H. P. Grice's obligatum

OBLIGATUM. Die Pflicht, or duty. What is owed or due to others or to oneself. In an ordinary sense, duty comprises the requirements, obligations, or assignments ascribed to any occupant of a social position, such as the position of parent, citizen, or jobholder, for which the person occupying that position is responsible. Duty as an ethical conception can be traced to the Stoics, but came to prominence in Kant’s ethics as the central concept of morals. Kant’s ethics is therefore a deontological theory (from Greek deon, duty). For Kant, duty is what ought to be done and thus constrains action. It is distinctive of conscientious conduct and is a concept that must be apprehended a priori. A good will is the basis of morality, and to have a good will is always to act from a sense of duty. Only an action performed out of a sense of duty can have moral worth. Duty is what we are obliged to do out of respect for the universal law. Kant distinguished duties chiefly into duties of justice ( juridical duties) and duties of virtue (ethical duty). A duty of justice is external in the sense that it applies to action that we can be compelled to do by an appropriate legal authority, while a duty of virtue is internal in the sense that its constraint or compulsion regarding action originates from our awareness of the moral law. This distinction roughly corresponds to his earlier distinction between acting in accordance with duty and acting from duty. He also distinguished between positive duty (what one ought to do) and negative duty (what one ought not to do); between perfect duty (which must be fulfilled under any circumstance and which specifies a particular action) and imperfect duty (which may be overridden and for which we have a significant degree of freedom in deciding how to comply). “Duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law.” Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals