Question

How much importance do you think duty ought to have in ralation to morality

Answer 1

The conflict between duty and morality is a never ending conflict and is now in the limelight since years. Many people argue that the action that a person performs should be such that they should only abide by the laws and the duties that have to be performed, even if they do not benefit someone or hurt a person, whereas, there are some ethical principles, such as the virtue ethics, which state that duty can be not followed if the action performed is morally hurting a person.

According to me, both duty and morality have their own place while performing an action, but at critical places, where a person ha to chose to perform their problems duty at the cost of the moral values of himself or another person, then, they should be choosing morality over duty. For example, today we witness people killing and committing mass murders in the name of a pen obligation or duty towards god. They could justify by saying that they performed the act since it would abide by the laws of god, but in such places, we really need to think, if committing such actions are justifiable over another person. Though, this was one of the extreme examples, but we need to think more consciously in filtering out situations where morality should prevail and not duty.