to literally kill an animal, something many people are de-facto not going to be comfortable with, you're knowingly recommending something I'm almost certain you know deep down isn't reasonable because it'd be a heinous overreaction, and it'd result in a mountain of paperwork and legal troubles for the commenter you replied to.

Ridiculous.

Some sense of duty along the lines of “I’ll follow the rules in the park even if it inconveniences me” seems to be missing.

I'd bet on some combination of the above like "nobody has even made a complaint in 20 years because 'everybody knows' such complaints are ignored, but the Good Old Boys responsible for stonewalling back then have since retired".

Filling potholes, OTOH, is a much higher cost thing to do, and so people are more likely to feel that the city should be using the money they have already paid in taxes to do it. (Another aspect is probably also legal risk--if I decide to fill a pothole and do it wrong and someone suffers damage to their car, I might get sued. The city has many ways of mitigating that risk that I, as an individual, do not.)

You have just illustrated why the concept of duty has lost a lot of power: it got misused.

I don't agree with you that it is my duty to cut back on CO2 emissions, because I don't agree with the underlying factual belief that leads you to make that claim. Every claim of duty rests on some underlying factual belief like that: but if we're talking about, say, the duty to pick up litter in a public park because it's a shared space, the underlying factual belief--that the public park is a shared space with shared responsibility for maintenance, and that littering decreases the value of that space--is much easier for everyone, or at least a majority, to agree on.

Of course, that still doesn't guarantee that everyone will agree; someone else upthread described kids in a public park telling him to mind his own business when he pointed out that they were littering. They obviously didn't share his factual belief about what kind of shared space the public park was or the impact of littering on it. But it took quite some time for society to reach the point where that concept of duty was no longer felt. And a major reason why that happened was that people with certain policy agendas tried to manipulate other people's sense of duty based on factual beliefs that weren't as widely accepted or easily supported as the belief about public parks and littering.

Even perfectly dutiful people usually know someone who clearly resents paying taxes (which at the very least encourages others not to fulfil their duties), or has no particular regard for the law beyond not getting caught. Most people know folks who vocally disrespect entire categories of people. Most people know folks who deny climate change, which clearly brings with it duties that would not otherwise exist.

If you don’t really know anyone like that, you’ve got yourself a nice living environment. That’s great - but there’s a genuine concern out there for people who know a range of folks. Even you yourself will be affected by significant externalities whether you recognise them or not.

There are other quotes from US authors that show they understood this concept as well. Though how ingrained it was in general American society, I don't know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton%27s_speech_to...

Thatcherite neoliberalism found an acolyte in Reagan, and ever since in this country, "government is the problem, not the solution". Under such a regime where the state seems to have no real obligations to its citizens, talk of duty seems rather precious.

This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.

IMHO progressive sophistication of human society goes hand in hand with replacing informal relations and processes (like duty, honor, shame, charity) by formal laws and institutions (rule of law, public welfare).

There are always some necessary compromises of individual liberties, but that can be handled by formal institutios, which generally have limited scope all control mechanisms compared to informal but unchecked power of society.

At the risk of being guilty of the same hyperbole I'm criticizing: While it's true that a society saying you shouldn't murder your neighbor is ostensibly "less free" than one that allows you to determine for yourself whether or not that's a commitment you want to endorse, the resulting society is in many ways much more free in a pragmatic sense.

If we choose to live in a society, then in order for that society to function well, we have to all behave in a manner that allows that society to function well.

If enough people choose not to behave in a manner that allows society to function well, then it stops functioning well.

This is not oppression. Anyone can always choose to leave society and live away from others. But in order for society to function, we need to live with some constraints on our behaviour.

If that's not your definition of "freedom", what is?

No, it isn't. Many duties are defined simply by being necessary in order to have a society where people can gain wealth by specialization and trade and exercise their individual freedom in any meaningful sense. The very medium in which we are having this conversation, which enables people to exercise their individual freedom to say what they think in a way that has never existed before, wouldn't exist without such a society. Neither would a multitude of other benefits that we all take for granted but which most of the humans that have ever lived did not have and could not even conceive of.

What is the mark of a non-free society is particular individuals telling other individuals what their "duty" is and claiming that they are doing so in the name of "society", when in fact they're just doing it for their own individual benefit.

Canada and Nordic countries rank highly in every major freedom index, yet these countries are all known for relatively high tax obligations and comprehensive environmental and climate regulation. No one serious believes all externally-imposed commitments are avoidable or oppressive.

I (and OP) wrote about (informal) duties defined by society as a whole, not (explicit) laws approved and enforced by government. Laws are necessary minimum to have functioning society and can handle these kinds of problems.

I think our sense of Duty started to dissolve sometime in the 80s with the idea that "Greed is good" and then continued in the 90s with a rise in apathy. Both of which are selfish ideas, selfishness is the opposite of Duty.

Along with "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent".

As far as cult-ish secular institutions go, Scouts was/is a pretty good one.

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I totally agree that the normalization/expectation of over-the-top greed is our biggest moral failing since the 80s, as a culture.

CEOs of national enterprise used to make 10x the lowest-paid employee, and were shamed by their network if they tried to cross that threshold.

There are many factors contributing to the new norms, it will take a lot of struggle to move them in the right direction.

I'm inclined to agree - Duty is about serving others, or one's country, not oneself.

I think it's the same discussion. We've lost our sense of community because community is somewhat repressive and we prefer individualism.

The tradeoff between social obligation and individual freedom might not be possible to balance and we might just have to choose one way or the other.

But you might be right, the evolution of morals that we've seen in the last 75 years might have killed the concept of Duty as a byproduct - because we no longer accept the same things as our Duty, nothing replaced them and the whole concept died.

Duty is for soldiers, servants, employees, and in a smaller way citizens (to pay taxes) in a free society. Now, if you ask people hey would you like to support the less economically well off in society, in theory people can vote on that as being a “duty” of government or a civil service, like a conservation corps.

I think you’d be more likely to get an answer from those in the military, police, firefighters, paramedics, ER docs/nurses, etc.