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Duty

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A term loosely applied to any course of action which is regarded as morally incumbent, apart from personal desires or external compulsion. Such action must be viewed in relation to a principle, which may be abstract in the highest sense -- obedience to one's conscience -- or based on local and personal relations. That a father and his children have mutual duties implies that there are moral laws regulating their relationship. That it is the duty of a servant to obey his master within certain limits is part of a definite contract, whereby he becomes a servant engaging to do certain things for a specified wage. Thus it is not the duty of an employee or soldier to infringe a moral law even should his superior command it.

From the root idea of obligation to serve or give something in return, involved in the conception of duty, have sprung various derivative uses of the word. Thus it is used of the services performed by a minister of a church, by a soldier, or by any employee. A special application is to a tax, a payment due to the revenue of a state, levied by force of law. Properly a "duty" differs from a "tax" in being levied on specific commodities, transactions, estates, etc., and not on individuals. Thus it is right to talk of import duties, excise duties, death or succession duties. Income tax is not a duty as it is levied on a person in proportion to his income.


John Morrill; Paul Slack; Daniel Woolf (editors). Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England. Clarendon Press. 1993. 347pp. Essays presented to G. E. Aylmer.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty; J. Duncan M. Derrett (editors). The Concept of Duty in South Asia. South Asia Books. 1978. 240pp.



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